This could have moved Delilah right along to thinking about Jeffrey, but she couldn’t allow herself to deconstruct him. He was her husband, she knew him too well, and she was angry. She would skip him. You really disappoint me. God, it infuriated her, but it did not surprise her.

Addison was talking now, rescuing them from Phoebe’s discourse on life as seen from the chaise longue. He was describing Las Vegas real estate trends (Addison loved trends) and how the old casinos—the Sands, the Golden Nugget, the Desert Inn—were being medicine-balled and replaced by theme-park giants—the Luxor, the Venetian, Treasure Island.

The waiter reappeared, and they ordered. Delilah ordered the salade frisée avec lardons and the steak. Jeffrey wanted the beets, but would not order them because they were out of season. And so he went with the grapefruit and avocado salad and the pasta with lump crabmeat. (Even their ordering could not surprise her. Phoebe ordered a salad with roasted vegetables. Addison and the Chief got the steak, like Delilah.)

Addison was the businessman, the money man. His last name was Wheeler, and every single person on Nantucket called him “Wheeler Dealer.” Addison was tall and thin and bald; he wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was part nerd, part aristocrat. His father had owned a carpet and flooring business in New Brunswick; his mother had been a nurse in the infirmary at Rutgers. Until high school, Addison’s life had been very Exit 8. It had been McDonald’s after football games; it had been Bruce Springsteen and summers spent “down the shore.” But like cream, Addison rose to the top. If you believed him, he did so without trying. He was bright, polite, and charming. He had a silver tongue. He was a social genius, and because of this, he stood out. The junior high school principal suggested that Addison make a run at boarding school, where he could take advantage of some real opportunities.

He got into Lawrenceville based on his interview alone. From Lawrenceville he went to Princeton, where he was president of his eating club, Cottage. There was something funny about his graduation, and by funny Delilah meant peculiar—he hadn’t had the correct credits at the end of his senior year to get his diploma. He had finished up the following summer at Rutgers. Had he graduated from Rutgers, then, technically? Or was it a Princeton diploma with a Rutgers asterisk? Delilah had also heard that Addison had been thrown out of Princeton for conducting an affair with the wife of the dean of arts and sciences, whom Addison had met at a faculty cocktail party he’d crashed. Now that sounded like Addison, but Delilah did not have confirmation of that story, and the one time she had been brave enough to ask Phoebe, Phoebe had said dismissively, I can’t keep track of all the stories. The man has had nine lives.

That was the truth about Addison: he had had nine lives. The stories were too numerous and byzantine to keep track of. Which were real and which were lore? He claimed to have lived in Belfast, Naples, and Paris while working as a broker for Coldwell Banker. But he had only just turned forty: how had he possibly fit it all in? He spoke fluent French and Italian, he spoke Gaelic, he knew everything there was to know about food and wine, painting, sculpture, architecture, classical music, literature. His first wife was an anorexically thin rubber heiress named Mary Rose Garth, who had a brownstone on Gramercy Park and a penchant for younger men—her personal trainer, the handsome Puerto Rican doorman. Mary Rose had taken Addison for the ride of his life; she had shown him all of the best ways in the world to spend money. But she had been too much even for Addison; they divorced amicably, and Mary Rose now lived in Malibu with their daughter, Vanessa. If you were to believe Addison, Mary Rose and Vanessa shared boyfriends.

Delilah ate her steak. She had asked for it rare and it had come perfectly cooked, seared on the outside, dark pink on the inside. Addison had also ordered his steak rare, but the Chief had ordered his well done. (Predictable.) They had moved on to drinking a red wine from Argentina—shocking, since Addison was a Francophile. But it was the most incredible wine Delilah had ever tasted. It was like drinking velvet. It was like drinking the blood of your one true love. If she said this, everyone would laugh. Phoebe would say, God, Delilah, you are so clever, and mean it, and Jeffrey would shake his head, embarrassed.

Andrea was talking about her kids. Dullsville. But Delilah would not save her.

In her mind, she moved on to Phoebe. Phoebe was Delilah’s best friend, though they were an odd match. Phoebe was blond, stick-thin, never caught in public without perfectly applied Chanel lipstick. She was a cruise director, a cheerleader; she was the pep squad. She was a trophy wife. She liked being all these things; the stereotype was her identity and she relished it. The shopping, the waxing, the Valentino heels, the Dior perfume, her slavish devotion to Sex and the City. She did not cook, she did not clean or do laundry, but she did take spinning and yoga classes, she did avoid red meat, as well as chicken and fish and all starches. It seemed like she ate the same way that she drank champagne: sparingly, on special occasions. Tonight she had ordered a beautiful leafy salad with a timbale of roasted vegetables, but at home it was all rice cakes, navel oranges, and mineral water.

What Delilah had learned, however, was that there was depth to Phoebe. The woman was a fantastic administrator. She sat on the boards of directors of two charities, she cochaired events that raised ludicrous amounts of money. She ran her consulting business with acuity; she was as shrewd as Addison—shrewder, perhaps, because whereas Addison was acknowledged as being shrewd, Phoebe was considered ditzy and vacuous.

Phoebe came from a close-knit family from Milwaukee. She had grown up with loving parents and a twin brother, Reed, whom she adored. They were the kind of twins who created their own language; they were, in Phoebe’s words, “just like the twins in Flowers in the Attic, minus all the nasty stuff.” Her parents, Joan and Phil, were still married, still living in a center-hall colonial in Whitefish Bay, still sustaining themselves on the milk and cheese of Phoebe and Reed’s youth. Reed was a fantastically successful bond trader in New York. Phoebe talked to him at least twice a day. He invested her money. He had made her millions.