Undoubtedly, it was something much deeper and more subtle than her blond, fine-boned beauty and her long-legged, Barbie doll figure, but Jane didn’t know what. Chloe was pacing in her cinder block shoes just outside Jane’s open door and unless Jane swung into action, any action, very soon, Chloe would probably do her the favor of finding a few guests ready to go on camera, making Jane look like a useless fossil.

Still, she couldn’t hang up on Caroline until she had the full story. Jane had been married to Dale for six years and had incontrovertible proof of two infidelities and one all-out affair. What surprised her most about Caroline’s worries was that they were coming so late into the marriage. “I think you need to take a deep breath and calm down,” Jane said. “It sounds to me as if you’re jumping ahead and assuming the worst. When you say he’s been acting strangely, what do you mean?”

“Strangely. Distant, cut-off.”

Jane was stung. Distant and cut-off had been the norm when she and Dale were paired up. Was he really that much more attentive and loving toward Just Caroline? An important part of putting the past in the past is believing that people really can change and that ex-husbands really can’t.

“He’s probably got too much going on,” Jane said. “He’s probably involved in some deal he believes the future of the planet depends upon.” Dale was a developer, one of those real estate millionaires who destroyed whole neighborhoods with their buildings and then seduced a reporter from the Boston Globe into writing laudatory stories about them because they included an affordable studio apartment for a Haitian family in one of their hundred-unit monstrosities. Now, in what Jane saw as an attempt at acquiring a veneer of glamour, Dale was a principal investor in a grotesquely expensive restaurant set to open in downtown Boston sometime next year. She’d heard about this through her brother, an architect on the project, and had seen it as the first signs of a midlife crisis arriving right on schedule. Restaurant business today, cocaine habit tomorrow.

Caroline exhaled luxuriously. “It isn’t his work,” she said.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Caroline. Somehow or other you have to ask him. If he admits to it, at least you’ll know where you stand.”

“And if he denies it?”

“Then you’ll know he’s lying.”