“Don’t they have a needlepoint club?” Davis asked, and again I didn’t recognize his humor. He was so deadpan. But Char laughed.

“I’m sure they do, and you can sign up right after you swap out Maddy for an entirely different child,” Char said, and turned to me, adding in a confiding tone, “He caught Maddy smoking. Cigarettes! She nicked them from her friend Shannon’s disgusting, smoky uncle.”

“Do we need to go into all of this?” Davis said.

This struck me as the kind of Waspy, hide-the-dirty-laundry crap that I’d been raised on, and I decided that I didn’t like Davis Whey very much, cute or no.

I looked past him to his daughter, already pulling a Lotus that was way too big for her off a hanger, trying to strap it on, hollering, “What’s this vest? Does this hose go to the air-tank thingy?” over her shoulder, flushed with pleasure.

She was hooked before she’d ever gone under, and I think I fell for the kid right then and there. I’d had a cold, stiff, distant father. I’d come from a family that buried anything ugly or painful, even if they had to bury their own child right along with it.

I saw myself in Maddy, so I called back, “That’s a buoyancy-control device—call it a BCD and you’ll sound like a pro,” as I pulled out paperwork and set it on the counter, giving Davis a cool, professional smile. “She can start with the Seal Team kids doing pool dives and learning the equipment and safety procedures right away. After she turns ten, we can get her in the ocean.”

“There, you see?” Char said. “Tell him how safe it is. Better yet, come with us for ice cream and tell him. Aren’t you about to get off work?” She knew darn well I was. Plus, she was dangling ice cream as extra bait. We were pretty tight by then; she’d told me how she’d flirted with an eating disorder as a teen. I’d downplayed my own war with my body, but I’d admitted that I’d flirted, too. She knew that I only ate sweets when I was out with friends, their presence controlling my portions. “Maddy? Want to go to Scoops?”

“In a minute,” Maddy called. She was reading a colorful poster about gear packages, pointing to the list of beginners’ must-haves. “It says here I get a knife! And a strap to put it on my thigh, which is so freakin’ cool. I want to strap a knife to my leg! Why do I need a knife?”

Before I could answer, Davis said, “To stab the shark while he’s eating you. So he will at least regret it.”

“It’s in case you get entangled,” I explained, irked.

I thought he was trying to scare her off, but Maddy laughed again—she had a huge, honking, rowdy laugh—and then mimed stabbing the air, saying, “Back off, shark!”

“Are there sharks?” Davis asked me, serious.

“Well, it is the ocean,” I said. “That’s where we keep ’em.” His forehead creased, so I added, “But it’s not like the movies. Maybe we should go get that ice cream.”

I wanted to talk about my sport with him, set his mind at ease so he’d let Maddy dive. And not for nothing, I wanted a chocolate-mint chip.

Char, thinking I had other motives, gave me a series of embarrassing winks and thumbs-ups behind Davis’s back.

At Scoops I began to realize he wasn’t half as cold and stiff as he seemed on first impression. Davis unbent enough to flick Maddy with a few sprinkles from his spoon when she sassed him, and I saw that the snarky talk was really banter, part and parcel of a deep connection. He wasn’t like my father at all. He was battened down, sure, but he loved his kid like nuts just under. It was buried so shallow that a single afternoon revealed it. Plus, he had really nice biceps and a clear sense of right and wrong. Within a month Maddy was my secret favorite Seal Team kid, and I’d been on seven dates with Davis. I knew by then that I could love him. Really love him. I was even getting a sense of the kind of life the two of us might build together. I could see its outline, forming. It looked very, very good.

In part it appealed to me because Davis loved rules, and tidiness, and order. He fell for the Amy I was now: disciplined and mature, quiet and strong. Even after we were lovers, even after he had whispered his own worst thing to me in the darkness, I had not told him mine. I’d talked about my background, my chilly, moneyed parents, my much-preferred brother, but he didn’t know about my wars with food and my own body. I’d downplayed how wild I was when I lived out west. I kept my secrets, telling myself that they were the past. I ignored the ones that were still alive. The ones that touched my every current breath, the ones I couldn’t even tell myself.

