She blew him a raspberry, which made Oliver start blowing raspberries back. I was on the floor with him, helping him bang around the wooden pieces of his My First Puzzle.

“Hurry up, already!” Maddy slid onto the stool beside Luca, her shoulder touching his, peering down at the book, even though she knew it backward and forward.

Roux, silent on my sofa, watched Maddy almost as intently as I watched Luca. Both of us mothers were clocking how he reacted to her touch. The answer was not at all. Maddy might as well have been a piece of furniture, but Roux’s eyebrows knit together, uncontrolled, as if she had forgotten she owned eyebrows for a moment. I’d thought it might be different with boys, this worry over their crushes. Apparently it wasn’t. Luca had a heart, unlike his mother. She was out to guard it.

Maddy, not getting any of his attention, climbed off the stool and dropped to her knees on the carpet by me. She hurled her arms around my neck and gave my cheek a resounding smack. The sound made Oliver laugh so hard she did it three more times, then zerberted his own cheek while he grabbed big handfuls of her curls and yanked joyfully, crowing.

Mad smiled up at me. “How much longer? God, I’ve missed diving. We haven’t gone much since Oliver. I mean, I love him and all.” She touched the tip of his nose and told him, “I love you, fat potato,” before turning her eyes back to mine. “But I miss us. Doing our thing. You know?”

From the corner I could feel Roux’s eyes on us, still.

“I do know,” I said. Davis and Maddy were blood, and Davis and I were married. Maddy and I, we were divers, and I hadn’t realized that as bad as we’d been missing getting under, we had also both been missing the thing that made the two of us a pair. I ruffled her curls. “I’m sorry, kiddo. I’ve been lost in baby clouds. But I promise, once we get through this, you and I will start diving on the regular again.”

“Get through what?” Maddy asked, and I shook my head a little, laughing.

“Just . . . you know, the class,” I said.

“You’re a good Monster,” Maddy said, and I felt my eyes prick with tears.

“Done!” Luca said, smacking the book shut.

“Good. You can take the DVD home and watch the last section tonight. We’ll do the test in the morning, right before your first open-water dive, okay?” I told him, so conscious of being watched. “Mads? Go get on your swimsuit. Luca, you too.”

“Want me to jog fat potato baby down to Mrs. Fenton?” she asked, poking Oliver’s belly to make him laugh.

“We’ll drop him on the way. Run get changed.”

Luca’s swimsuit was hanging up with his wet suit in the downstairs guest bath. He went in as Maddy went bounding upstairs. The rest of the equipment was already loaded in the Subaru, ready to be driven down to Tate’s.

I flipped through Luca’s book, making sure he’d done the practice quizzes. I did not look at Roux. I kept still, so my body wouldn’t telegraph anything. It was time to put the plan I’d woken up with into action. If today was like yesterday. If she went to the gym. But she stayed on the sofa.

“She really loves you,” Roux said.

“Of course she does,” I said, surprised out of my pretend.

Roux’s eyes narrowed. “It doesn’t always work that way. Not with steps.”

“Not always,” I said, wondering if a bad step was the reason she was running. While she was in a talking mood, I asked, “Is your husband Luca’s step?”

She ignored that. “She isn’t jealous of you? Adolescent girls don’t like women macking on their fathers.”

“There’s a little bit of that, but Davis and I make sure not to exclude her.” I didn’t want to talk with Roux about Maddy, but if I did, maybe she’d talk back. Several times now I’d seen the woman who lived inside her constructs and characters. I’d seen enough to believe her when she said she liked me, in her way. I hadn’t yet given up on using that. “I work on it. Davis and I both do. We even planned our honeymoon around Mads.”

“Huh,” Roux said, a skeptical breath of sound, but it was true.

I said, “We did a destination wedding, just the three of us in Key West. She stood up with both of us. We called her the Best Mad and the Mad of Honor.”

“No church?” Roux asked, surprised. “You smell like church to me. No big white dress?”

