“It’s weird to go on vacation with your whole family,” Sylvia said, in Spanish. “Really weird.”

“Tell me about them,” Joan said. He swiveled in his chair so that he was looking out the window, too. “That’s your brother?”

“That’s what they say,” Sylvia said.

There were footsteps in the hall, and both Joan and Sylvia turned to look. Lawrence had changed into his bathing suit and was holding a sweating glass of water. He walked up to the door to the garden and watched as Carmen and Bobby took turns doing handstands in the shallow end.

“Maybe I’ll just take a nap,” Lawrence said, and turned back around.

“And who’s that?” Joan asked.

“My mother’s best friend’s husband. They’re gay. I don’t think he wanted to come.” Sylvia paused. She wanted Joan to laugh, but only because of Lawrence’s reluctance. This was important.

“And now he’s stuck with you for how long?” Joan asked, the right question.

“Two weeks,” Sylvia said, smiling so hard that she had to lean forward and pretend to take a sip out of her empty water glass. If she didn’t interact with anyone else for the entire two weeks, Sylvia thought, that was okay. Joan looked like an excellent candidate for sex. In fact, if sex had made a poster advertising its virtues, they might have put his face on it. Sylvia let her lips linger around the rim of the glass. Wasn’t that what one was supposed to do, draw attention to one’s mouth? She gave the glass one little lick, decided that she felt like a camel at a zoo, and put it down, hoping he hadn’t noticed at all.

It was too hot to walk during the middle of the day, and so Jim waited the sun out. He switched into his running clothes (Lycra, windbreaker) and sneakers and headed out with just a quick wave to Sylvia, who was curled into one of the living room sofas with a book three inches from her face. She was on Villette, working her way through the Brontës. She’d read all of Jane Austen that year—Austen was good, but when you told people you liked Pride and Prejudice, they expected you to be all sunshine and wedding veils, and Sylvia preferred the rainy moors. The Brontës weren’t afraid to let someone die of consumption, which Sylvia respected.

“Be back soon,” he said.

Sylvia grunted a response.

“Tell your mom I went for a walk.”

“Where else would you have gone?” Sylvia asked, still without looking up from her book.

Jim headed up the hill. Mallorca was dustier than he’d anticipated, less rolling and green than Tuscany or Provence, more rocky and sun-bleached, like Greece. There was supposedly a plateau of some kind a few hundred feet up the road, from which one could see the ocean, and Jim liked the idea of a vista.

Weekends were fairly easy—he wouldn’t have been at the office, anyway, and so running his normal errands felt good, natural. He would watch a movie with Sylvia if she’d let him, he would debate about which restaurant to order dinner from, he would run around the park a couple of times. The weekdays were the challenge—Monday mornings, in particular. Being in Mallorca would make that easier. He still woke up at seven a.m., popping out of bed and into the shower. Jim was not a foot-dragger or a layabout, not like all these young people who were living with their parents until they were thirty and spending their time playing video games. Jim liked to work. The weekend hadn’t been bad, but today was worse, though not as bad as when they were at home, when his chest seized just at the moment the alarm was to go off, his body panicked at its lack of forward momentum.

For the past forty years, every day at work had been spent moving ahead, trying to be the smartest he could, trying to be the best he could, trying to open as many doors as possible, and now, just like that, the doors had closed, and he had nothing to do but sit at home and wait for the phone to ring. Which it wouldn’t. The board had made that clear: it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise. Jim was finished, professionally. As long as he wanted them to keep their mouths shut, he would stay home and take up bird-watching. This was presented as a courtesy. The gaping maw on the other side of the silence was that every magazine in New York and every website with a gossip column would be delighted to list the salacious details at length. Jim would have balked at the threat if he hadn’t recognized it as the truth. Gallant’s new editor would be a clear-eyed man of thirty- five—even if no tragedy had taken place, Jim’s tenure had an expiration date. No one wanted advice from their father.

The road was steep, and even though the most intense heat of the day had passed, there was no cover over Jim’s head, and the sun felt strong on the back of his neck. If this house had come along three months later, Franny wouldn’t have taken it. If Sylvia hadn’t graduated, if the whole vacation hadn’t been pitched as a gift to her, Franny would have canceled it. Jim didn’t know if he should feel grateful that the wheels had already been in motion, or stuck, as though he’d been caught in a bear trap. At home, there were always other quiet rooms, places to hide. Their house had been the right size, once, when there were two kids and a babysitter and visiting grandparents, but now it was far too big. The three of them not only had their own rooms, but had multiples: Jim had his office, and a den that Franny avoided, Sylvia had her room and Bobby’s, which she had turned into a holding pen for local disaffected youth, and Franny had everything else: the kitchen, the garden, the bedroom, her office. They never had to see one another if they didn’t want to, could spend days walking in their own loops, like the figurines above the entrance to the Central Park Zoo.

Gallant’s board had been unanimous in their decision. That’s what surprised Jim the most—he expected censure, yes, but not outright vitriol. The girl—he hated to remember the excitement he felt just hearing her name, Madison, a name he would have ridiculed otherwise—had been twenty-three, the age that Franny was when they got married, so many thousands of years ago. Twenty-three meant that she was an adult, out of college and ready to enter the workforce. An editorial assistant. Franny had pointed out that Madison was only five years older than Sylvia, but twenty-three was an adult, a full-grown woman. Capable of making her own decisions, even if they were bad ones. When the board mentioned Madison, they used the word girl, and, once, child, which Jim’s lawyer had objected to, rightly. It wasn’t a courtroom, though, and such language held no weight. They were all sitting around the table in the conference room, as they had so many times before, discussing tedious matters. All ten board members had shown up for the meeting, which was unusual, and Jim knew the moment they walked in that things weren’t going to go his way. Not one of the three women on the board looked Jim in the eye.

Jim rounded a corner. There was a long stone wall a few yards ahead, on the ocean side of the road. The mountains seemed to have shifted color with his elevation, and now were tinged with blue. He brushed off the stones and sat down, swinging his legs over so that they dangled a few inches off the ground on the other side. Before him, sheep grazed and strolled, their heads low and content. They wore bells around their neck, which clanged pleasantly as the sheep snuffled in the grass. He didn’t know how much Franny had told Charles about the situation at the magazine. The children didn’t know much—Bobby didn’t know anything—and he wanted to keep it that way. According to Jim’s resignation, he was leaving his position as editor in order to pursue other passions, to spend more time with his family, and to travel more. Though of course that’s exactly what Jim was doing, the implied motives were completely false. If Jim could have, he would have returned from Mallorca and gone straight back to work, gone straight back to work every single day until he dropped dead at his desk, horrifying the young staff, now all trying to be so adult with their natty tie-clips and shiny shoes.