“You’re so young and beautiful. What would you know about losing your looks?” Maureen shook her finger at her, which made Ann feel like she was being scolded instead of warned. “It happens just like that, you know. Like someone flipped a switch. You’ll see, my dear. Sooner than you think. One day you’re beautiful, the belle of the ball, and the next day you’re—well, you’re me.”

Ann set the book down. The plot of Pelican Brief was too confusing. She looked around the living room and groaned. Maureen’s decorating was so self-conscious that Ann felt like she was in a museum. Every object was on display as if it were meant to be observed and learned from, like the framed photos of Toby and Brooks that Maureen had blown up and tinted sepia to make them look timeless. The photos hung in the dining room and were framed in gold and lit from above as if they were real art. The boys’ necks looked like they could snap under the weight of their abnormally large heads. They had small eyes, big noses, thin lips, and their mother’s ruddy freckles. The strange combination of features was a study in big and little, delicate and thick, and their expressions were of kids who didn’t like to have their photos taken. Ann felt restless for the boys, as if they were trapped inside those frames the same way she felt trapped inside their sealed house, where Maureen’s hovering attention to the home was evident in every detail, like the polished decorative seashells that Maureen had scattered thoughtfully on the coffee table and across the mantel. Ann had never seen pink shells on the Wellfleet beaches that were anything like the ones Maureen picked out. She suspected they’d been bought in Bermuda, a place that sounded especially rich, and where Maureen told her they owned another home—or “a little place,” as Maureen called it.

Ann looked out the window to make sure nobody was around before she walked down the plush white-carpeted hallway that led to the Shaws’ bedroom. She opened Maureen’s closet and found the dress hanging on the door in a sheer plastic bag. She carefully pulled the raw silk off the hanger and set it on the bed, the pink standing out against the dizzying Waverly floral print on the coverlet.

Ann had poked around in the master bedroom before. She loved to discover things in the intimate spaces of the people she babysat for. Back home, she’d discovered a completed marriage quiz in the green pages inside the Johnsons’ Ms. magazine. Mrs. Johnson had answered “No” to the question “Do you still love your husband” and “Yes” to one that asked if she fantasized about other men.