John groaned and swung his legs out of bed. “Yeah, we do. but I was hoping to get you into the shower first.” He looked at her over his shoulder. “That would be the first stop on the tour of my adolescent fantasies.”

“A girl in the shower?”

“A girl in that shower,” he said. “Hot water and soap and a girl, all together.”

“So how old were you when you got to try that out?”

He grinned at her. “Thirty-six.”

Angie sat up. “You’re kidding. That’s a virgin shower?”

“As far as I’m concerned it is. My great-aunt Helen lived here for the last twenty years, you know. She was a sweet old lady but proper, and she had ears like a bat.”

“When did she die?”

He cleared his throat, looked away. “Last summer.”

For the last year John had lived in this house whenever he could get away from Princeton, and for most of that year he had been engaged to Caroline Rose. Had Caroline declined an invitation to join him in the shower because Rob and Kai were down the hall, or had he never asked?

“What was the plan, anyway?” she asked. “Was Caroline going to move in here, or …” Her voice trailed away when she realized she didn’t really want to hear the answer. John was going to tell her anyway, she could see that.

“She was supposed to move in this week,” John said. “Or at least I thought she was. Her sisters still think I’m going to move into Old Roses. I don’t know what Caroline was actually thinking, which I suppose should have been my first hint.”

He rubbed his knuckles over his jaw and the bristles of his new beard made a hushing sound.

“Is that what you needed to talk to me about?”

“In a way. Caroline wrote me a letter.”

Angie pulled her knees up to her chin. “Okay. Go ahead.”

She listened, her head tucked forward as he read what couldn’t have been more than fifty words, and still Angie wished the lights were out; she wished they had had this conversation on the phone. She didn’t know how she was supposed to react. Except that wasn’t exactly true. Mangiamele, she told herself, you are such a fake. You don’t want to say what’s on your mind because you have never known a man, no matter how open-minded, how liberal, how smart, to take such speculation with a shrug. If a woman left for another man, that might be a relief or a tragedy, but the guy whose wife left him for another woman was the butt of the joke. In a town like Ogilvie, how would this play? Angie closed her eyes, trying to imagine it, and then, slightly nauseated, opened them again.

You don’t know this for a certainty, she told herself yet again. So shut up.