No one had come down by the time I’d finished cooking, so I folded their eggs into tortillas with avocado slices and salsa and wrapped them up in tinfoil to keep warm.

I went to the foot of the stairs and called, “You guys are running late.”

“Poo-splosion!” Davis called back. “Don’t come up here, honey. Run. Save yourself.”

That made me smile. The kind of small disaster that defined my current life was unfolding normally upstairs. “Hey, Mads? You better not be still in bed.”

“Blah!” Maddy yelled back. She sounded vertical at least.

Just as I finished my breakfast, Davis came hurrying down with a nearly naked Oliver in his arms. He shifted his hands under Oliver’s armpits, then held him out to me. “Take this wretched, pooping baby!”

“Ahmamamama!” Oliver said, reaching, babbling a sound that wasn’t quite a word but I thought still meant me. His dangling legs kicked in excitement, though he saw me every day, all day.

I propped him on my hip, and he got himself an anchoring fistful of my hair. Davis pulled a onesie with cartoon dogs sprinkled all over it out of his pocket and offered it to me, draping it over his arm with a flourish, like a ma?tre d’s napkin.

“I had to strip the sheets,” he said. “They’re in a plastic hamper on the landing, and this boy here? I ran him under some warm water in the shower because otherwise it would have taken enough baby wipes to create a whole new landfill.”

I looked at my husband, standing in our sunshiny kitchen, having a regular morning-time conversation while the baby we’d made together pulled my hair and blew raspberries. I had to turn my back and blink away the tears that sprang up unexpected in my eyes. This ordinary life, full of laundry and diapers and kitchen curtains with apples printed on them, was so precious to me. This morning it also felt frail.

“You were very brave,” I told Davis, working to make my voice sound normal as I got his to-go breakfast off the counter. “I’ll put the sheets in as soon as the washer clears, and then I’ll bleach the bathroom.”

“Bleach can’t save it. Once Maddy leaves for school, you and Oliver should go outside and burn the house down.” He checked his watch. “Sorry to leave it with you, but . . .”

“I got this,” I said, trading him the egg burrito for the onesie.

“Southwestern style?” he asked, all hopeful, and when I nodded, he said, “I do not deserve you.”

“True,” I said, and hoped it didn’t sound as ironic as it felt.

He dropped a kiss on the corner of my mouth, and he was gone.

I got Oliver dressed and then popped him in his high chair, sprinkling a handful of Cheerios on the tray to keep him busy while I mixed baby oatmeal with stored breast milk and opened up a jar of pureed apples. I was about to call Maddy again when a car horn sounded and she came hurtling down the stairs. She’d paired her short blue shift dress with green knee socks patterned with demented deer heads. These things didn’t go together on any planet, nor with her battered orange-and-aqua tennies. As she dashed past, I caught a glimpse of mascara and a smear of gooey pink lip gloss. My girl lived ninety percent of her life in leggings and ratty T-shirts, so why was she decked out in full Mads regalia?

“Love you, Monny-Monster!” she hollered over her shoulder.

I stood up. “Breakfast!”

“Not hungry!” she shouted from the living room.

“Hold up, Mads!” I called. “Madison!”

The only answer I got was the front door banging shut. Loud. I scattered more Cheerios on the tray to keep Oliver busy, grabbed the burrito off the counter, and ran after her.

I yanked open the front door just in time to see an Infiniti convertible, cherry red and gleaming, peeling away with the top down. Maddy’s bobbed curls ruffled in the same wind that was streaming Luca’s long black hair.

I wanted to leap off the porch and run after them, shrieking like a harpy, I was that angry. She’d never once been allowed to ride to school with an unsupervised teen driver, much less the male of the species. I’d gotten deliberately misleading words from the grumpy heap of covers, and then she’d lurked upstairs until the last second, no doubt to avoid conversation that might lead her into a direct lie. But they were already too far for me to catch them, music blasting too loud for them to hear me. Plus, I couldn’t leave Oliver alone with Cheerios for more than five seconds without worrying about choking.

I went back to the kitchen. I half wanted to hustle Oliver into his car seat and take off after them. It would be an overreaction, though, and it would embarrass Maddy nigh unto death.

I sat down and put breakfast into the baby as he banged around with his “helping” spoon, spattering us both with oatmeal and apples. His world was so small and so safe, but Maddy had ridden off into a much larger one, in a car, with a shady boy. And why would a kid who looked like Luca be offering our Mads a ride to school anyway?

Maddy was beautiful, to us. To most adults. But not the kind of beautiful that played in high school. She had her dad’s bold nose and a heavy brow line, and two weeks ago, in a fit of despair over the rash of pimples that kept appearing on her forehead, she’d grabbed the meat sheers and cut herself a thick wedge of unflattering bangs that poinked out in all directions. She was the kind of girl who would come into her own in college, when ideas about beauty widened to include girls with striking features and flashing dark eyes, and when the boys themselves got a dollop of emotional maturity.

Luca, meanwhile, was teenage-dream-style beautiful. Cheekbones for days and that sulky James Dean mouth set in skin so clear and flawless that he looked like he’d been carved. Add the hot car and he was cheerleader bait. I couldn’t see him fitting in with the spotty herd of magnificent weirdos in Maddy’s clique.

Unless he was gay? Please, God, let him be gay, because I doubted that Roux had taught her boy to be gentle with girl hearts. Last night she herself had come to book club with a battle strategy. And what kind of mother would put an adolescent male behind the wheel of a car like that? But of course I knew what kind. I had met her. A shit stirrer. With a great big spoon.

When Oliver finished eating, I called the school office to make sure Maddy hadn’t had bigger, badder plans to skip with Luca. She was on the attendance log for homeroom, so the stolen ride had been the end of it. Still, it was more drama linked directly to Angelica Roux, and on a morning when I was already full up with her.

I released Oliver into the babyproofed keeping room. There the TV and a pair of comfortable brown leather sofas shared the space with Davis’s armchair and a ton of built-in bookshelves. The lower shelves were full of soft, squeaky toys. I latched the baby gate to keep him from the kitchen while I was baking, watching him pull up on the low coffee table as I mixed ingredients, answering his babbles and blowing raspberries back.

Once the blondies were in, Oliver and I went upstairs to clean the bathroom, get the ruined sheets in the washer, and remake the bed. We’d just come back down so I could check on my baking when I heard my front door opening.

“Amy?” Char called from the foyer.

I checked the microwave clock. Nine-fifteen, damn it.

“I’m in the kitchen,” I called back.

I power-walked with Charlotte every weekday morning. The time had gotten away from me. My head was really not on right. Worse, caught up first in my own invented worries and then with Maddy’s deception, I hadn’t considered what I was going to do about Tate Bonasco and Charlotte’s husband. Now, that was a real problem, concrete and immediate, and it wasn’t like me not to put Char first. She’d been a priority ever since she’d poked her nose nervously into Divers Down almost seven years ago, right after I started working there, asking if we had adult swimming lessons.

I’d been sitting in the empty shop, thinking about all the ways I’d already given up my mission. I’d come to Florida after my thirty-fifth birthday. That was the year Boyce Skelton, a lawyer at the firm who managed my family’s money, called me to tell me the clause earmarking Nana’s trust for college had expired. The money, well over half a million dollars by then, was wholly mine, to do with as I pleased. As soon as he told me, I thought about Tig Simms. Even before I got off the phone, I was forming a half-assed, nebulous plan to give the money to Tig.