She makes her way over to the bar, where Anna has begun prepping a tray of cocktails to ferry down to the spa. With fewer than twenty people on-site, deliveries come only once a week; no mint for mojitos, Anna says, but all the rum and Coke you can swallow. She sets up a row of glasses and drops ice into each one.

Maeve says she can’t risk a hangover. Only twelve days left.

“But this is what it’s like here.” Anna adds a slice of lime to each drink and leans across the bar. “You work and you work and you work all day and it’s never enough and at night you don’t want to be alone with it.”

“If I’m hungover, there’ll be no work at all.”

“It must be terrible to have to rely on your body.” Anna flicks her eyes across the room and Maeve realizes she’s watching Dan. He’s crouched low, checking the burners under the buffet one by one. “Why is he ignoring me, do you think?”

The question throws Maeve off balance. It takes a moment, but then relief floods in: if Anna and Dan have something going on, she’s off the hook. She’s just been overreacting. Not unusual for her; not since Iain, anyway.

A kind of vacation fling, Anna says. Not terribly unique at this kind of retreat. But it started in the spring.

“Half the reason I came back. Don’t tell Karo—she thinks I’m here for the atmosphere.”

Maeve would never have guessed. Anna and Dan haven’t talked or touched once since dinner began. What does Anna get out of it?

Anna twists at the wedding ring on her finger as she talks. There’s a man back home in New Orleans—a man who calls without fail every night and every morning, sometimes more, she says. Anna holding the phone to her ear and smoking a cigarette out the open window of her room.

“Three, four calls a day to check up on me. Just checking up. I need someone who’s interested in my body. Who makes me feel nervous in that good way, you know?”

Maeve doesn’t. But she thinks back to what Sadie said about Dan on the trail: He’s got that cop thing, some women really go for that. Only she didn’t mean some women. She meant Anna.

“Besides, he was fucking with some waitress last year—my husband was. Thought I didn’t know. So I guess my business is my own.” Anna gives Dan a last look and shakes her head at Maeve. “But why is he ignoring me now?”