“I suppose that’s my cue to head back to the barn.” “The barn” was what Sarah called the carriage house they’d spent $80,000 rehabbing. With the way Boston rentals were going, they could be getting $3,000 a month easily. But no, because she wasn’t living under the same roof as them, Sarah insisted upon pretending she’d been exiled to a “barn” and probably told her friends she was forced to sleep on a pile of straw. As she was heading out the door, she turned to Jane and said, “Oh, for gosh sakes, I almost forgot. Everything’s been so confusing here with fancy caterers showing up for a little dinner and you late and all. You had a call a few minutes ago from someone named Dale. He said you should call him as soon as you got in.”

Jane felt a rush in her chest, similar to the worrisome thump she sometimes felt after drinking too much coffee. There had been no need for either of them to mention it, but she assumed they had an unspoken agreement not to call each other at home.

“Your ex-husband was named Dale, wasn’t he?” Sarah had her meaty arms folded and resting on the shelf of her bosom.

Don’t Engage. “I suspect it was my ex-husband. Thomas and I are friends with Dale and his wife.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. Really.”

Sarah said nothing. With her arms still crossed, she made her exit, letting the door slam behind her.

The best thing about having Sarah around was that once she left a room, Jane felt a tide of peace and contentment wash over her. In the silence, she heard Gerald saying, “Leave those dishes on the table. I need the counter space myself.” Surely it wasn’t possible that his voice was changing already—he wouldn’t be seven for four more months—but he did have a strangely deep voice, which, along with his advanced verbal skills and his peculiarly adult interests, could be disorienting.

2.

After being rebuffed by Gerald—“I’m afraid I don’t have time for small talk, Jane”—she went upstairs and picked up the phone next to the bed. While she waited for the call to go through, she wrote “dry cleaner” on a pad of paper on the bedside table, a reminder it was time for a general tidying up of the whole second floor. She’d let things go in the past couple of weeks and it was beginning to show. Dale answered with an insulting “Yeah?” which she refused to take personally but still threw her into a defensive stance.

“It’s me,” she said curtly. “I’m returning your call.”

“Janey, I’m in the car. Traffic’s a complete nightmare.”

“That’s what you get for living out in the suburbs.” Technically, she supposed she lived in the suburbs, too, but at least they had subway lines in Brookline, not that she used them.