He showed up at her yoga class; he did all the positions, hoping she was watching him in her peripheral vision. He waited for her by the water cooler, but she breezed past him.

“He borrowed a dog,” Andrea said. “That golden retriever.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “Jesus. I forgot about the dog.”

“She almost fell for it,” Andrea said. “But when she found out it wasn’t his, it set him back.”

“So what was it, in the end?” Jeffrey said. The Greg-in-pursuit-of-Tess story was in fact a well-documented and much-laughed-about legend, and the first-night-at-the-Muse story could easily be told by people (like himself) who hadn’t even been there. But what had flipped her? What had changed her mind? Jeffrey couldn’t remember, or didn’t know.

“I gave her permission,” Andrea said. “I told her the guy clearly deserved a chance, he was going to so much trouble. I told her it was okay to relent. To say yes. And that was all she needed. She did.”

“Oh,” Jeffrey said.

“Thank you, Peach.”

Jeffrey nodded. “You’re welcome.”

He did not tell anyone about Andrea’s visits or about the recounting of Tess’s life in obscene detail. Meaning he did not tell Delilah. This was unprecedented, because one of Jeffrey’s hallmark qualities was that he was an open book. His accounts were honest, his slate clean. He hid nothing; he had no secrets. He prided himself on operating this way; he felt it gave him the upper hand. Delilah had secrets; she had hundreds of hours unaccounted for that fell under the category of “time to myself” and was therefore unimpeachable. She was always hiding something, covering up, making excuses. It was exhausting to live that way; Jeffrey could see the toll it took on her, harboring an entire emotional life she refused to share with him.

He decided to keep Andrea’s visits a secret, not for his sake but for Andrea’s sake. It went unspoken, but Jeffrey was pretty sure the Chief knew nothing about the hours she whiled away in the farm attic. Delilah, if she knew, would get mad, she would feel threatened (though she claimed again and again that it was impossible to feel jealous of someone like Andrea); she would ridicule Jeffrey first, then Andrea; she would degrade their attempts at self-help, at memory as therapy. She would misunderstand it and misrepresent it to others and ruin it.

It was working. Jeffrey could tell just by looking at Andrea that she felt better.

And so did he.

PHOEBE

Her days grew happier and happier. She woke up and brewed an espresso. She had renewed her membership at the gym; she ran on the treadmill and lifted weights three times a week and attended Pilates twice a week. On Saturdays and Sundays she tried to get Addison to walk with her to the beach, but he usually said no, he didn’t feel like it, he was too tired, too hungover, too lazy. So Phoebe went alone.

She was secretly taking herself off her drugs. Back in 2001, after Reed died, she had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and then, in short order, depression. She took all the drugs prescribed to her and then some, twice as often as she was supposed to, and in this way the pain had subsided. But along with the pain went everything else. Along with the pain went her personhood. Goodbye, Phoebe.

In coming off the drugs, the whole thing was working in reverse. She could think, she could feel. She had appetites. This, she thought, was a basket of raspberries. Yum! This was an egg salad sandwich with arugula on wheat bread. She wanted to eat it, in alternating bites, with crisp, salty gourmet potato chips, the juicy berries, and sips of iced tea with mint. Eating lunch, for the first time in years, gave her joy. Her pathological fear of calories was gone, too. She had desires. On a sunny day she liked to sit for an hour or two by the pool. She liked the warm sun; she liked the cool water. While on the drugs, she had barely been able to tell the difference between the two.

She called Delilah. She wanted to hang out with the kids.

You’re kidding, Delilah said.

Phoebe wanted to go to the beach, ride a boogie board to the shore on a monster wave, and eat a faceful of sand. She wanted to pick a Popsicle out of the cooler and let it drip down her hands. The colors of the water and the sand and the eelgrass in the dunes and even of the Popsicle startled her. Such deep, vibrant color! She could see it, she could appreciate it. It was as if she had been blind and only now was her sight restored. The pink of the raspberries, the deep brown of her espresso, the turquoise of the swimming pool. Amazing!

The sound of the boys, Drew and Barney, laughing. The sound of the waves crashing against the shore. The hum of airplanes making a landing. The James Taylor song on the boom box three towels down. She used to love that song; she still did.

“I can’t believe how wonderful I feel,” Phoebe said.

“That makes one of you,” Delilah said.

It was wrong, all wrong. It was backward. Addison was a shell, a husk. He was miserable and toadish. He was an abuser of alcohol. His lover had died and he was undergoing the predictable decline. Delilah, too, was suffering from nuclear fallout. Her hair was wild and haglike; she admitted she could muster the energy to get in the shower only once a week. Once a week! She was getting dreadlocks. She had put on weight. Delilah had a very sexy, curvy figure, but she stuffed her face mindlessly with the Doritos and Chips Ahoy that she took to the beach for the kids, which went right to her ass. She complained about her ass and her dimpled thighs, she had a harder time getting out of her beach chair, she waddled to the water line, but she kept on snarfing down the snacks. Phoebe invited her to go for walks to the beach, or to Pilates class when the kids were in camp, but Delilah turned her down. I don’t have it in me, Phoebe. And she had quit her job. She couldn’t work at the Begonia anymore, now that Greg was gone. Thom and Faith had replaced Greg with an Irish trio; Delilah had gone in to work one shift to see if she could do it, but when the girl started crooning in her Gaelic accent, Delilah ran out of the bar in tears. She went through her closet and took all her hostessing dresses to the hospital thrift shop.