If he pulled a Bible out of there, she was going to have to rethink this friendship. Fortunately, it wasn’t that. He handed her a postcard. “Tim picked this up in the coffee shop yesterday morning. He asked me to give it to you.”

She turned it over. Dear Dr. Berman—Everything I haven’t told you . . . After all the confessing she’d done in the past forty-eight hours, after baring so much of her heart to Desmond, after letting him read her fictionalized appointment books, you’d think she’d be immune to shame. And yet, looking over what she’d written—it’s just that there’s so much I don’t want to know about myself—she felt humiliation squeezing her chest.

“I suppose you read this?” she asked.

“Who could resist?”

She fanned herself with the card and turned it over a few more times. Her handwriting on the back was cramped and tight, a sign, no doubt, of stray obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Something else to be ashamed of. “What do I do with it, Desmond? Do I rip it up, stick it in the mail, slip it under the doctor’s door?”

He sat beside her on the bed and read the message with her one more time. He opened his mouth to tell her something, stopped himself, then sighed, and began again. “It’s just my opinion,” he said, “but I think you addressed this to the wrong person. I think you should cross out the doctor’s name and deliver it to your husband.”

Jane looked at the picture on the front: a beach, water, a road to somewhere. Deliver it to Thomas. Can we start from scratch? That was a question she could answer herself: No, they couldn’t start from scratch. They’d been married too long, and there had been too many disappointments and betrayals. They were both too damned old. But what if she, like Desmond, had been missing something all along? There’s so much I don’t want to know about myself Not the key to everything, that was too much to hope for, not a whole new life, a concept that was too exhausting to even consider at this stage, but the starting point of a life that was a little better, a little more truthful. She really would have to give this some serious consideration. It didn’t look as if the storm was about to blow over, and there wasn’t anything else to do in the orange room.

2.

They left Florida two days later. They boarded a plane and lifted off into a sky so clear and blue and clean you wanted to drink it. The plane circled out over the sparkling waters of the Gulf and swung north.