“I’m thinking of quitting,” Delilah said. Her head was spinning. She was drunk. One of the signs of Delilah drunk was that she disclosed pieces of classified information prematurely. She hadn’t discussed quitting the Begonia with Jeffrey, nor with Phoebe—nor, properly, with herself. The thought was just floating around in her mind with sad inevitability. At the funeral reception, Thom and Faith had approached her together and told her to take as much time as she needed before she came back to work. They had been drunk at the reception. They were more or less always drunk or hung over, which was what gave the Begonia the whiff of disrepute among people like Jeffrey and Andrea. But Thom and Faith were good citizens, community people. They loved Delilah and they had loved Greg, who had played the guitar there for over ten years. Thom and Faith had, in their hippie, hazy, funky, freewheeling way, always treated Delilah and Greg as part of their family.

They had also had the misfortune of being present for the fiasco that was Sunday night, Greg’s last night alive. But Delilah wasn’t willing to discuss it with them; she wasn’t going to think about it. She looked at Thom and Faith—Thom with his gray ponytail and John Lennon glasses, and Faith with her signature rouge (some days it was applied more evenly than others). Delilah had tried many times over the years to imagine Thom and Faith making love, and had failed. Likewise, she could not imagine herself ever working a shift at the Begonia again. Thom and Faith feared this, maybe, and hence were offering her lots of leeway—anything to keep the door open. If Delilah could just be honest with herself, she would say that for her, the Scarlet Begonia had always been about Greg, and Greg was dead.

Andrea did not respond to Delilah’s revelation. No surprise there. She just closed the book on the conversation by saying, “The kids will live with us. We’re their family.”

Delilah cut through the Chief’s sandwich with her serrated bread knife and arranged it on a plate with a handful of chips. Jeffrey stepped in off the back deck and said, “What are you girls talking about?”

“Nothing,” they said together, and Delilah was grateful. She had concocted the whole notion of taking Chloe and Finn without consulting Jeffrey. She was a horrible wife. And she was drunker than she thought.

ADDISON

Addison’s memory, in regard to Tess, went back only as far as the first time he had kissed her. December 27, in Stowe, Vermont.

He wasn’t sure if he could go back and think about it. Well, wait, maybe, give him a minute. It was sort of like asking him if he could go down and touch his toes now that his femur was broken. But then it occurred to him that all he had left of Tess were these memories, and since no one knew about their relationship, there was no one in the world to talk to about it other than himself. It had crossed his mind to make a truly mind-blowing announcement at Jeffrey and Delilah’s house following the reception. Why not just confess? Make a scene? But Addison loathed scenes. Even now, when he thought about Phoebe shrieking in the parking lot of the Galley, he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. Never mind the way she’d shattered like a teacup on September 11. Addison decided not to come out with the truth for many reasons—and really, his distaste for scenes was at the bottom of the list. First of all, he didn’t want to hurt Phoebe. Second, he loved his friends, and he wanted to keep them. And somewhere in there was another niggling reason: he feared that if he told everyone that he and Tess had fallen in love, no one would believe him.

Why? Because Tess was married to Greg, who had muscles chiseled out of mahogany, a voice that fell somewhere between Frank Sinatra and John Mayer, eyes that made even Florabel, the receptionist in Addison’s office, who was a lesbian, tremble with nerves and excitement so that she almost spilled her coffee every time Greg walked in. Why why why would Tess turn around and have an affair with Addison, who was bald and bespectacled, and who could not even get his own wife to kiss him with tongue?

No one would believe it. They would laugh.

In your dreams!

But it had happened. It was real.

They had all gone to Stowe on the day after Christmas, for what was their sixth (and final) group vacation. Adults only, five days of ski and après-ski. Addison had gotten hold of the 4BR condo for free in the usual way, which was to say that a man who had bought a five-million-dollar piece of land on Pocomo Point from Addison in the fall had offered the condo to Addison as a thank-you for doing the deal.

Addison said, Oh, really, Jack, it was nothing.

Jack said, Take the condo. Week after Christmas, it’s yours. Wife and I are going to St. Barts.

The group vacations were always fun. They were always the best (though in Addison’s mind the best of the best had been Vegas, and every trip since had been an earnest attempt to live up to Vegas). This trip to Stowe was especially handicapped because of what had transpired between Tess and Greg. The whole mess with April Peck had been murderous. Addison had heard only Greg’s side of the story: Tess would not forgive him. She would act like she’d forgiven him and then either something would happen (she’d bump into someone at the grocery store who would want to vent their feelings on the topic) or nothing would happen—out of the blue, she would just flip out. She would make Greg tell her the whole story again, she would get angry again, she would declare that she could never trust him again. She wanted him to quit his job, she wanted to move away, she wanted to move out.

Still, they had agreed to the trip to Stowe; they asked Cassidy Montero, on Christmas break from her freshman year at Dartmouth, to baby-sit. Greg was gung-ho about the skiing in a way that made Addison nervous. Addison, despite his many other talents and accomplishments, did not ski. He liked the atmosphere of skiing—the fire-warmed lodge, the view of a snowy mountainside, the clean air, the drinks—but not the sport itself. Addison suspected that Greg’s opinion of his own prowess was inflated—this was generally the case—but at any rate, Greg’s enthusiasm fueled a sense of great expectation for the trip.