He took a deep breath. Beer, onion rings, exhaust from the stove. The Sox were on TV and the jukebox was playing Tom Petty. He was in the Scarlet Begonia. He was okay, despite the fact that the tox report was eating at him like a tapeworm, despite the fact that Andrea was certifiably nuts and needed a padded room on a quiet farm in central Pennsylvania. Andrea thought about nothing other than Tess: Tess drowning in Nantucket Sound, Tess almost drowning in Boston Harbor as a child, Tess miscarrying once, losing the second baby in a fall, miscarrying again, Tess suffering through the weeks of Greg’s inquisition, Tess withdrawing from Andrea right after Christmas. This last thing seemed to be the corn kernel stuck in Andrea’s back molar: for the six months prior to Tess’s death, Tess had been distant and strange. Andrea had felt her pulling away. It would have been imperceptible to anyone other than Andrea, but Andrea had sensed that something was wrong. Tess didn’t confide in Andrea, she went two and three days without checking in, and, worst of all, she had stopped going to mass with Andrea on Saturday evenings, which was the one hour of the week that they reserved not only for the Lord but for each other.

Andrea was so consumed with her interior life that she didn’t always notice what was going on around her. The twins had their own set of complicated needs—food, clothing, a chauffeur service, enriching ways to pass the time indoors and outdoors, athletic and educational, for all of their waking hours. Andrea could barely meet the minimum requirements: drop off, pick up, breakfast, lunch, dinner, bath, bedtime. If there were to be outings, if there was to be fun, it had to be provided by Eric, Kacy, or the Chief. Eric and Kacy had jobs and friends. The Chief had a police force to run and an island to keep safe. They did what they could, but it was clear the twins were unhappy. Not only devastated by the tragic loss of both their parents, but bored and uninspired by their new life in the Kapenash house. On Sundays, when the Chief was in charge, he asked the twins what they wanted to do and they invariably said they wanted to play with Drew and Barney; they wanted to go to Auntie Dee’s house. And though that would have been killing two birds with one stone—he would be making the kids happy and resurrecting some of his lost social life (his mouth watered at the thought of grilled corn, cherry tomatoes stuffed with guacamole, the wickedly spicy tuna tartare that Delilah made in the summer)—he could not in good conscience take the kids over there. Andrea would unhinge. This happened more and more frequently—the guitar smashing had been the worst, followed by dumping a platter of perfectly grilled rib-eye steaks into her perennial bed, followed by throwing her cell phone into the ocean. The kids were terrified of Andrea. One morning Finn ate his Cheerios without milk because he was afraid to ask for some.

Chloe had a bad case of the night terrors. She woke up calling for her mom, and Andrea lay there with her eyes open but made no move to deal with it, so the Chief would walk Chloe back to bed, find her doll, and try to make a convincing whispered argument that everything was going to be okay. The poor kid was craving her mother, a woman with peppy energy and feminine warmth, and what she got was her gruff uncle who had a big, scary job and carried a gun.

In a brave moment, the Chief had told Andrea that the best way to honor Tess now was to concentrate on caring for the children.

Andrea had basically spit on him for that. She said, “I am caring for them, Ed.”

But she wasn’t. She was too caught up in her grief. It was backward, upside down, inside out.

Here at the Begonia, the Chief stroked the scarred tabletop. Addison was next to arrive, and he must have stopped at the bar, because he was carrying a drink. The Chief stood, they shook hands, Addison sat down opposite, and the Chief felt nervous suddenly, like he was on a blind date. He and Addison had been friends for eons. It was true that he and Addison did not have a whole heck of a lot in common; Addison was slippery like a fish. Impossible to grasp. He had had a fancy education, he’d lived and worked in other countries, he had a daughter who lived in California like a character in one of those Teen Disney shows that Chloe wanted to watch but Andrea prohibited. Addison was a businessman; he was Nantucket’s real estate magnate. He did deals where he made so much money it felt illegal. He made connections, he culled favors, he lived in a six-thousand-square-foot house with his fragile wife.

The Chief had always respected the way Addison fretted over Phoebe. Especially now that the Chief had his own wife to worry about.

The Chief and Addison had once been lost in the woods together. They had rented a canoe during their group trip to Saranac Lake, paddled around the wrong bend (the Chief had chosen incorrectly; he’d insisted, despite Addison’s protests), and ended up in East Who-the-fuck-knows. They had no map (two big strong men, no need for a map), half a bottle of Evian, and no food except for breath mints. They each had a cell phone, but no god-damn reception. They were out on the lake for hours, and when they were supposed to meet the hotel pickup truck at the end point, they were lost. They decided to pull onto land and carry the canoe and look for a road. Hitch a ride back to the refuge of their elegant resort, the Point, where everyone else was getting ready for dinner and most likely starting to worry.

They pulled off into thick, almost impenetrable woods. They considered getting back into the canoe, but that felt like regressing. They battled through the brush while holding the canoe over their heads. The Chief had worked with guys who had been to Vietnam; he’d heard stories just like everyone else about the dense jungle, the bugs, the snakes, the booby traps. What the Chief and Addison were dealing with now was, of course, not warfare, but the conditions weren’t much more favorable. The mosquitoes were thick and whining; there were thorns everywhere, and mud. Addison was, ridiculously, wearing Ferragamo loafers. The canoe hindered them tremendously; at one point they were tempted just to ditch it, but it belonged to the resort, it was a beautiful wooden canoe and had probably cost thousands of dollars. It was growing dark, they couldn’t see, the mosquitoes were like motherfucking tigers, the Chief was dying of thirst. He was so thirsty he would gladly have drunk lake water, despite whatever kind of gut-rotting dysentery it would give him, but by now, he estimated, they were at least a quarter-mile inland.