JP tells Vivi that he has “fallen for” his employee Amy Van Pelt.

“What does that mean?” Vivi says. She has never met Miss Van Pelt, though JP waxes rhapsodic about her all the time—she’s “sweet” and “cute,” an Alabama sorority girl with an abundance of “Southern charm.” “You’re in love with her?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Yet. But I want to be with her. I’m leaving you, Vivi.”

Vivi laughs. “You’re leaving me? For your twenty-three-year-old shopgirl?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

It feels like a ploy. JP seems like a disgruntled child who packs a pillowcase full of clothes and heads out to the end of the driveway to “run away.” But JP is resolute: He wants to pursue a future with Amy. He wants to break up the family, burn down their hopes and dreams.

Anger, confusion, anger, fury, anger, sadness, rejection, anger—and, finally, more anger.

They schedule an emergency session with their therapist, Brie. (“Cheese therapy,” they call it when they’re in a light mood, which they are not today.) Brie astonishes Vivi by announcing that affairs are the responsibility of both parties.

“If you, Vivi, had made JP feel more treasured, more loved, more central in your life, then he wouldn’t have gone outside the marriage to find affirmation. I’ve been seeing you both for eighteen months. JP has been clear and vocal that his emotional needs aren’t being met but you’ve made no changes. Frankly, I’m not surprised this happened.”

“Wait a minute,” Vivi says. “You’re blaming me?”

“You’re both at fault,” Brie says.

Initially, Vivi wants to reject this. But if she honestly examined her feelings, the ones that she has done her best to sublimate and ignore, she’d have to admit that, over the years, she has lost respect for JP. She has placed him in the same category as the kids. He’s someone she has to support, someone she has to guide. In previous therapy sessions, JP articulated that he didn’t feel important to Vivi—not as important as the kids, not as important as her writing, not as important as her running. Is he wrong? Wouldn’t Vivi choose all of these things (even her running) over JP? Hasn’t she thought, at times, of leaving him? She has stayed because they have a whole huge life—the kids, the house, their friends, their routine. They have stability. Their household is happy, often joyous—which is different from how Vivi and JP grew up.

But now—Amy?

It’s reasonable for Vivi to ask JP to move out; after all, he’s the one who’s ending the marriage. But incredibly, he refuses to go anywhere. He wants to stay in the house; he wants them both to stay in the house while he pursues a new relationship with Amy. It’ll be better for the kids, he says.

“Who do you think you are, François Mitterrand?” Vivi says, a question that sails right over JP’s head.

Vivi is not going to live in the same house with JP while he sleeps with his twenty-three-year-old employee. Sorry. They have a lot of whisper-fights in Vivi’s home office, which is the room farthest from the den, where the kids watch TV. Vivi realizes that JP has always been handed exactly what he wants without any accountability—but not this time.

“You stay,” Vivi says. “I’ll go.” Her novel Along the South Shore has sold well over the course of the summer, even though Vivi refused to go on tour. The kids are young and she’s needed at home (besides which, she waits all year long for summer on Nantucket and the last thing she wants to do is leave). What if she were to go on tour now, at the end of August, beginning of September? She runs it past her publicist, Flor.

“I have dozens of requests for you,” Flor says. “You’ve created a bit of a mystique by not going on the road before now. Let me see what I can pull together. How long do you want to go for?”

“A month?” Vivi says. “Two months?”

Flor puts together a twenty-nine-stop tour that’s spread out over seven weeks; it’s a systematic march across the country. Vivi spends Labor Day weekend at Browseabout Books and Bethany Beach Books at the Delaware shore. She hits Politics and Prose in DC, then Fountain Books in Richmond. She heads to North Carolina: Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, Malaprops in Asheville. Then it’s down to Fox Tale in Woodstock, Georgia, and Page and Palette in Fairhope, Alabama.

She goes to Oxford, Mississippi; New Orleans; Houston; Dallas; San Antonio; Phoenix; Wichita; Edmond, Oklahoma; and the legendary Tattered Cover in Denver.

She misses the kids’ first day of school. It has been a Quinboro tradition to take a picture of all three kids on the back deck. When Vivi asks JP to send the picture, she gets no response. She later sees the picture posted on Facebook, because for some reason Vivi and JP are still Facebook friends. Vivi copies the picture and makes it her screen saver, which she shows to any reader who asks. In the picture, Carson is wearing a sweater with a hole in the shoulder seam. Leo has a cowlick. Willa’s scowl seems to be an indictment of Vivi’s absence.

This isn’t my fault! Vivi wants to tell the kids. But Brie has been crystal clear that this isn’t allowed—and apparently, it is partially her fault.

Turnout at Vivi’s events varies from place to place. Sometimes there are sixty people in attendance, sometimes six. But Vivi’s readers are always enthusiastic. One woman packed up her two little kids and a baby she was still breastfeeding and drove three and a half hours from Kansas City to Wichita. Another woman took the day off work and drove from New Mexico to see Vivi at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale.

Vivi calls the kids every night. They cry. Carson, especially, is having a hard time. She wants to know if Vivi will be home in time for her eleventh birthday. The answer is no; Vivi will be in San Francisco doing a signing at Book Passage.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Vivi says. “I’m sending presents.” What Vivi does not say is that she was the one who ordered the cake from the Juice Bar and she texted JP the contact info for the parents of Carson’s friends so he could send out the invites for the sleepover.

By the time Vivi gets to California, she understands why rock stars are so often drug addicts. Life on the road is brutal. Vivi’s agent, Jodi, has negotiated the best tour package possible—Vivi has car service wherever she goes and stays at hotels with twenty-four-hour room service, and Mr. Hooper picks up the tab. When Vivi started out, there was wonder, relief, and excitement in dialing a number and soon after having a club sandwich, French fries, coleslaw, chicken noodle soup, vanilla crème brûlée, and a bottle of wine appear on a tray at the door, and then an hour later having that tray whisked away and replaced in the morning by freshly percolated coffee and a pitcher of real cream. Vivi’s suitcase grows fat with pilfered bars of soap, tiny bottles of shampoo and body lotion, notepads with the hotel’s name and logo at the top (perfect for grocery lists), pens, and individually wrapped artisanal chocolates.

But there are just as many (too many) trips to Hudson News for a Coke Zero and a prepackaged sandwich (Vivi chose tuna once and only once). There are days she has to fly early and misses her run; there’s the never-ending quest for a place to charge her phone. There is a yawning loneliness and too much time for reflection. What breaks Vivi’s heart is the memory of JP sitting on the edge of the tub holding out the ring, asking her to be his wife, and of how much she loved him in that moment and how lucky, how truly and incredibly blessed she felt to be marrying Edward William Quinboro. At that time, she thought he was better than her. But Vivi has learned that where a person comes from means far less than what she makes of herself.