The three of them stood as if at opposite points of a triangle, staring at each other.

“With all due respect,” said Lu (though privately she didn’t think any respect was due), “you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I?” said Nancy. She pointed a finger at Anthony. “Do you think I don’t know that you’ve been sleeping with him? I saw him sneaking home the other morning. This has been going on all summer, probably. In the house that Henry and I are paying for. Leaving your boys unattended, probably hooked up to screens.” (Lu did not point out to Nancy that the boys weren’t “hooked up to screens,” whatever that meant, you didn’t hook up to screens these days, you just tapped on them.) “Sneaking around behind Jeremy’s back while he works his fingers to the bone to support you all?”

“I’m not sleeping with anybody!” cried Lu. (She was scarcely sleeping with her own husband.) “Anthony was just helping me with something.”

“I bet he was,” said Nancy. “I’m going to get in touch with Jeremy to let him know.”

“To let him know what?” said Lu, starting to laugh. It was so wildly improbable, all of it.

“To let him know that something untoward was going on. He’s on his way home right now.”

Lu stopped laughing.

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“Because he told me.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Lu looked to Anthony, confused.

“Maybe he couldn’t get hold of you. Maybe you were . . . otherwise engaged.”

Lu’s stomach flipped and dropped. This was it, then, the end of her charade. If she didn’t want Jeremy to think the very worst thing, the thing that would end her marriage, she was going to have to come out with the rest of it. She was going to have to tell him about the blog, the book deal, the blogging conference, the imaginary family. She was going to have to tell him all of it.

Chapter 52

ANTHONY

CASSIE HAD ASKED if she could take Max to a late breakfast alone, and Anthony had agreed. Now that he’d left Lu with her tyrant of a mother-in-law (he hadn’t wanted to, but Lu and Nancy had each, in their own way, suggested that he leave), he was trying hard not to think about the fact that his father had a reading scheduled that afternoon at Island Bound Books. Even so, he knew his mind would keep going there all day: Now my father is getting off the plane. Now he’s on his way to his hotel. Now he’s eating lunch.

“What do you want to do now, Mom?” he asked, to distract himself. Dorothy was sitting on the small deck, frowning at her iPad. There was a mug of coffee in front of her. “What is it? Mom? What are you looking at?”

“Just reading the weather,” she said. “It looks like we’re getting some really heavy rain.”

“When?”

“Today. Later this afternoon.” She peered at the screen. “Goodness, this looks serious.”