Chapter 2

Maggie poured herself another cup of coffee, wrapped her long red hair in a bun, and wondered how much longer she should let the guy in her bed sleep. It was nearly eleven. Surely it was time for Tim to go. She had errands to run and maybe even a stop at the cheap hair place near the grocery store for a cut before that thing she was supposed to go to this weekend. What was it? A summer kickoff cocktail party? Something like that. She might even paint, and Tim’s being around was not conducive to painting. Today felt like a good day and she wanted to make the most of it.

Jesus, Maggie, a line cook? she thought to herself . She knew Tim was yet another poor choice, but on the hierarchy of all the poor choices she’d made since she was about sixteen, Tim was pretty low level. It was the eight-year difference in their ages that was the biggest strike against him.

He was a cook at the only decent restaurant in godforsaken Mill River, a tiny town in the western part of Connecticut where she was spending a year as an artist-in-residence, with free housing, studio space, and a few public appearances to earn her keep. The age difference would have been nothing if she were the twenty-six-year-old and he were the thirty-four-year-old because she always had fancied herself sophisticated, an old soul.

But she had put a lot of distance between herself and naive Tim in the last decade: a starter marriage at twenty-three (as her sister Liza had said,

“Oh my God, sleep with the bartender, don’t marry him”); several failed attempts at finishing college, one ending in a hospitalization after she’d swallowed too many pills; a short stint in LA as an actress but mainly as the live-in girlfriend of a rising and controlling director; many wild nights, several Coachellas, and one Burning Man, a period of time her sisters

referred to as “Maggie Sweeney: The Lost Years”; a recent pilgrimage to India and two hundred hours of yoga teacher training that she negotiated in her breakup with Darren the director; and several bouts of depression that knocked her off her feet for weeks. Tim’s two years as a ski bum at Stowe didn’t really add up against all of Maggie’s life experience.

He was harmless, but he had to go. Like now.

“Hey, Tim!” Maggie called out, much more like a camp counselor than the exotic older woman she played last night. “Get up! You gotta go. Now.”

Her phone rang. It was Liza.

Damn, Liza was going to bug her about the two paintings she was waiting for—both commissions, both nice paydays, as Liza reminded her in a text last week. Maggie never bothered to reply because, well, she didn’t feel like it. Both paintings needed work and Maggie’s motivation was minimal. How many more of these pleasant, easy pieces could she turn out before her creative spirit turned to stone? Maggie used to have promise, now she had paydays. Occasionally, that demoralized her.

But she couldn’t tell Liza that. Not the woman who managed a career, two high-achieving children, a husband who was never home, and their difficult father with such efficiency that she even had time for tennis lessons. Liza’s gallery supported Maggie’s entire life, such as it was, and without that representation, Maggie’s work would never see the light of day.

They both knew that to be true, although neither one ever mentioned it. This whole residency happened because Liza had forced her to apply and guaranteed by letter that Maggie Sweeney would have a high-profile show at Sweeney Jones at the end of the year. (“You have to get out of LA. Come home. We’ll find a soft landing, but get away from Darren. He’s not good for you,” Liza had said on the phone about eighteen months ago, when Maggie had called her in the middle of the night, seeking guidance, after another huge fight with Darren about one of his on-set affairs with another Next Big Thing. As Maggie had told Liza, “They keep getting younger. I can’t take it.”)

Liza was right about leaving Darren, leaving LA, and getting back to familiar ground, to a place where people wore black to funerals like they were supposed to. For a few months, Maggie had been on a painting jag.

Her work was joyful, filled with the colors of India and highly accessible.

Or, in Liza’s words, “Flying off the walls at the gallery.” But the last few weeks, a familiar darkness had lingered, setting Maggie’s output back a bit.

As supportive as Liza was, Maggie knew she would never really understand how Maggie could spend an entire day going through the mail, puttering around the garden, and then lying in bed scrolling through Instagram accounts of artists she admired and lifestyle influencers she loathed, unable to rally to go to the store for food, never mind her studio for a productive afternoon. Liza would never let her day slip away without accomplishing a single thing.

Maggie didn’t even bother trying to convey her situation to her younger sister, Tricia, who had emerged from the womb ready to conquer the world, setting and achieving goals with astonishing success: a scholarship to prep school, early admittance to Yale and then Yale Law, completing marathons.

Tricia tried to be helpful, swooping in whenever contracts needed to be written or logistics organized, but empathy wasn’t really her strong suit.

Maggie was the one Sweeney sister who excelled at emotional intelligence and she alone connected their father with the sisters and the rest of the world. She was the glue that held the whole family together.

Maggie’s phone pinged with Liza’s voicemail. Maggie ignored it. She’d call her tomorrow, maybe.

“Tim, are you up? I need to leave, so you need to leave.” Chances were, Maggie wasn’t leaving, but Tim definitely needed to leave. The phone rang again. Again, it was Liza. Reluctantly, Maggie answered. “Hey. Sorry to miss your first call. Running in from the studio. What’s up?”

When Tim did emerge from the bedroom, Maggie was on the front porch, working as hard as she could not to lose it and holding the cup of coffee she’d made for Tim. “I hope you take milk,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m not okay. My father . . .” Maggie knew that if she started crying, she wouldn’t stop for a while. “My sister called. My father died.”

“Oh, dude. I’m so sorry.” Tim, in jeans and a T-shirt that smelled like French fries, slipped into his Vans before hugging Maggie. He pulled away quickly. This wasn’t what he’d bargained for last night at the bar when they flirted over darts. Still, he asked, “Do you need anything?”

“Can you watch my cat? I have to go home for a few days. The key’s under the mat on the back porch.”

“Sure. Text me deets.” Tim climbed into his truck and gave Maggie a wave. Today, it suited them both that Tim was young and clueless.

As he pulled away, Mary Magdalene Sweeney put her head in her hands and sobbed.

Chapter 3

Tricia had eight minutes between meetings, so she took to the stairwell.

Up, down, up, down between the twenty-third and twenty-fifth floors of her midtown office building, home to the law firm of Kingsley, Maxwell & Traub. She did most of her best thinking between her office on twenty-three and the conference rooms on twenty-five. She could turn off the soundtrack of the modern workplace, the beeping and pinging of phones, computers, devices everywhere, and concentrate on the regulated reverb of her footsteps on the metal. Her daily thirty minutes of ascending and descending, stolen in eight-minute increments, was as close as Tricia would ever get to the meditation classes that had sprung up all over Manhattan.

Somedays, it was the only exercise she got. This depressed her, considering at one time she was running seventy miles a week with her college cross-country team. Now she was lucky to do the three-mile loop around the reservoir in Central Park after she got home from work at night, so to the stairwell she went when she had a few extra minutes, tracking her steps like billable hours. Tricia liked to keep track of everything in her life.

When the phone rang, she cursed. It was Liza and she knew she should take it, but the reception was sketchy in the stairwell. She owed her a call.

Normally, she was a conscientious communicator, but this class action suit had taken over her life and she’d slipped into some bad habits, like blowing off friends and family, assuming that they’d all understand the life of a young lawyer. Guilt got her and she answered the call, knowing it would be impossible to carry on a conversation, and spoke before Liza could get a word in. “Hey, let me get to a place where we can talk. Hold on.” Tricia sprinted up the steps two by two and slipped into the hallway on twenty-

four, home to the admin staff and law library. The hallway was quiet.