For the previous three months, Alex had been living with Mac in his bony studio in Berlin, then in a succession of cheap riads in Tangier. She had hinted at her parents’ wealth: “My dad made a lot of money in the stock market,” she had said. “He used to be poor, so he likes to make the most of it.” But she hadn’t mentioned the tennis courts, the pool, the spa, the screening room. The staff. For the first time, Alex truly reckoned with the fact that the man she was about to marry had no idea who she was. That is, Mac knew her, of course, but he knew her outside the context of her past. Their courtship had been brief, intense, and abroad. This place, this balconied, gray-shingled mansion, jutting its chest out proudly at the sea—this place was inside her.

Alex’s father, George, the son of a Mexican gardener, was a brilliant man. He had gone to Harvard Business School on full scholarship and now had his own fund at Goldman Sachs. Nothing to be ashamed of there. Her mother, Polly, had grown up in Boston, her father a banker and fifth-generation Bostonian. She was an alumna of Miss Porter’s and Tufts and wore pearls and a little black dress to meet George’s parents in their two-family house overflowing with relatives—a story George still enjoyed teasingly recounting, proud as he was of his cultured, Grace Kelly wife.

Alex sat on one of the soft couches, crossing her bare, moisturized legs, and noticed a black smudge of what looked like soot along the creamy edge of a slipcover. She wondered at this soiling. What could it be? Her eyes roved to the fireplace. It was neatly swept. She stood and walked out of the brilliant room, down a cool, dark hallway that emerged into a kitchen bristling with stainless steel appliances. Juan, the chef, was bent over the stove. She spoke to him in Spanish, which her father had insisted all his children learn fluently.

“Juan,” said Alex, “do you know where Dorothy is? There’s a weird black smudge on the couch in the living room.”

Juan looked up, nonplussed. “Watch my onions.”

He hurried off to find the housekeeper. Alex shifted the wilted, browning mound with a wooden spoon.

Polly Palacio walked in then, wearing white workout clothes. She was tanned and glowing with sweat.

“You’re up!” she said, beaming at her daughter.

Alex noticed that her mother’s copper hair, much dyed, now had the look of cotton candy, falling in wisps to her shoulders. Her classic face had taken on a new heaviness in the bottom half, the fat in her cheeks shifting down into a pocket under her chin. Alex casually imagined lancing the pocket, draining the fat, and restoring her mother’s beauty.

“I wanted to get up earlier,” she said.

“Why?”