S— Sorry to cancel our second to last session, but I won’t be able to come today. I will see you tomorrow at ten to say good-bye. Had fun at the beach.—J

He could easily have sent it in a text message, but if he’d texted, she would have seen it faster and responded. The e-mail was a time bomb, waiting for her to open her computer in order to detonate. Sylvia felt her cheeks go up in flame, but then she heard someone at the door and was instantly relieved. He’d been joking! Obviously, Joan wasn’t that much of an asshole—he was just playing with her. Sylvia scrambled to the door. She considered flashing him when she opened the door, but her breasts had never been particularly impressive, and decided against it. She was laughing as she pulled the knob.

A tall woman—taller than Sylvia by several inches, which meant she was close to six feet—was bent in half on the other side of the door, rooting around like an anteater in a gigantic leather purse.

“Can I help you?” Sylvia asked. She put her hands on her hips in hopes that her posture would communicate that she was not the slightest bit interested in doing anything of the sort.

The woman looked up startled. “Oh, Lord. You must be Franny’s daughter, are you? I saw the car in the drive and knew that I must have mixed up the dates. Isn’t that just like me,” she said, as if Sylvia would be able to corroborate. She stood up and gave her long, wavy blond hair a shake. “I’m Gemma,” she said. “It’s my house!”

“Oh,” Sylvia said. “Then I guess you should come in.” She gestured toward the foyer, stepped inside, and screamed for her mother before retreating to her bedroom.

Franny hadn’t seen Gemma in person in a decade and was horrified to find her remarkably unchanged. Gemma got herself a glass of water—Oh, you’ve been using the filter? I just drink straight from the tap like a cat. I think it’s what keeps my immune system in such top shape—and then they went out to sit by the pool. Gemma had just come from her house in London, a limestone in Maida Vale, but before that she’d been in Paris for two weeks, and before that, Berlin.

“It’s so exhausting,” Gemma said. “I really envy that you have this lifestyle. You can pack up the kids and just go somewhere for two weeks and no one will even bother you.” She widened her eyes at the word bother. “You can just get away. I would pay a million dollars for that. Even when I do go on vacation, the gallery is always calling me, or one of my artists, and then I have to get on a plane just to massage someone’s fragile ego, and I want to say, you know, I was just about to have a snorkel in the Maldives.” Gemma ruffled her hair with both hands, laying it over the back of the chaise longue. “It’s a nice house, isn’t it? Quaint.”

Franny could have described the house using a hundred adjectives, and quaint wouldn’t have been on the list. “It’s incredible,” she said, not wanting to contradict Gemma outright.

“Most Brits think Mallorca is for drunken teenagers,” she said. “It’s sort of like reverse psychology, buying a house here, up in the mountains. It really is the best place to get away. It’s like if you and Jim decided to buy a house on the Jersey Shore, everyone would think you’d gone mad, but then there you are at your lovely house, miles away from the puddles of sick and the beaches covered with pale skin and babies in dirty nappies. None of my British friends would ever come here.”

Franny stared out at the mountains. If the house had belonged to her, she would have invited everyone she knew, and they all would have oohed and aahed. She could have her whole terrible book club come and read George Sand and laugh about how wrong she’d been about the island, how depressive. Literally any person in the world would love the view, the food, the people. Franny thought she could write a new brochure for the tourist board if someone so much as slipped a pen into her hand.

“Well, we’ve all had a wonderful time. Eating our way through, really.”

“Oh, I never eat anything. Just the ice cream. I come for a week, eat only ice cream, then go home feeling like I’ve been on a cleanse.” Gemma closed her eyes. The sun was beating straight down on them, and Franny felt the warm part of her hair. “So,” Gemma asked, eyes still shut, “where’s my Charlie?”

He hadn’t told her. Of course he hadn’t told her! If Charles hadn’t said a word to Franny, then he wouldn’t have dared say anything to Gemma. Not since she was in the eleventh grade had Franny felt such delight in the knowing and dispensing of news about her friends’ lives.

“Oh, you don’t know?” Franny feigned surprise. “That’s so odd that he wouldn’t tell you—I know how close you two are.”

Gemma’s eyes flew open. She blinked several times in a row, giving the impression of a rodent emerging from months spent in a dark hole underground. The skin around her eyes had begun to crease, and maybe even sag. Franny didn’t often revel in other people’s flaws, but in this case, she would make an exception. Gemma was waiting for her to speak, with her own lips parted, as if that was where the information would enter her body. She looked like a beautiful, stupid dog. Franny wanted to kiss her on the mouth and then shove her into the pool.

“They went home to get their baby,” Franny said. “A boy. They’re adopting a baby boy.”

“They left? To buy a baby?”

“They’re not buying a baby, they’re adopting a baby.”

Gemma let out a bark. “On purpose? I thought babies only happened to people by accident. I’ve had three husbands and have narrowly avoided them half a dozen times! What on earth is he thinking? Really. Oh, Charlie. Now his paintings will all be dewy little portraits of a half-naked Lawrence with a baby asleep on his chest.” She paused. “Now I’m doubly sorry to have missed him. The last hurrah!”

Franny tried to smile, but couldn’t. “I suppose.”

“Are you and Jim in the master, upstairs?” Gemma asked. She slipped her sunglasses out of her purse and put them on. “You wouldn’t mind moving to whichever room Charlie and Lawrence were staying in, would you? You know how it is to sleep in your own bed. All the other mattresses are too soft for my back, like sleeping on giant pillows. You’ll be fine for one night, I’m sure, won’t you? If it’s not too much trouble.” She stood up and dusted off her spotless blue jeans. “I’ll call Tiffany’s and send over a spoon.”

“How nice,” Franny said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll start packing upstairs so that you can have your bedroom back.”

The two women walked toward the door side by side, each one trying to reach the handle first, as if to stake claim to the entire property. Franny would have won if her legs had been a few inches longer, but Gemma grabbed it first, her long, thin fingers gripping it like it was a loose diamond floating in the swimming pool. She held the door open for Franny, who walked in with her head held high. She wouldn’t tell Charles what a bitch his friend was—that would turn her moral high ground to mush. Instead, she would just be secure in her knowledge that she was the better friend, and that his baby, whoever he was and whoever he would grow to be, would call her his aunty, whereas Gemma would never be more than a terrifying shrew on the other side of the globe.

Bobby wanted to swim until he could no longer feel his arms or legs. His personal record in a pool was a mile, mostly because that was six laps at Total Body Power, and doing less than six laps seemed pathetic, but he didn’t much like swimming. No one in Florida did. Swimming was for the tourists, splashing around in a way that would never equal the calories in a single Cuban sandwich. Right now, being in the pool was the only way to make sure that no one would speak to him, and so that’s where Bobby wanted to be, exhausting his limbs and his lungs and avoiding his entire family.