I shook my head. “It was the second time for both of us. I wore a sundress. We stayed a week, and Mads and I went diving every morning while Davis slept in and then read or golfed. Then we’d all three go hang out at the beach or Mallory Square. One afternoon I said I needed a nap, and I sent Mads and Davis to the Hemingway Home. Mads wanted to see all those cats with extra toes. I did, too, but more than that I wanted her to know that even on our honeymoon she and her father would have their own space.” Roux was leaning in, interested. It made me want to say more. I could feel her doing it, and this was part of her job. She got people talking, listened for the cracks and damaged pieces that hinted at their secrets. I talked anyway, hoping she might talk back, tell me something real in exchange, even if it was only to bait me. “What about you? How did Luca manage when you got married?”

“I got married long before I had Luca,” she said, which still didn’t mean the mystery husband was Luca’s father. Not definitively. There had been any number of lawyers post-vows. After a moment she added in a grudging voice, “She’s a nice enough kid, your step. But I wonder what you’re doing here.”

I didn’t understand the question. “In Pensacola?” I’d come here looking for Tig. She knew that.

“No. Here.” She waved her hand around at my keeping room. “In this brick-front shithole with Mr. Elbow Patches, raising his tweedy baby and a girl who’s nice enough but not even yours. Baking whole chickens. Having quiet, don’t-wake-the-baby sex every Thursday at nine p.m. I bet you’re in the PT-fuckin-A, and how can you stand it? You’re like me, Amy. I see you. I see you all the way down. We’re the same, except you had advantages I didn’t. You were born with a silver spoon jammed up your ass. How the hell did you land here? You could be anyone.”

I was affronted, but I worked hard not to let her see it, because this was interesting. She was off-kilter, her words flowing so fast she couldn’t be thinking them through. I fixed her with a challenging stare. I was remembering Tate’s careful outfit, her scrubbed-clean home, all prepared for Roux, and Roux’s disdain for Tate’s need to show her up. Did Roux feel that I was actual competition? There was a measure of respect in her words, but maybe this was just another way to work me.

I tested it. “You’re so right! Why am I here, when I could be on the run from the law, stealing cars, squatting in the Sprite House smelling mildew with my poor kid jerked out of school and away from everything he knows? What was I thinking?”

It was a solid hit. I saw the flinch, though it was nothing more than a reset of her shoulders.

“You’ve never seen my real life,” she said. “This is a hiccup. Come Monday I’ll have the means to start my real life over. Trust me. My real life isn’t this . . . small,” she said, waving a hand at the walls around us.

I looked at her with something that was almost pity, then down at Oliver. He was lying on his back, tired out, his little fists wrapping my index fingers. I bobbled his hands back and forth.

“It isn’t small, here,” I told her. “Your eyes are no good. If my life was shit, why would I fight for it this hard? You can’t send me to jail, Roux. Tig fixed that. All you can do is mess up this tiny, tiny life you think is nothing. But I’m willing to pay almost a quarter mil to keep it. What I have is valuable and fine. But you can’t see that. You’re too damn broken.”

It was probably the most honest thing I’d ever said to her. I wasn’t looking at her, but I thought it landed. I could feel it in the air between us. When I finally did look, she had shaped her face into something insouciant, pitying, but under that I believed I had shivered her. I saw a haunting buried in the back of her eyes.

Maddy came bounding down the stairs then, lithe and young and lovely in her bathing suit, a voluminous sheer cover-up billowing around her.

Roux got up just as Luca came back from the bathroom. Maddy was a dawdler, but I’d wondered what had taken him so long, and now I saw he had already struggled into his borrowed Aqualung wet suit, still damp from yesterday. It was a little short, a slice of bare ankle showing at the bottom, but this time of year the water was still warm enough for it not to matter.

“Gym time,” Roux said, though she was still in her street clothes.

I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief. I didn’t react at all. She paused to drop a cool kiss on her boy’s cheek on the way.

“Have fun. Be good,” she told him.

“Always,” he said.

She saw herself out.

“You could have waited until we got to the pool. That can’t be comfortable,” I said to Luca.

“I know,” he said, sheepish, pulling at the wrist. He did look good in it.