“Yeah, I texted her,” Nick says. “She’s off-island.”

Amy isn’t sure if she should act surprised or just keep rolling. She decides on the latter. “In that case, I’m ordering food. How about the cheeseburger bao buns and the poke nachos?”

Amy’s cocktail comes before her food. She drinks it while studying the other people at the bar as though she’s an anthropologist. The clientele is young and stunning; everyone is filled with joy and bubbly laughter, and Amy feels worse and worse about herself with every passing second. Where did she go wrong? Well, she knows where. She should never have gotten involved with a married man. She could still end things and start a new relationship with someone like Nick. Or maybe Nick is too young. He is too young.

Amy’s food comes, but for once, Amy just isn’t herself and isn’t hungry. She asks Nick for to-go boxes. She would like the check, please.

“You got it,” Nick says. She tries to ignore the pity in his voice. “The band starts up at ten if you want to come back then.”

“Thanks,” Amy says, and for a second she feels like a strong, independent woman who might be back to enjoy the band if the spirit moves her. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

Out on the street, she has an idea. Then she tries to talk herself out of it.

She puts her to-go containers in the front seat of her car. Home, she thinks. Go home.

But she’s drunk, she shouldn’t drive; she should walk it off, and if her walk happens to take her down Union Street, is that a crime? She strolls along until she reaches Entre Nous. The two onion lamps, one on either side of the front door, are lit and the front windows are bright, but the rooms appear unoccupied. Amy has never been inside the house so she isn’t sure of the layout, though the kids used to swim in the pool all the time back before Vivi put in her own pool at Money Pit.

Amy sees a discreet flagstone path that leads between the hedges just beyond the driveway. She checks the street—deserted. She sneaks around the side of the house to the backyard. She fears motion-detector lights will announce her trespassing, but the back is quiet. Accent lights illuminate the teal-blue rectangle of the pool.

The back of the house is all windows, and the lights are on so Amy can see, clear as day, Savannah and JP sitting at the kitchen island, a bottle of Casa Dragones tequila and a bowl of popcorn between them. Amy tiptoes to the windows so she can get a better look and try to hear what they’re saying—but the windows are closed. There’s air-conditioning.

Savannah has on white jeans and a black tank. She’s barefoot, wears no makeup or jewelry, and her hair is piled on top of her head in a bun. She’s talking, blinking rapidly, sipping tequila, and then her expression crumples and she starts to cry.

JP stands up. Please let him be leaving, Amy thinks. There’s no sign of dinner. Maybe they’ve already eaten, or maybe popcorn was the most Savannah could manage. JP holds out his arms and Savannah falls into them like a woman in a movie and starts sobbing into JP’s chest. He places one hand on her back and one on the back of her head and starts rocking side to side.

This is…awful. If Amy had just stayed home and imagined what was transpiring here at Entre Nous (“Between Us”) it couldn’t have been any more traumatizing than this.

They’re commiserating, Amy thinks. They lost someone important to them both and this dinner is necessary so they can talk and heal. Amy just has to be patient.

Savannah raises her face and gazes at JP with a vulnerable expression. Are they going to kiss? Are they? How many times has JP told Amy in detail what a bitch he thinks Savannah is? He was so ruthless that Amy found herself defending Savannah. She started an important charity, she saves children’s lives. And she’s got great style.

The moment lingers on, the two of them seemingly suspended in the moment just before a kiss.

Amy runs out of the yard. She catches her toe on the edge of one of the flagstones and goes flying to the ground, scraping her knee. She gets to her feet. She needs to go home and check JP’s top drawer to make sure her beautiful engagement ring is still there. But as she reaches the sidewalk and heads to her car, she knows she won’t find it. She knows it’s gone.

Her leg is bleeding, but she doesn’t care. She won’t get home before JP. She wants him to get home first and wonder where she is.

JP and Savannah? Impossible. Amy is sure he’ll pull away and say he has to go, and all the way home he’ll wonder what came over him, getting to the edge of an intimate moment like that. Amy reaches Main Street and thinks, Club Car piano bar? She can mix in with the mass of humanity belting out “Stop Dragging My Heart Around,” and no one will realize she’s by herself. But when she reaches the Club Car, there’s a line out the door. No, thank you. She considers Straight Wharf (the clientele is too young) and Cru (she has spent enough money at Cru this summer). She decides to head back to the Gaslight since Nick (sort of) invited her.

She can hear the band playing before she enters. She stops at the vending machine at the entry that dispenses tiny bottles of Moët et Chandon champagne for twenty dollars a pop (as it were). It’s gimmicky and exorbitant, but suddenly, Amy wants champagne to celebrate the hideous mess her life is rapidly becoming.

The champagne is delivered ice-cold. Amy drinks straight from the bottle, then wanders over to the bar, and, believe it or not, her very same stool is unoccupied. It’s magical, as though novelist Vivi has been holding this seat for Amy’s eventual return. But Amy’s not a character. She’s real. She hoists her petite bottle of Moët up to Nick in a cheers.

“Hey,” the guy next to her says. “Your leg is bleeding.”

Amy looks down at her leg. Yes, it’s pretty gruesome; there’s blood running down into her sandal.

The guy hands her a stack of cocktail napkins and she looks up at him. It’s Dennis.

“Oh,” Amy says. “Hey.”

Dennis laughs. “We have to stop meeting like this.” He peers behind her. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“Who?” Amy says, and Dennis laughs again. Dennis looks…okay. He has a tan that ends at his shirt collar and his eyes look intensely blue. There’s a Cisco Whale’s Tale in front of him. Is he here alone? “Are you here alone?”

“I am,” he says. “Beats sitting home in an empty house.”

Amy nods. Why is it fine for a man to sit at a bar alone but nothing short of pathetic for a woman? “JP is having dinner tonight with Savannah.”

“Ah,” Dennis says. “That must be tough on you.”

“It is,” Amy says, blinking against tears. Why is Dennis Letty the only person who has considered her feelings? She raises her bottle to Dennis’s blue can and they both drink.

“I’ll watch your seat,” Dennis says. “Why don’t you go clean up your leg and then we can dance.”

Dance with Dennis? Amy thinks. One part of her rebels against hooking up with another man that Vivi got to first. The other part says, Couldn’t hurt, sounds like fun.

“Okay,” she says. “Be right back.”

Vivi

When Vivi swoops down to check on Savannah, her BFF, the godmother of her children, the person whose advice and guidance she held above all others, she finds her in the kitchen of Entre Nous being rocked back and forth in a man’s arms.