Madeline set down her pen and took a deep, cleansing breath. The book was done. Not only did Madeline know that Angie would love it—she knew that it was good.

EDDIE

When he walked into the office Monday morning, Barbie was already at her desk, with two coffees from the Handlebar Café and the newspaper open in front of her.

“Sit,” she said.

He didn’t like her telling him what to do, but something about her tone made him obey.

Maybe she was going to confess to her relationship with Glenn Daley.

She handed him his coffee, loaded with milk.

She nodded at the newspaper. “You see this?”

It was the article about the garden, open to the picture of Grace feeding Benton the strawberry.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, shrugging. “Grace said the photographs were all staged.”

“That’s what Grace says,” Barbie said. “But everyone else on this island says that you’re paying this guy to screw your wife.”

“Speaking of screwing,” Eddie said, “how is Glenn?”

“Don’t change the subject,” Barbie said. “You need to get your house in order. I’m serious, Ed. You need to deal with this.”

Eddie eyed his sister and saw the same girl with the bad perm and too much eyeliner fighting with Teresa Maniscalco outside the high school library because Teresa told everyone in school that the girls’ locker room reeked like Barbie’s vagina. Eddie could remember hearing the phrase reeked like Barbie’s vagina and feeling mortified. He wanted to defend his sister’s honor, but he’d never been good at facing up to his problems—he was too scrawny. He’d only ever been good at running away from them.

Barbie, afraid of no one, fought it out with Teresa Maniscalco, busted Teresa’s lip open with one punch, and promptly took a three-day suspension. Eddie had walked past the main office, and he saw Barbie through the Plexiglas window, slumped in a chair, her arms crossed over her chest, glowering with pure steel resolve. He thought, My sister is the toughest person in the world. Way tougher than Eddie himself.

After that, nobody messed with Barbie. She worked her ass off and was accepted to Boston University, where she favored peasant blouses and learned to read tarot. After she graduated, she followed Eddie to Nantucket. Her first job was working as a personal assistant to a very wealthy woman with a summer estate on Abrams Point—and Barbie absorbed the lifestyle like a sponge. Which wine, which fork, which flowers. She learned about crystal and art dealers and the neighborhoods of Manhattan and Paris. Eddie could not believe her transformation. Maybe he didn’t know shit from Shinola, but Barbie presented herself to the world as an elegant and refined woman. And then, of course, she’d always had the sixth sense. That was the thing.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine.”

He reasoned with himself the whole way home. Grace was not having an affair with Benton Coe. It might have been a schoolgirl crush—Grace enjoyed having someone to talk to about her hens and her flowers—but Grace didn’t have it in her to have an affair, Eddie didn’t think. She was too programmed to be good—instilled in her from childhood by her grandmother, her parents, her older brothers. Rebellion for her, Eddie knew, had been drinking tequila and smoking cigarettes—on the same night, on a Tuesday!—during her sophomore year at Holyoke. An affair in adulthood would be unthinkable.

Right?

Eddie’s heartburn ratcheted up from the mellow 3 it had been that morning to a 7 and then an 8. And then, when he pulled into the driveway and saw Benton’s big black pickup truck, it became a 9.

Eddie busted into the house. “Grace!” he called. He raced up the stairs two at a time—Fast Eddie—and barged into the master bedroom. Empty. Then he swung open the door of Grace’s study without knocking—something he was forbidden to do, because that study was her sanctuary, she said—but the study, too, was empty.

Eddie calmed down a bit. He had let Barbie poison his thoughts. Grace and Benton would be out in the garden, weeding and mulching and making plans to build an outdoor shower with doors fashioned out of shutters salvaged from a French farmhouse. And climbing roses. Grace had forever wanted roses in her outdoor shower.

See? He did listen!

Eddie went through the kitchen and out onto the deck.

“Grace!” he called.

The backyard was uninhabited except by butterflies, bees, birds on the feeders. The garden was shimmering as if in some feverish utopian dream. Eddie walked out to the far edge of the property and plunked down in an Adirondack chair. The views across Polpis Harbor at this time of year were dazzling. He was a lucky man. Just like Barbie, he had come a long way since the days of Purchase Street in New Bedford.

He stood up. Where was Grace?

He wandered back over the rolling green lawn, past the hammock and the rose bed, past the swimming pool, past the perennials. He stopped at the five-foot angel statue and said, “Where’s Grace?”

The statue didn’t answer. It just stood there with the same inane, placid half-smile it always offered. Eddie had paid five figures for the statue. For that much money, it should respond when spoken to. He laughed at himself. Barbie was such a pill. She put thoughts into his head, and now he was losing his mind, talking to stone figures.

Then, Eddie saw the shed.

The garden shed.

He heard Barbie’s voice: You need to get your house in order.

He tried the knob. Locked. Why would the door to the garden shed be locked? He pressed his ear to the door. He could hear noises—breathing, he thought, and movement.