Trevor didn’t exactly push Madeline away, but he didn’t embrace her either. He stiffened, and then he stood up.

“I need you to help me!” Madeline said. “I need you to support me. You’re my husband.”

“And you’re my wife,” Trevor said. His tone was marginally kinder, and Madeline felt a wash of relief. But then he said, “I think maybe you need space. Or I do.”

“Space?” Madeline said. “What do you mean by space?”

“I think you should stay here for a few days,” Trevor said. “While I try and process this.”

“I don’t want to stay here!” Madeline said. “What a horrible suggestion.”

“If you let me read what you’ve written, I’ll change my mind,” Trevor said. “But I know you pretty damn well, Madeline King, and my gut tells me you’re hiding something.”

“I’m not hiding anything!” Madeline said. But her tone of voice wasn’t convincing even to herself, and it would never fool Trevor. “I’m just a writer trying to protect my work.”

“Madeline,” he said.

She nearly blurted it out: Grace is having an affair with Benton Coe, and I’m secretly using it as fodder for my new book. But it wasn’t my fault! I got backed into a corner. Or I painted myself into one.

“I don’t want you to read it,” she said. “Later you can, but not right now.”

“Fair enough,” he said. He stood up and moved for the door.

“You’re serious,” she said. “You’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

“How long is ‘a few days’?” she asked. She worried that Trevor was saying a few days but actually meant forever.

“I don’t know, Madeline,” Trevor said. “A few days. If you need a firm number, I’d say a week.”

“A week?”

“I need to simmer down,” Trevor said.

That night, Madeline slept on the uncomfortable double bed in the apartment. She tried to think of it as fun, an adventure, but the mattress was stiff and unforgiving, and the sheets that she’d found in the bathroom closet smelled funny. There was one window in the bedroom that faced an alley which people coming out of the Boarding House and Ventuno cut through to get home. Madeline could hear their footsteps and their voices, buoyant and slurred with alcohol. She should have had a glass of wine before bed herself, but she didn’t want anyone to see her buying wine at Murray’s and then heading back to her apartment with it.

She didn’t have the desire or the money to take herself out to dinner—and how would that look, anyway? Madeline King, out to dinner alone, possibly waiting for her lover to show up.

She made herself a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich for dinner.

She thought she might sleep better on the sofa, so she moved to the living room with her blanket and her pillow, but the front windows had no shades, no treatments at all, and light pollution from Centre Street poured in. Madeline sat up and stared at the box of bird eggs and wondered about the previous owner of this apartment, now living on a cliff somewhere in St. John.

How could she fix this? Should she have Eddie call Trevor and assuage his worries? That sounded like a good idea—maybe? Or it could backfire and make things way worse.

What if Trevor divorced her? The mere thought was preposterous. Or it had been until today. She and Trevor had spent the majority of their marriage on a path paved with rainbows. They were the Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore of Nantucket!

But maybe that was why this idiotic rumor had spread—because people were jealous and they wanted the “happy couple” to be revealed as anything but.

When Madeline finally did fall asleep, she had a nightmare about Geoffrey. In real life, Geoffrey had had a shaved head and an elaborate tattoo of Prometheus on his back. But in Madeline’s dream, Geoffrey was Rachel McMann’s husband, Dr. Andy, only Dr. Andy had a mouthful of black teeth. When he secured the plastic zip ties to Madeline’s wrists and ankles, he showed her his teeth, and she screamed, and the scream woke her up.

Madeline lay facedown on the sofa, her face buried in the cushion, and she thought, What have I done?

My gut tells me you’re hiding something. Trevor would never have thought that if he hadn’t heard the blasted rumor from Pamela.

Madeline stood up and paced the apartment, stopping at the dark window to shout at the street.

Mind!

Your!

Own!

Business!

Stop!

Gossiping!

She pictured women lunching at the Galley, talking about Madeline; she envisioned Janice, the hygienist at Dr. Andy’s office, spreading the rumor to all of her patients. Did you hear? She pictured Pamela at Island Air telling Barry, the bartender at the airport restaurant, who in turn would tell his wife, Candace, who was the receptionist at the RJ Miller Salon. Once it got into places like the dentists’ offices and the salons, there would be no stopping it. Blond Sharon would tell her friends at the yacht club as they sailed and played tennis and ate Cobb salad. Then, of course, the brokers would get hold of it. It would be whispered about during an open house for an eleven-million-dollar listing in Monomoy. From there, it would travel out to Sconset—to the post office and the Summer House pool. People at the Wauwinet gatehouse would gossip about it as they let the air out of their tires before heading up to Great Point. Madeline knew she wasn’t really the target; Eddie was the target. A lot of people hated Eddie. The librarians at the Atheneum would be talking about it, and the men who loaded cars onto the steamship, and the scuppers who had their boats serviced at Madaket Marine, and the cast of Pygmalion, put on by Theatre Workshop of Nantucket.