“I want to investigate the Flying Horses,” Bev proclaimed. “I remember Rex saying how soothing it was to watch them, after we took the Jabs to Back Door Donuts.” Clayton sniggered, as he did whenever someone mentioned Back Door Donuts.

There was no Rex at Back Door Donuts or at the Flying Horses Carousel. Children giggled as they gripped wooden manes, their palms softening startled eyes, the equine mouths frozen in rictus. Laird left Beverly and Clayton absorbed in this saccharine tableau to check with nearby bystanders. A mother and a little girl in a neon-orange bathing suit reported they had recently come from the annual Storrow pool party, where Rex had performed multiple cannonballs off the diving board.

Beverly Greene was sure she had a bond with Rex Hasselbach that no one else shared. He had stumbled upon her in a moment of weakness, crying behind the Rec Barn where they screened movies and held the end-of-season “Jabberwocky Prom,” and while she understood the risks in revealing her troubles to an internet troll, she also intuitively knew that he would not betray her. Therefore, she spilled her guts to Rex, explaining that at the beginning of summer, as camp was convening, she had committed her mom into a nursing home. The thing was, Beverly didn’t have to take so drastic a step. Beverly’s mother had inherited a fortune, and she had yet another chunk of change from the divorce settlement ages ago with Beverly’s dad, who had been a Goldman Sachs senior VP; they could pay for around-the-clock care, but Beverly did not want to deal. Her mother had been a piece of work even without Alzheimer’s, and Beverly preferred the Goldman Sachs dad, all but absent while she was growing up, to her mom. Typical of her mother was the time she pulled down Beverly’s pants and spanked her at the carpool in front of her elementary classmates because a twenty-dollar bill was missing from her purse—again, not that money was an object.

Amelia, her mother, had also been hypercompetitive, and Beverly did not measure up. After Beverly had gotten ready to attend her own prom, her mother, who liked to drink, and was drunk by the time Bev paraded her finished ensemble into the living room, told her that she was about as attractive in that pink dress as a fart in a bathtub; then she whipped out her scrapbooks and reminisced over pictures of herself at her prom back in the day while they waited for Beverly’s date to arrive. When Beverly fell flat on her ass during figure skating championships not once, but twice, the embarrassment of her sixth-grade daughter’s failure was too much for Amelia to handle. She registered for private lessons that began before Beverly’s did, in order to “show her how it was done.” Bev’s insides twisted at the memory of watching her mother at practice. They had matching leotards, and as Beverly laced up her skates while Amelia elatedly demonstrated sit-spins for their coach, she wished the rink were made of real ice her mother could fall through and drown. Trolls had nothing on her mom—she could give them pointers. It wasn’t possible for anyone to do more damage to Beverly than what she had already endured.