She was lost. She’d lost herself. When? It had happened, what she’d been so afraid of when he was wooing her. She’d given over to him, to being married to him. She was like Frieda now—the jealous wife.

She remembered Frieda, what Frieda had said about Graham’s infidelities—that they weren’t important to him, that Annie should understand that, that she had understood it too late for herself. But Frieda had had the great privilege of agreeing to it at the time, even if she’d come to regret that later. She had agency, of some sort. At any rate, he’d told her what he was doing. She had known. She didn’t need to find out after the fact. She didn’t need to be shocked by it. Damaged by it.

“And what if he’d asked me?” she said aloud. What if he’d said to her, “Annie, I want to do this. Do you?” Or just, “I want to do this.”

But he hadn’t, she thought. He hadn’t asked. He’d kept it from her. A secret.

And told Frieda all about it. Frieda. Her friend. She made a funny noise, a moan.

She opened the door to the screened porch and went outside.

The air felt cool, almost cold. What time was it? Midafternoon, anyway. The sun had come out from behind the clouds for a moment, and there were deep shadows in the woods around the house. The air stirred, and she heard raindrops falling from the trees onto the bed of dry leaves below them.

She had to leave. She had to get the fuck out of here. She felt it as a physical necessity. Her breath was coming short, her hands shaking. She went back inside the cottage, shutting the porch door behind her, locking it. She picked up the things she’d set down on the kitchen table and crossed the room to the front door. She went back out into the cool, wet air and locked that door behind her too. Something felt final about this.

She stood for a long moment in the yard, looking around again. Everything seemed sad to her. Everything cried out for work. It exhausted her just to look at it. How could she have imagined this would be any kind of haven? She looked down the long dirt driveway she’d come in on, the tunnel between the trees that arched in on either side—the trees that brushed the sides of the car when you drove through them. The driveway curved slightly; you couldn’t see the end of it. There was nothing to do but get in the car and go back down into that endlessness, to go back the way she’d come. There was nowhere to be that would be any better, that could help her with what she was feeling.

She got in the van and turned on the engine.

Twice she stopped. The first time because she realized that she didn’t know where she was, she was so distraught. Nothing looked familiar, and she had no sense of how long she’d been driving. Finally she saw the sign for the rest stop near Exit 10, but it didn’t help—she still felt so wildly disoriented that it frightened her. She pulled off when she came to it, and drove past the few cars to the very end of the parking area. There was a truck there, off to the side, but she didn’t see anyone in it. She cut the engine, rolled down the windows, and sat, trying to breathe slowly and deeply, until her body seemed calmed.

The second time she stopped was to get gas—she had noticed just in time that she was almost out. This frightened her too, the idea that she might have driven until the gas ran out and then have had to wait for help. That image of herself, alone and lost and useless at the side of the road, waiting for some form of rescue, seemed so terrible that she wept for a few minutes in the gas station after she got back into the car.

At home, the door was locked. She let herself in and called for Sarah, even though she could tell by the sense of stillness in the air of the house that she wasn’t there. Then she saw the note on the floor, a book set on the edge of the paper to hold it in place.

“I changed my mind about staying,” Sarah had written. She’d headed to Logan to get on a waitlist to return early to San Francisco. She hoped Annie would find her stay in Vermont “a comfort.” Annie made a noise.

She took her jacket off and draped it over the newel post. She went into the living room and sat down on the couch. The light was almost gone in here, and in the shadowy room everything, all these things she’d chosen as . . . what?—emblems of her life with Graham, with Sarah?—they all seemed alien, unappealing. She closed her eyes. She was glad Sarah had left.

After a minute or two she got up on her knees and bent forward over the back of the couch, reaching down to the oversize books on the shelf behind it. There it was, where she’d left it—Memoir with Bookshop. She brought it up and sat down again, sinking into the old pillows with the book on her lap. She turned on the lamp next to her and opened it, feeling her anger swell. Her hands were trembling.

25

Frieda had been taken aback by her conversation with Jeanne—the conversation in which Jeanne had told her that the scattering of Graham’s ashes was just for the immediate family. In its aftermath, she had felt roughly treated. She went over and over what Jeanne had said, and it seemed to her that nearly every word was a blow. It took her several days to recover.

But as she gained more distance on it, she began to think that Jeanne was right—that of course Annie had a right to keep the ceremony small and intimate, if that’s what she wanted. To make it, after all, about the death of her husband—the marker of the end of her marriage to Graham.

And in what seemed like the logical next step after that, she actually began to admire Jeanne for her role in all of this. How unapologetic she’d been! How clear and unflappable. How fierce, in her defense of Lucas’s interests. That part helped Frieda to see their marriage anew, and she felt glad for him that he had someone so powerfully loyal to him.

She came to feel, too, that perhaps she had taken advantage of Annie in some ways. She’d never considered it, because of Graham, she supposed. Because he had seemed to take it for granted—as she had also, in the end—that she would always be part of his life with Annie. She began to wonder, in those days after she’d talked to Jeanne, what it might have cost Annie to be so generous, as Jeanne had said.

She thought for the first time too of the way in which her presence at so many important moments in Annie’s life with Graham might have been intrusive. Unwelcome. She actually began to feel an element of embarrassment for herself—she must have seemed so needy sometimes, so desperate.

What she seized on to help her with all this was that she needed to make some kind of apology to Annie, an apology that she hoped might rebalance their relationship.

Or perhaps not an apology, she thought. It might be difficult to discuss it directly with Annie. Surely she wouldn’t want to acknowledge feelings of irritation or anger toward Frieda. Feelings that might, after all, be unconscious on her part. Or if conscious, certainly awkward to confess to her, to Frieda.

She began to focus on the toast to Graham that she wanted to give at the bookstore party. She thought she could write it so that Annie would understand it as her way of saying how sorry she was, but in a way that would put no burden on her.

She had written it out, and then gone over and over it, discarding whole paragraphs, changing a sentence here, a word or a phrase there. She had read it aloud and then spoken it five or six times to be sure she was saying exactly what she felt, to be sure that it was clear, that it was, itself, generous enough.

As she made the toast, she had felt with deep pleasure that it was working. She watched Annie’s face open to her, her hands too opening in gratitude, in blessing. She felt it again as she and Annie embraced later in the evening—and she was grateful to Jeanne again for having spoken as she did.

So much of that was just swept away starting the very next day after the toast—swept away by Annie’s shock and anger at what she assumed was Rosemary’s affair with Graham; and by the way Frieda was complicit in that affair, as Annie saw it. Complicit in having kept it a secret from her.

Frieda was crushed. She had been so hopeful that she and Annie could somehow begin again. Annie’s deep anger—at Graham, at her—had made that seem impossible. It haunted Frieda—partly because of her guilt at confirming Graham’s affair with Rosemary when what she’d meant to confirm was that long-ago affair he’d had with Linda Parkman.