She picked up the display box of bird eggs. They were all delicate and perfect in their eggness, each nestled in a cushy bed of straw in its compartment. Alternately speckled, smooth, and cobbled, with the subtlest variance of colors: white, cream, ivory, porcelain, tint of blue, tint of green. Was the woman who had moved to the Virgin Islands an ornithologist? Madeline had once given a magazine interview in which she said Every life contains a novel. Could she reasonably write a novel about a female ornithologist who moves from Nantucket to the Virgin Islands?

She knew nothing about the Virgin Islands.

A knock at the door startled Madeline so badly that she nearly tossed the box of eggs into the air.

Who…?

Madeline was terrified, despite the fact that it was broad daylight and she was smack dab in the middle of town. She still suffered from a lingering case of PTSD, even now, more than twenty years after her kidnapping. She was terrified of sudden noises, and she would never have been able to write an S&M novel like Fifty Shades. Ropes and blindfolds and gags made her hyperventilate to the point of passing out.

Who was at the door?

Madeline waited, holding her breath, hoping whoever it was would retreat.

Another knock. Steady, insistent. Madeline’s car was in the driveway. Any one of a thousand people would have recognized her car.

Madeline tiptoed over to the door, not wanting her footsteps to be heard.

A familiar male voice said, “Madeline, I know you’re in there. Open up, it’s me.”

Me? Madeline thought. The voice was so familiar, and yet in her panic, she couldn’t identify it.

She unlocked the door and cracked it open.

Eddie.

Madeline exhaled. “Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.”

He was wearing a white linen shirt and khaki linen pants and a Panama hat and the tan Versace loafers he loved so much. This was his summer uniform, and Madeline thought he was pushing the season a little bit. It was “warm” today, at sixty-two degrees, but it was still far from summer, and here was Eddie, dressed like a pimp in Havana circa 1955. And yet, the look worked for him. Fast Eddie. He could list a house at ten a.m., show it twice, and have it sold at ten percent above the asking price by afternoon. People loved the Panama hat, which came not from Panama, as people would likely think, but from someplace in Peru or Ecuador.

Every year, someone on Nantucket went as Fast Eddie for Halloween.

“Can I come in?” he said. “Please?”

Madeline ushered him inside. Her pride at having her own place was pretty much quashed once Eddie dragged his assessing eye around the digs.

“How did you know I was here?” Madeline asked. “I haven’t even told Grace about this yet.”

“How do I know anything?” Eddie said. “I heard it on the street. So, what are you paying?”

“Um…” Madeline thought about lying, but he would find out the truth. He probably already knew the truth; asking was just a pretense. “Two thousand a month.”

“Ha!” One short, derisory laugh.

Madeline waited for the follow-up.

He said, “I could have gotten it for you for fifteen hundred, maybe twelve.”

He’s bluffing, Madeline thought.

“Oh?” she said.

“But you went with Rachel.”

“I did,” Madeline said. “She was sort of pushy when I mentioned it. And I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

“You wouldn’t have bothered me,” Eddie said. “This is a quiet time of year for me. I could have gotten you this place, and I would have done you better on the rent. Frankly, I’m surprised you decided to use Rachel. After what Calgary did to Hope…”

Madeline thought, Calgary didn’t do anything to Hope except for break up with her a week before the Christmas formal. And, supposedly, he gave the sea-glass pendant necklace—which probably cost all of thirty dollars—to another girl, Kylie Eckers. But hadn’t teenagers been doing this kind of thing since the beginning of time? Why should Rachel be punished?

“What are you doing here, Eddie?” Madeline asked.

“Once I heard you got a ‘writing studio,’” Eddie said, “I had to come see it for myself.”

She didn’t like the way he said writing studio. It made this decision sound fanciful and absurd, like she had bought a unicorn.

“I’m working,” Madeline said, nodding at her blank legal pad.

“Are you?”

“Trying.”

“I still haven’t read your last book,” Eddie said. “But everyone else loved it.”

Madeline knew that Eddie had never and would never read any of her work. The last book Eddie had even bothered to crack open was Dune, in the tenth grade.

Eddie gave himself a tour of the apartment, his interest in her writing evaporating like a bad smell. In the kitchen, he opened the cabinets, then the creaky door to the outdated dishwasher. In the bathroom, he turned on the water in the sink. And in the bedroom, he emitted a dissatisfied hmmmpf.

Madeline rolled her eyes. Really, what did Eddie Pancik care about a piddly one-bedroom apartment that rented for two thousand dollars a month? The only rental he handled was the famous fifty-thousand-dollar-a-week house on Low Beach Road, from which he took a whopping weekly commission.

Eddie popped out of the bedroom and readjusted his Panama hat in that way he had, giving Madeline a glimpse of his shaved head. Madeline had known him so long, she remembered his curls.