“Thank you,” Madeline whispered.

“I’ll handle Angie,” Redd said. “After all, you don’t just pay me to sit around my office and look handsome.” He let out a great belly laugh. “Now, my darling, get to work.”

Madeline hung up the phone and thought, Yes! She needed to stop worrying about Eddie and the fifty thousand dollars, and she needed to stop vilifying Allegra—she was a narcissistic sixteen-year-old girl—so what? Brick would get over her and move on, and his heart would be stronger in the place where it had been broken. But, most of all, Madeline had to stop missing Grace.

That was the toughest thing. She couldn’t make herself stop missing Grace.

Maybe she could write a novel called Missing Grace, about a novelist who writes about her best friend’s affair and then regrets it. It would be sort of like the woman on the cereal box eating from a box of cereal that has her own picture on it, and so forth infinitely.

Her brain hurt thinking about this.

She picked up her pen and a fresh legal pad.

Get to work!

A little while later, a phone call came to Madeline’s cell phone from Rachel McMann. Madeline had decided to write not a sequel but a prequel to Islandia. She would tell the story of Nantucket before it became submerged under water. She would write a novel about the beginning of the end, her protagonists, Jack and Diane, still in their mothers’ wombs. She would cast a foreboding shadow over everything; it would be psychologically terrifying because readers would know the water was coming.

Brilliant? Or potentially brilliant? Better than a sequel, anyway, Madeline thought.

Rachel McMann. Now what? Madeline thought. She had already had two long phone calls with Rachel about the Allegra–Ian Coburn–Brick situation; that topic was exhausted. And at the end of the second conversation, Madeline had let Rachel know that she was back to living at home. She and Trevor had worked things out. Moving on.

Madeline let Rachel’s call go to voice mail. It was two o’clock—Madeline had only four hours left, and she was still working on an outline.

Rachel called again, and Madeline thought, Really? She picked up.

“Hello?” she said, allowing a tinge of impatience to creep into her voice.

“I need you to sit down,” Rachel said.

“I am sitting down,” Madeline said. “I’m working, Rachel.”

“You aren’t going to believe this,” Rachel said.

Madeline sighed. Gossip, gossip, gossip. If she were smart, she would hang up now. But she wasn’t strong enough.

“What?” she said.

“Grace Pancik was having an affair with Benton Coe,” Rachel said. “Just as we suspected.”

“I don’t think we suspected that,” Madeline said uneasily. “And I’m not sure what would make you think that was true.”

“Oh, come on!” Rachel said. “When we all saw the article, we knew.”

“The article doesn’t prove anything,” Madeline said.

“Okay, let’s say, strictly speaking, the article doesn’t prove anything. But…!”

“But what?” Madeline asked. She wanted to slam the phone down and never talk to Rachel again, but she had to know what Rachel was going to say. Who had found out about Grace and Benton for sure?

“Bernie Wu was the driver for the writer and the photographer of the article, and he said they arrived early, and it was pretty clear they’d interrupted something. Grace and Benton were locked in the garden shed, and they emerged looking very disheveled indeed.”

Oh no, Madeline thought.

“You’re gossiping, Rachel,” Madeline said. “It’s hearsay, and you should be ashamed of yourself for repeating it. It is none of your business.”

“It sounds like you’re taking the moral high ground,” Rachel said. “Which is ironic, since we all know you’re the one writing a book about it.”

“I’m not writing a book about it,” Madeline said. “I threw that book away.”

Rachel gasped. “No!” she said. “Oh, Madeline.” She sounded genuinely upset, like Madeline had told her she’d put her dog to sleep. “It was so good. I was dying to read it. In fact, I already posted about it in my Goodreads profile.”

“I threw it away, deleted the file,” Madeline said. “It was garbage.”

There was a heavy silence on the other line, which was then replaced by Rachel’s usual sparkly energy. “Well, the thing about Grace and Benton isn’t the most scandalous thing I have to tell you, anyway. Because, did you hear what happened to Eddie Pancik?”

“No,” Madeline said, exasperated. “I did not hear what happened to Eddie Pancik, and I don’t want to hear.” Unless he won the lottery, Madeline thought. Or found a pot of gold sitting on the bottom of Miacomet Pond.

“Eddie Pancik got arrested by the FBI last night,” Rachel said. “He’s been running a prostitution ring on Low Beach Road.”

Madeline closed her eyes. She had several thoughts at once.

Poor Grace.

Eddie was far more desperate than I thought.

Poor Grace.

Madeline didn’t trust any information coming from Rachel McMann. “That’s absurd,” she said.

“It’s true,” Rachel said. “I can’t tell you how I know, but I know. Eddie Pancik has spent his summer pimping out a crew of five Russian housecleaners to his clients. His secretary overheard a conversation or two, I guess, between Eddie and his sister, and she put two and two together. She contacted the FBI.”