She tried to focus on The Pelican Brief, a book Maureen had told her she just loved. “I’m crazy for courtroom dramas,” she’d said. “I have a law degree, believe it or not. I used to have a brain before it got trash-compacted by my kids and the minutiae of everyday life.”

Ann didn’t know what those minutiae were, or why Maureen felt she had to put herself down. She was clearly bright. When she wasn’t reading the latest thriller, she completed crossword puzzles or had her nose in a book about natural selection or an article in The Boston Globe about the HIV epidemic. Then again, for someone so smart, Maureen could act like any stupid girl from Ann’s high school. Earlier that day, before she left for Marblehead, Maureen ran into the living room in a sleeveless pink Lilly Pulitzer dress that she said she planned to wear to dinner at the Wicked Oyster that weekend with her husband. She acted like she’d just gotten invited to the prom.

Ann quickly discovered that Maureen was one of those women who used the word “husband” too much. My husband this, my husband that. If she cared so much about her husband, why didn’t she stay in Marblehead with him and get some action? Ann couldn’t believe Maureen was so giddy over someone she’d been married to for a long time. It made her even more anxious to meet this mysterious husband, which was why she agreed to babysit the next night, even though the last thing she wanted was to spend more time in the Shaws’ hermetically sealed home. Maureen offered to pay her overtime, and that was nice, but Ann babysat because she was curious: What kind of man could make his own wife so insecure? What was it about him that made Maureen so jumpy and eager to please?

All she knew about him was that his name was Anthony, and that he had large feet, based on the worn leather boat shoes that sat outside the back door. She liked to imagine him as a real man, strong and confident like the characters in the Harlequin romances she read. A man with secrets. Men, she thought, should be different from her father, inaccessible and mysterious.

Maureen twirled in front of Ann like a little girl in a beauty pageant. “So, be honest. What do you think?”

“It’s nice,” Ann said, although she thought otherwise: that pink wasn’t a good color for Maureen, not with her burnt-red hair and freckly, coral complexion. The silk clung to all the wrong places.

Maureen put her hand on Ann’s shoulder and smiled. “Gosh, it’s so nice to have another gal in the house.”

Gosh? A gal?

Maureen could sense Ann’s disapproval. “You think I’m too old for it, don’t you?”

“I don’t think you’re old,” Ann lied. She thought Maureen was ancient.