Grace shut and locked the heavy door and dimmed the lights on the huge pewter chandelier that hung from the ceiling. If Madeline had a study with a door that locked, she thought, then she wouldn’t have needed to spend twelve thousand dollars on the apartment.

But Madeline was too good a friend to begrudge Grace her study. It wasn’t merely an excuse for interior decorating: Grace had gardening issues to take care of, and she ran the business of raising Araucana chickens and selling organic eggs.

Madeline sat in the green leather armchair and draped a thick, cream-colored chenille blanket over her lap. Grace collapsed across the crushed-velvet sofa. She propped her chin up on a golden brocade pillow and stared into her goblet of Screaming Eagle, which she held with both hands.

“Grace,” Madeline said, “what is it?”

“Do you remember when I told you that I had a crush on Benton Coe?” she said.

“Yes,” Madeline said. “Obviously.” It had been at the end of last summer. She and Grace had been plunked at the waterline at Steps Beach, drinking homemade watermelon margaritas that Grace was serving from a thermos. Tequila had long been truth serum for Grace, and so somewhere in the middle of the warm, drowsy afternoon, she’d reached over to touch Madeline’s arm—waking Madeline from a nap—and she’d said, “I have a crush on Benton Coe.”

Madeline had still been half or three-quarters asleep, but she said, “No, Grace, you don’t.”

“Yes,” Grace had said. “Yes, I do. You must know what I mean. You must have had a silly, harmless crush on someone over the course of your marriage.”

Madeline shook her head. “No.”

“Really?” Grace said. “You guys have always been Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore?”

“Always,” Madeline said.

The conversation had ended there, but Madeline hadn’t forgotten it.

Now, Grace said, “Something has started between us.”

Madeline had had so much wine, she couldn’t even form the appropriate expression on her face. And what would the appropriate expression be? Shock? Horror? Disapproval? Madeline had never been one to judge; the spectrum of human experience was simply too vast to believe in absolute right or absolute wrong.

“What kind of something?” Madeline asked.

“He brought me pistachio macarons from the bakery,” Grace said. “And then he kissed me.”

“Kissed you?” Madeline said. “Was it just one time?”

“It was just once at first,” Grace said. “But then it happened again in the garden shed. And it happened a third time while we were putting up the hammock.” She swirled the wine in her goblet with such abandon that Madeline feared she would spill it all over the golden pillow. Grace was pretty drunk. Possibly she was blowing the “kissing” out of proportion.

“Now,” she said, “it happens every day.”

“Every day?” Madeline said. “What kind of kissing is it?”

“The best kind,” Grace said. “The kind of kissing that makes me dizzy. You know what that feels like, right?”

“Right,” Madeline said. Her and Trevor, the summer of 1993.

“Or maybe it’s desire particular to a forty-year-old woman who has been ignored for so long.”

“Does Eddie ignore you in bed?” Madeline asked.

Grace shrugged—meaning what, Madeline wasn’t sure. “It’s been so long since I was his primary focus,” she said. “How long, do you think?”

“A long time,” Madeline admitted. For pretty much as long as Madeline had known Eddie—close to twenty years—he had taken Grace for granted. Grace had complained about it in the past, but she also said she understood that Eddie was busy. Their lifestyle took an enormous amount of money to sustain, and Grace brought in three hundred dollars a week selling eggs, which was just enough to fill her Range Rover with gas and pay the girls’ cell-phone bills. The leather jacket Allegra had been wearing tonight had probably cost more than what Madeline spent on groceries in a month. Eddie had a lot of pressure on his five-foot-eight frame, hence his constant case of heartburn.

“I’m lonely,” Grace said. “I’ve been lonely for years.”

“Are you going to sleep with him?” Madeline asked. She was whispering now. She could not believe Grace was involved with Benton Coe.

“I don’t know,” Grace said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“I would try getting back to just being friends,” Madeline said.

“That’s easier said than done,” Grace said. “I feel like I’m in a race car and there’s no reverse.”

“How do you see this ending?” Madeline asked. “I’ll point out, Grace, because I’m your best friend and it’s my job, that no good can come of this.”

“I know,” Grace said. “Do you remember the séance?”

Rhetorical question.

The séance had been held in Grace and Eddie’s basement on Mischief Night the previous October. Eddie’s sister, Barbie Pancik, was known for having certain prescient powers. When she was in her twenties, she had purchased a crystal ball at a flea market in Brimfield, and it had made its way around the party circuit on Nantucket, back when Barbie used to do the party circuit. Somehow Grace and Eddie had convinced Barbie to bring it over on Mischief Night—the twins and Brick safely ensconced at a party at Hannah Dromanian’s house. Barbie had not only said okay; she had dressed up as a full-on gypsy, in a long black dress, with her frosted hair wrapped up in an Hermès scarf.