Allison passed the Coxes’ stone lions on her way into the house—well, one lion, the other, apparently, had sold—and called for Suzanne. No one answered, but Allison ventured in anyway, knowing there was nowhere else Suzanne could be. Allison could hear her talking in her professional voice from deep inside the house.

She found Suzanne propped up in her bed, her belly a growing mound, surrounded by myriad papers and her laptop. She was on the phone, but she waved to Allison.

“By Monday,” Suzanne said. “I’ll expect to hear from you then.”

Suzanne was working frantically these days, hoping to have a few un-squirt guns, as she was calling them, ready for the summer season—now only a few months away.

Allison gave her the lemon bar. Suzanne hung up the phone and smiled. “Bless you, Allison Miller. How’s Adam doing?”

“Jumping on a bed, last I saw. With Grammy at his side.”

Suzanne crossed herself. “My dear, sainted mother.”

Grammy had gotten Adam to promise to come to her for help with everything during the next few months, so Mommy could rest, and Adam promised he would. Sometimes it got lonely, Suzanne admitted, but she was getting some work done for a change.

“It’s just temporary. Remind me that it’s just temporary.” Suzanne called Allison several times a day to ask for reassurance.

“It’s just temporary,” Allison said. “Everything is.”

Temporary, ephemeral, fleeting. Nothing lasted. Maybe that was good. The fight over the future of Willard Park had loomed so large for a while, until, suddenly, it didn’t. After the fire, the town council unanimously agreed to adopt the building regulations of another similar town nearby, thereby ending the threat of mass mansionization. Problem solved.

But there were other, less solvable, problems. Like Grant. He’d shown up at the Coxes’ two days after the fire. He wouldn’t say where he had been. “It doesn’t matter,” he’d said, but it did to Suzanne. He’d tried to explain away the boudoir shot as a joke, but Suzanne wasn’t having it. She told him to leave and never come back—and so far, he hadn’t. The longer he was gone, the better her case for abandonment, Suzanne said, having consulted a lawyer. It seemed clear which way that marriage was going.

Her and Ted’s was less certain. Valeria, who never called, made a video call in the middle of the night, Paris time, to offer her best-friend opinion after Allison finally told her about Ted’s holiday from sex. “No sex? Are you kidding me?”

They’d done regular video chats since then, and one audio chat, during which Allison told her about Nick. She’d been afraid to do it face-to-face, not wanting to see disappointment, or even disgust, on Valeria’s face, but Valeria surprised her by telling her about rumblings in her own marriage. Ted would have to agree to go to therapy with Allison. She would do her part if he did his. If he forgave her when she told him what she’d done. There were a lot of “ifs.” There were no guarantees.