If I did not pay Roux off, he’d see all of it. See all of me.

I did think that he would forgive me. I was his wife. I loved and looked after his girl, and I had borne his son. He’d be the easiest person to tell, so I tried to picture it, how it would go.

Davis, at book club we played an awful game. It was a lot like Never Have I Ever.

I could line up shots on the kitchen counter, though Davis, a one-beer-on-a-hot-day guy, hated to see people getting sloppy drunk. Still. I would need to kill both my inhibitions and my instincts for self-preservation.

Davis, never have I ever lied to you. Drink.

Never have I ever kept a secret. Drink.

Never have I ever taken a human life, or stayed silent and let my best friend bear the blame, or watched him go to prison for three years while I said nothing. Drink. Drink. Drink.

And after that—

No. It was unendurable. Roux was unendurable.

I was so preoccupied as I made dinner that the salmon came out rubbery and the broccoli was practically mush. When we sat down to eat, I was snappy and distracted, daring them with my eyes to say a word about the food.

Davis and Maddy filled up on rolls and salad, and I saw them exchanging a purely Whey look, coming to a silent agreement that they would tiptoe around Monster tonight. It made me furious and guilty all at once, and after that I did my best to be quiet and spoon peas into Oliver and not bite anyone’s head off.

At bedtime, when Oliver was down for the night and Maddy was in her room reading or, more likely, sneak-texting Luca on her phone, Davis called me out.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked as I emerged from the bathroom, teeth brushed, in one of his big T-shirts that I salvaged from the hamper. I liked to sleep in them after he wore them, when the smell of his aftershave and his own warm scent was caught inside the fabric.

He was already in bed, propped up against his pillows, a book about Civil War spies open facedown on his lap. I was putting lotion on my arms, getting ready to climb in on my side, but I froze at the question, feeling how serious his gaze was.

I’d redone this bedroom right after we married, wanting to make it ours instead of his. Or rather his and Laura’s. I’d replaced her stark modern furniture with a sleigh bed, queen instead of king, making room for a pair of cherrywood nightstands. I’d painted the walls a warm, rich gold, bought chocolate-brown and cream bedding, added a few pops of cranberry and rose with throw pillows and in the print of the love seat I put by the window. This room was a haven. No TV and a lock on the door. It was a place where we were two, a couple instead of a foursome. I didn’t want to barefaced lie out loud to him in this room.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. I sat down on the edge of the bed, an excuse to turn my back on him, and began putting lotion on my legs. “I’m having a bad day.”

“You’ve been having a bad week,” my husband told me gently, and a week ago—that was the day we had book club. I hadn’t realized how much the strain I’d been under was showing.

I shrugged, and a waiting silence fell. We were both quiet people, neither of us big on chitchat. We talked at dinner about family things, but at night we liked to sit side by side, reading in bed, exchanging a few words about our books or plans for the week or events of the past day. His physical presence, his heartbeat, his breath usually combined to make me feel content and safe, but now the silence felt brittle.

What would happen if I simply let all the silent truths I kept deep buried spill into the room? Davis loved me, I knew this. It would hurt him, but it might not be a fatal wound. He might forgive me, and I knew how relieved and free and lightened I would feel. Roux, damn her eyes, had taught me that. There was such solace hidden in confession.

Her power over me would be instantly cut in half, and I would have an ally. Davis had such a strong, sure moral compass. He would know the right thing to do. Or the rightest anyway, because there was no purely good move I could make.

I teetered on this cusp, a thousand words piling up in my mouth. I looked over my shoulder at him, the tube of lotion forgotten in my hands.

“Honey, what?” he said, genuinely concerned now, his spine elongating, his brow furrowed. “What is it? Just say it.”

I opened my mouth, and what came out was, “The Vegetables might be cheating on Charlotte.”