Box wasn’t happy with Dabney, either. She had suffered through a great big dose of I told you so.

Dabney wondered if she should have waited until Agnes was eighteen, or twenty-one. Maybe her mistake wasn’t in waiting too long but in not waiting long enough. Maybe she should have waited until Agnes had enough experience to realize that life was a complicated mess and you could count on being hurt the worst by the person you loved the most.

However, in the weeks following the revelation, she noticed that Agnes expressed curiosity about Clendenin Hughes. Dabney’s yearbooks ended up on the floor of Agnes’s bedroom. Agnes googled Clen on the family computer; she brought up a list of his articles and may even have read a few. And then Dabney found a letter addressed to Clen, care of the New York Times. It was lying on top of Agnes’s math textbook, in plain sight, as if Agnes had wanted Dabney to see it. More likely, it had been left there as a form of torture.

Dabney had wanted few things in life as much as she had wanted to read that letter.

Then, as it always did, summer arrived and Agnes attended her program in France, and she came home weeks later with a penchant for silk scarves at the neck, and for calling Dabney “Maman,” and a ferocious new love of macarons. She brought Dabney the foolproof baguette recipe, and mother and daughter baked bread together and ate it with sweet butter and sea salt—and once, magically, the addition of an ounce of dark chocolate—and everything pretty much went back to normal. Dabney was Mom, Box was Dad, and Clen’s name wasn’t mentioned again. Life went on.

But Dabney wasn’t naive. She knew she had done some real damage and inflicted some real hurt, just as her own mother had when she disappeared for good, leaving Dabney in the care of May, the Irish chambermaid. Dabney feared that perhaps her mothering was flawed and doomed because she had received such poor mothering herself.

But no—no excuses. Dabney had never felt sorry for herself; she was her own person. She had made a decision, right or wrong. We all make choices.

But to tell Agnes that Dabney was now in love with Clendenin Hughes, her biological father, and having an affair with him?

We all make choices?

No.

Dabney woke up in the morning unable to get out of bed. She couldn’t describe it. There was pain…everywhere.

Agnes said, “Do you want me to call Dr. Field?”

“No,” Dabney said. It was not stress, or guilt. She was lovesick. “Just call Nina, please, and draw the shades.” The sun was giving Dabney a headache; she wanted the bedroom dark. It was such a sin, Dabney wanted to cry, but there was no option. Her body felt invaded by pain, colonized by pain.

Agnes brought a glass of ice water and two pieces of buttered toast. The toast would never be eaten.

“I called Nina and told her you were sick,” Agnes said. “Can I bring you anything else?”

“Just please don’t tell Daddy,” Dabney said. “I don’t want him to worry.”

The following day, Dabney woke up feeling fine. A little flannel-mouthed, maybe, but otherwise fine. So maybe not lovesick, maybe a twenty-four-hour bug.

“We’re going to dinner tonight at the Boarding House,” Dabney said. “Put on something pretty.”

Agnes said, “You just feel sorry for me because CJ canceled. I’m going to stay home and mope. Eat Oreos from the bag, watch bad TV.”

“Reservation at seven o’clock,” Dabney said. “I’ll meet you at the restaurant, though, because I have to run some errands.”

“What errands?” Agnes said.

“Wear something pretty!” Dabney said.

Agnes

When she got to dinner at the Boarding House, Dabney was already waiting at the usual table on the patio, but there was a third chair added, and Riley Alsopp was sitting in it.

Dabney beamed as Agnes approached. “There she is!” she said.

Riley Alsopp stood up. He was wearing a shirt and tie, khaki pants, and flip-flops. He grinned when he saw her. “Hey, Agnes!”

Agnes thought, My mother is so obvious.

Dabney excused herself before dessert. “You two stay and enjoy,” she said. “I’m going back to the house. I’m still not feeling a hundred percent.” She dropped her napkin onto her empty plate. She had devoured her dinner. “The bill is all paid, Riley. My husband insists on a house account. He would eat here breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week if he could. Anyway, stay and have an after-dinner drink, please, or another beer, whatever you want.” Dabney was busy gathering up her Bermuda bag and her cardigan, trying to beat a quick yet organic-seeming retreat so that Agnes and Riley could be alone. Agnes had seen her mother do it again and again and again.

Agnes pitched forward in her seat. As a defense against the matchmaking, Agnes had drunk too many glasses of Shiraz. “You know she’s trying to set us up, right?”

Riley exhaled in a long stream. “Right.”

“She gets an idea in her head,” Agnes said.

“Does she see something?” Riley said. “I mean, has she told you if she’s seen…if we’re like…pink or whatever?”

Agnes smiled at him. Pink, rosy, she and Riley Alsopp? She briefly imagined what being in a relationship with Riley would be like, and the first word that came to her mind was easy. Did she want easy? She couldn’t believe she was thinking this way. She was engaged to CJ, and just because she was angry with him did not mean she could pair off with someone else, even cute, easy Riley Alsopp. She said, “How was your date with Celerie?”