Oh no! he thought. She was going to cry!

“I want to leave him,” she said.

“And go where?” Addison said.

Tears dripped down her face. “I don’t know,” she said. “Paris?”

It had started there. They did not need the petites tartes Tatin with Calvados ice cream that Sandrine sent out, nor did they need the chocolate truffles or the slender flutes of rose champagne. (“Billecart-Salmon,” Sandrine said. “Un cadeau.” A gift.) But they enjoyed them anyway.

Addison paid the bill with five one-hundred-dollar bills, which made Tess gasp even louder than she had at the gym when she thought he was in cardiac arrest. He whisked her out of there, stopping only to kiss Sandrine on both cheeks and say, “Le déjeuner de ma vie.”

He and Tess were holding hands as they left the restaurant. Nous Deux. We Two. That morning at eight o’clock, Tess MacAvoy had been Phoebe’s friend and, more saliently for Addison, Greg’s wife. She had been a secondary or tertiary theme in the symphony of Addison’s life; she had been a figure in the background.

Now, however, she was his.

They stood under the awning at the back door of the café, facing a small parking area where there was only one car, an ancient silver Peugeot—most likely Sandrine’s. Addison bent down and kissed Tess—and yes, it did occur to him that he’d consumed an entire bottle of wine, followed by a glass of champagne. He was drunk and so was she. The kiss could fail. It could be like kissing his little sister. But their lips connected and there was a spark, an electric charge, a surge of attraction. The kiss was the right thing. He kissed her again. And again. And again, and then they were kissing in the back parking lot of Nous Deux. Tess’s arms locked around him. He pulled her in. She was his now. Did she know this?

So that there was no mistaking what all this meant, he said, “I may have just fallen in love with you. Okay?”

And she said, “Okay.”

Addison was crying now. Of course he was crying. The silly, sad tears of a little boy, though he had no recollection of feeling like this as a child. This feeling was adult. There were so many things he could never bring himself to do again: he would never go to Stowe, he would never order that bottle of Mersault, he would never eat a croque-monsieur. He would never kiss anyone for the first time.

He had Tess’s iPhone, pilfered from the Coast Guard’s bag of her personal effects. He felt guilty for stealing it. But then, guess what? The Chief called to inform him that he was the executor of the MacAvoy wills.

“What?” Addison said. And because his memories of Tess started this past December, it took a while to come back to him.

He had agreed to serve as executor. Back in 2000, when Greg and Tess bought their house on Blueberry Lane. Addison was their Realtor, he was at the closing with their attorney, Barry Karsten, a big, affable fellow of Danish descent. When the papers were all signed, Barry suggested that Greg and Tess make wills. He could write them up.

“Right now?” Greg said.

“All you need to figure out is who you’d like to be the executor and what happens to the house if you both die at the same time.”

Tess said, “We’re trying to get pregnant.”

Barry Karsten said, “Okay! We’ll account for that.”

Addison had barely been listening, but he had been at the right place at the right time (or, as he’d thought of it then, the wrong place at the wrong time). Greg asked him to serve as executor. Since Greg and Tess had both taken the day off from teaching to attend the closing, Barry ended up printing out a boilerplate will for each of them. They all signed.

“And you mean to say that Greg and Tess never signed another will?” Addison said.

The Chief muttered something, throwing in the words “god-damn careless,” but under the terms of the existing wills, the twins got everything anyway. No guardians had been named for the children, and this was the thing that the Chief didn’t understand. It was an egregious oversight. But the last thing Tess and Greg had planned on was… dying.

So, put honestly, Addison knew he was the executor of Greg’s and Tess’s wills, but, like being the permanent treasurer for the Class of 1977 at Lawrenceville, he’d forgotten, because he never expected the job to have any responsibilities.

Tess’s iPhone was suddenly under his jurisdiction. All of the MacAvoy property was under his control. He would go through the house, see what was there; he would have free rein over the most intimate nooks and crannies of Tess’s and Greg’s life—the bank statements, the drawers of the bedside tables, the diaries.

It terrified him.

ANDREA

Twice she had the same dream. Then three times. It was such a stupid way to manifest her grief. So clichéd and predictable that Andrea was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. There was no one to tell anyway, since Tess was dead.

The dream was real, though. This was to say, she was really having it. Once. Then again. Then a third time, with a variation.

It went as follows: Andrea was her normal self, sitting in her chair on the beach, reading her book. There was shouting from offshore. Someone was drowning. Andrea ran to the shoreline. It was a man caught in the riptide. Andrea motioned with her arms; she shouted: Swim with it—it will carry you down the beach, but you’ll be okay. She was a lifeguard, with a lifeguard’s instincts and knowledge. She did not want to go in to save this man; he was too big. In a rip like this, he would take her down. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. She had faith that the man would get it; he would save himself! But he was going under. She lost sight of his face. She started swimming. She reached him, got him under the chin. She could do this. In lifesaving class, Andrea had practiced on dummies that weighed twice as much as she did.