When Winnie’s phone lit up on Tuesday morning with a text from Amber, she was crossing Pike Street with her arms full of dried flower arrangements. She’d volunteered to pick up the flowers for the winter banquet at Samuel’s school.

The flowers, which you could buy from the market in huge, inexpensive bouquets, were sold dried through the winter. Winnie found that depressing. They crunched slightly in her arms as she waited for the light to change. She was freezing, her nose still raw from the cold she’d had last week. She wondered who on the school board thought bouquets of dead flowers were Christmassy, and why hadn’t someone invented a heated coat?

She had to hike uphill back to the parking garage where she’d left her car, so she didn’t read the text until the flowers were loaded neatly into the trunk, and even then, she was distracted as she glanced at her phone while she walked around to the driver’s side door. She had to read the text again, sure it was a mistake, clearing her throat incessantly as she did when she was anxious. Surely Amber, who routinely drank two glasses of wine with lunch, had it wrong. But Winnie also knew that Amber, who’d grown up in Brooklyn and had once shoved a man down a flight of stairs for touching her rear, was not the type of person to raise false alarms.

So Winnie typed a reply: Send the photo.

She waited with her back leaning against the car door, feeling her stomach lurch repeatedly as the seconds ticked by. It was cold four floors up in the parking garage, the wind skating right off the Sound and passing through the open, yawning windows—but Winnie didn’t want to get in the car yet. She shivered, staring at the side of a black Suburban. Someone had written Idiot in the dirt on the passenger door. It would be different if this were coming from someone else, but Amber was her cousin. If she came bearing bad news, chances were, it was valid bad news. Something you had to see but didn’t want to see.

She opened her eyes to read the text again, just to make sure:

I debated sending this but I feel it’s the right thing to do. I was at lunch yesterday at Palomino. I spotted Nigel and thought he was with you so I headed over to say hi. When I reached the table I saw that it wasn’t you. He was with some woman. They were sitting on the same side of the booth, very close. Something wasn’t right. They were turned toward each other. They didn’t see me but I took a photo as I walked by. I’m sorry.