She can’t speak.

“Okay, then,” he says. He turns and walks out the door.

Tabitha puts a second coat of Paul Revere’s Ride on the powder-room walls—then, since she’s on a roll, she starts on the lavender room with an oil-based primer called Kilz. She bids the lavender adieu. There is zen in painting, she finds, but her mind keeps turning over the slight changes in Franklin’s behavior. They went from a full-on sex-and-love binge to… well, they’d had sex early that morning before Tad and Richie arrived, but sex isn’t exactly what Tabitha is craving. She misses tenderness: hand-holding, Franklin’s finger running along her cheekbone, his mouth on the back of her neck.

Tabitha imagines Franklin and Richie out at Offshore Ale, flirting with the young waitresses in tight T-shirts and short shorts; Franklin probably knows them all by name. As the walls of the lavender bedroom become white, Tabitha writes a story across them. Franklin follows one of the young waitresses into the kitchen; they find a dark corner—a pantry, maybe, or the room where the kegs are stored—and Franklin kisses the waitress the way he has just kissed Tabitha. The waitress slides her hand down the front of Franklin’s jeans.

Tabitha wonders what he meant by “night fishing.” Will they actually go fishing at night, or is it a euphemism for something else?

Stop! she tells herself. The door to the bedroom is closed; possibly the fumes are getting to her. She has no reason to doubt Franklin. But he is a single man out with one of his single friends; they are drinking. And who’s to say this relationship is exclusive? They haven’t defined it; they haven’t set any boundaries or parameters. They’ve basically been living together for two weeks, but Franklin hasn’t called her his girlfriend. He didn’t take her to meet his parents. She hasn’t been back to his house since that first night; she never learned the address, and she isn’t confident she could find it again, although she’s pretty sure it’s somewhere in Oak Bluffs.

What does Tabitha know about him, really? He picked her up at a bar. Who’s to say he won’t pick up someone else tonight? She should go somewhere—to dinner or the movies. She overheard someone at Skinny’s today talking about eating at Alchemy. Tabitha could easily take a shower, put on a dress, and go find trouble of her own.

Instead she pulls a beer out of the cooler that Franklin keeps on the back deck, then she fishes one of the Ambien she stole from Eleanor’s stash out of her purse. She is so agitated that she takes a second Ambien and wanders up to the master bedroom because it’s now the only place to sleep. She lies facedown on her father’s bed and thinks that she would like to cry. Except that she’s suddenly too tired to summon the effort.

She hears footsteps on the stairs and opens her eyes to see Tad in his Carhartts, carrying his tiling trowel. He walks past her into the master bathroom. Tabitha’s mouth is cottony. She wants to sit up, but she can’t. She succumbs.

She opens her eyes. Where is she? It takes her a minute: Nantucket, she thinks. No—the Vineyard. Billy’s house, Billy’s room. She turns her head; her neck is stiff.

There’s an old-fashioned clock radio on the nightstand. The glowing blue numbers say it’s one thirteen. Billy’s clock is wrong, which is not surprising. Everything about this house is wrong! Tabitha reaches her arms out to her sides so that her body is in the shape of a cross. No Franklin. She eyes the door to the master bathroom. It’s closed tight, and there doesn’t seem to be any activity on the other side. But wasn’t Tad just there? Or did she dream that?

When she checks her phone, she sees that it is quarter after one. In the afternoon! She is appalled at herself. The Ambien knocked her out for fifteen hours, and she still feels woozy. There are no texts and no missed calls from Franklin, which is a good thing. He must be downstairs, working. She can’t imagine how she’ll explain sleeping the morning away.

She slinks downstairs and is met with the powerful smell of polyurethane. The Portuguese Paulos are varnishing the floors. They look gorgeous, honey-toned and silky. And they were there all along, smothered underneath the hideous carpeting.

“Franklin?” she calls out.

“No here,” one of the Paulos says.

“No?” Tabitha says. She tries to remember what was on the docket for today. Kitchen, she thought. Getting to the kitchen can only be done by walking the far perimeter of the living room past the powder room and into the dining area. Through the skinny dining-room windows, Tabitha sees Richie on a spade digging a hole for the mature hydrangeas, whose roots are wrapped in burlap. Richie is here—that’s good, she supposes. He and Franklin didn’t get lost down the rabbit hole.

Tabitha finds Tad in the kitchen, tiling the backsplash behind the range.

“Hey,” she says. “Sorry I slept for so long.”

Tad barely looks up. “You’re not on my payroll.”

“No, I know,” she says. “It’s just… well, I like to get up and at ’em.” She watches Tad place the smoky glass tile row by row. This kitchen is going to be spectacular. She can’t believe the difference. She clears her throat. She could use a glass of ice water, some Motrin, some strong coffee. “Do you know where Franklin is?”

“No,” Tad says. He doesn’t offer anything else, and Tabitha listens to the rasping noise of the trowel against the wall.

Tabitha grabs her bag and heads to her car, which has been baking in the midday sun and is now an oven, the seats too hot to sit on. She puts down the windows and waits a few seconds before climbing in. She cranks the AC and backs out of the driveway.

Did Franklin even come home? Were her paranoid scenarios not so paranoid after all? Has he taken some little chickie up to Cedar Tree Neck to skinny-dip in the bay? Would he do that? Tabitha’s gut says no. Is she being naive? She doesn’t think so. She wonders if Harper somehow found out that Franklin was doing the work on the house. Does she still have connections here, someone willing to swing by and check on the house? Did Harper call Franklin? Did she threaten him, or did one of her drug buddies threaten him? Is that why he’s staying away? She can’t decide if this theory is spot-on or completely ridiculous.

Tabitha tries to go to Mocha Mott’s, but there’s no parking, then she gets stuck in traffic at Five Corners. She calls Franklin’s cell. It rings six times, then goes to his voice mail.

“Hey,” she says. She’s at a loss. Where is he? And what right does she have to know? It feels like the whole world has changed, and she’s the last to find out. “It’s me.”

She hangs up.

Franklin isn’t back at the house when she finally returns—she had to go all the way to Tony’s Market, in OB, to get coffee, water, and painkillers—and now she’s starting to panic. Something is wrong. She charges up the porch stairs into the kitchen, where Tad is still working.

“Have you heard from Franklin?” she asks.

“No, ma’am,” he says.

“What the hell?” she says. She is angry now, angry and worried. She wants to take it out on whoever is available, but Tad is having none of it. He ignores her.

“You know him far better than I,” Tabitha says. “Does he pull these little disappearing acts often?”

“No,” Tad says. “He doesn’t.” He sets the trowel down in the tray and faces her. “Have you called him?”

“Yes,” she says. “Voice mail.”

Tad nods. “I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

Tabitha doesn’t like anything about that statement, so she storms out to the yard. She approaches Richie from behind and gives him a vicious poke on the shoulder. He’s behind this change in Franklin somehow; she just knows it.

“Where’s Franklin?” she asks.

“Whoa!” Richie says. He turns on her with a venom that Tabitha doesn’t understand. What has she ever done to him? Why couldn’t he be nicer? Why couldn’t he be happy that Franklin has found someone? “I don’t appreciate being touched like that.”

“Sorry,” Tabitha says. But she’s not sorry! She is so frustrated and so confused that she would like to take Richie’s shovel and hit him over the head with it. “Do you know where Franklin is?”