“It’s a lovely house,” Jack offered interlopingly, though it wasn’t. There was a general disorder to the room, books on every table, venetian blinds at odd angles to window frames. The furniture looked as though it had been bought all at once from a catalog. There was not a piece of art on the walls. Jack gestured at the window. “Look at that view!” Truthfully the view was only good in that you could see a pennant of ocean in the right upper corner. The rest was taken up with hedges, the across-the-street house, television aerials, telephone wires.

“It’s nice,” Linda agreed. “You need a new coat, Sadie. Let’s go shopping: you can pick one out.”

“I’ll buy you a coat,” said Jack.

“We’ll go to Lord & Taylor’s,” said Linda.

Her father’s death had bound her to her mother. How could Jack not have known this? Everything that Sadie had told Jack about Linda, her height, her seriousness, her occasional unkindness, the way she fussed over Sadie’s weight, couldn’t carry a tune but sang, couldn’t remember the name of any of Sadie’s friends—none of them had prepared him for this truth. Sadie’s mother loved her unnervingly. Not in a way that meant she’d love him, too. The opposite. Their love was a piece of furniture designed for two people only. Their love was an institution that barred men. Their love was love, provable and testable, solid, documented in any number of ways. What Jack and Sadie had was something different, built quickly, a lean-to, like all young love.

He’d imagined he’d walk into Linda’s life through Sadie’s door. That was how it had worked in his family: Sadie belonged to him; she arrived with him as luggage, to be understood only as a part of his life. He saw that this wouldn’t work with Linda. He would have to come around the other side and talk his way in.

He left the window and sat in a leatherette armchair seemingly made of the skins of Gideon bibles. It sighed under his weight. “Oh!” he said. “Jordan almonds!” He reached over and took a handful from the bowl on the glass coffee table, and Linda lunged and slapped his forearm, really slapped it, and said, in the voice of a shocked dog owner, “No.”

Then she put her hands to her temples, contrite. “I just always get those for Sadie,” she said miserably. “She loves them. They’re harder to find than they used to be.”

It had hurt. She’d meant it. He looked at Linda, then at Sadie, and understood that they were all going to pretend this hadn’t happened. He had the almonds in his fist, which he unfurled. The pastel coating had started to transfer to his palm. “Of course,” he said. “You have them.”