“Not for snow. For sand. Or to get yourself out of the next hole you dig yourself into.”

Cox laughed. “No need. I got big plans.”

“Mansions?”

“A water-treatment plant,” he said. “Or cotton. I’m considering growing cotton.”

“Cotton?”

“It’s worked before.”

Ted was about to say something about how well that had worked before, but thought better of it. They shook hands and Ted watched him retreat down the walkway toward his yard, rapidly clearing of oversize televisions and overstuffed couches.

ALLISON WALKED AMID THE COXES’ OUTDOOR ROOMS TRYING OUT chairs like Goldilocks, imagining herself into the kind of woman who would want the furniture that was set out here: a lamp that was more valuable than the contents of her entire first floor, a chair so big and cushioned you had to put up a good fight with it to get up again. But her heart wasn’t in it. She couldn’t stop looking at Kaye, sitting on the porch with her hand in Jakey’s. She looked so small and beaten down, a ghost of the bubbly blonde she had been before the fire. She rarely left the house these days.

Allison felt to blame, knowing the feeling was irrational. Obviously nearly killing her daughter had sent Kaye over the edge—but she still couldn’t rid herself of a feeling of culpability. Her lust for Nick had turned to wonder at her own folly in the nearly two months since their fling had ended, but her feelings of guilt and shame held fast. Did what she did make her a bad person? Did it erase forty-plus years of trying to be reasonably good? Could she make up for it by being extra mindful for the rest of her life? She didn’t know. She just knew that she had hurt Kaye Cox, even if Kaye didn’t know it. And she hoped she never would know. Kaye had suffered enough.

She and Nick had met at the Sawyers’ one last time after the fire, not to be intimate in their old way—Allison had made it very clear that was never going to happen again—but for a different kind of intimacy. Nick had cried about Lindy, and Allison had patted his back, let him release feelings that, she told him, he should start sharing with Kaye. He could start anew, she told him, be a better person. And if he could, maybe she could. Maybe redemption was a possibility.

She bought a tree-shaped cookie at Lucy’s table, along with a cup of hazelnut tea and a lemon bar to take to Suzanne. Lucy had put up the old bulletin board on an easel and had tacked quotes to it: Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing, and Love is flowerlike; friendship is like a sheltering tree, among a bunch of others.