Dabney stepped in through the mudroom door.

“Agnes?” she cried out.

Agnes was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich at the counter. She looked skinny to Dabney. Her jeans were hanging off her hips. And—even more shocking—she had cut her hair!

“Eeeek!” Dabney said. She reached out and touched Agnes’s shorn head. All that beautiful, straight dark hair, the hair that had reached down to Agnes’s nearly missing behind, had been chopped off. She looked like a boy.

“I know, right?” Agnes said. “It’s so different, I feel like someone else. Yesterday morning in the mirror, I didn’t even recognize myself.”

Dabney pressed her lips closed against the fifty annoying mom questions that threatened to escape: When did you cut it? Why did you cut it? Oh, honey, why?

Agnes took a bite of chicken salad sandwich and Dabney thought, Yes, eat, eat! She thought this was her punishment for never going to visit her daughter in New York, despite at least two hundred invitations to do so. Her daughter had come home looking like a cross between Twiggy in the 1966 Rolling Stone shoot and a teenage boy newly released from juvie.

Agnes swallowed and said, “CJ convinced me to do it.”

CJ, of course.

Dabney hugged her daughter. “How is CJ?” she asked.

“Great!” Agnes said. “He’s here. He came with me.”

“Did he?” Dabney sounded excited and happy, even to her own ears. “Where is he?”

“He went for a run,” Agnes said.

“Oh, good!” Dabney said. To her, the “oh, good” sounded okay. It sounded like, Oh, good for CJ, out enjoying this glorious spring weather! What she meant was, Oh, good, she didn’t have to deal with CJ right this second.

Dabney took a cleansing breath and renewed her vow not to be critical of CJ. Charles Jacob Pippin was forty-four years old to Agnes’s twenty-six; he was only four years younger than Dabney. But, as Box had pointed out, Dabney had no room to complain about the age difference because Box was fourteen years older than Dabney and it had rarely, if ever, been an issue. CJ was divorced from a woman named Annabelle, who—he was eager to mention—now lived in Boca Raton, heedlessly spending the million dollars a year CJ paid her in alimony. CJ was a sports agent in New York; his client list included nine New York Giants and four prominent Yankees, as well as some top-ranked tennis players and golfers. CJ had met Agnes the preceding September at the annual benefit for the Morningside Heights Boys & Girls Club, where Agnes was the executive director. CJ had written a large check to the club, and then he had danced with Agnes in the Waldorf ballroom all night long. The following Monday, a box containing two dozen brand-new basketballs had arrived at the club, followed on Tuesday by a slew of new art supplies. On Wednesday, Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz called the club to see if he could come in to sign autographs for the kids; at first, Agnes had thought it was a prank call. On Thursday, a huge bouquet of flowers arrived for Agnes, along with an invitation for her to have dinner with CJ at Nougatine on Friday.

It was a wooing straight out of the movies, and Dabney couldn’t blame Agnes for succumbing. What twenty-six-year-old could resist? CJ was smart, successful, and sophisticated—he could talk about everything from Frank Lloyd Wright to the World Wrestling Federation. Since they had started dating, CJ had taken Agnes on trips to Nashville, Las Vegas, and Italy, where they drove down the Amalfi coast in a rented Ferrari.

Box, who was impressed by no one, thought CJ was the greatest thing since sliced bread. CJ golfed, he understood economic theory, he was a Republican. In Box’s mind, it was a two-for-one deal: a beau for Agnes, a friend for him.

The fight at Christmas had started when Agnes asked her mother if she and CJ were a perfect match.

Dabney’s heart had seized. She was “Cupe” for Cupid; she was Nantucket’s matchmaker, with forty-two couples to her credit, all of them still together. Dabney could tell if a couple was a perfect match just by looking at them. She saw either a rosy glow or an olive-green haze. However, Dabney didn’t like to offer her opinion on couples she didn’t fix up herself. It was pointless. People were going to make their own decisions regardless of Dabney’s predictions. Hot, passionate love—and even worse, lust—were the enemies of reason and good sense.

Dabney said, “Oh, honey, I have no idea.”

Agnes said, “Mom, please. Please tell me.”

Dabney thought about Agnes and CJ. For Christmas, CJ had given Agnes a pair of Christian Louboutin heels, a new iPad, and a gold Cartier love bracelet, which he dramatically locked onto her wrist. This final gift, especially, underscored CJ’s controlling nature. He liked Agnes to watch what she ate, and he liked her to exercise at least once a day, preferably twice. He disapproved of Agnes’s girlfriends; he thought they were “a danger to the relationship” because they met for cocktails and went to clubs in the Meatpacking District on the weekends. Now, Dabney suspected, most of the friends had fallen away. When CJ and Agnes walked together, CJ pulled her along like she was a recalcitrant child.

CJ was always charming with Dabney, but charming in a way that verged on ingratiating. He liked to reference that fact that he and Dabney were practically the same age. They had both grown up in the eighties, the era of the J. Geils Band and Ghostbusters; they were both in high school when the Union Carbide disaster killed half a million people in India. Dabney didn’t like that CJ had changed his name after his divorce; his first wife, Annabelle, and everyone else in his life at that time, had called him Charlie. Dabney was alarmed when CJ said he didn’t like dogs (“too dirty,”) and that he never wanted to have children. Agnes loved children; that was why she worked at the Boys & Girls Club. Now, Agnes had started saying that she didn’t care if she had children or not. Dabney wasn’t sure how to explain it reasonably, but she sensed something rotten, possibly even sinister, under CJ’s charismatic facade.