It was, alas, empty.

That was the thought that met Connie when she opened the front door. Connie’s footsteps echoed in the two-story foyer. The floors were made from white tumbled marble, and there was a curved staircase to the right that swept up the wall like the inside of a nautilus shell. The house had been Wolf’s design.

Wolf was dead. He would never walk into this house again. This reality hit Connie anew in a way that felt unfair. It had been two and a half years; friends and acquaintances had told Connie that life would get incrementally easier, her sorrow would fade, but that day hadn’t come.

Connie struggled for a breath. Beside her, Meredith looked very small and overwhelmed, and Connie thought, We’re a couple of basket cases. Me, once voted “Prettiest and Most Popular.” Meredith, once voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”

Connie said, “Let me show you around.”

She led Meredith through the foyer into the great room, which ran the whole length of the house, and flooded with rosy light at dawn. To the left was the kitchen: maple cabinets fronted with glass, countertops fashioned from blue granite. The kitchen had every bell and whistle because Connie was a gourmet cook. There was an eight-burner Garland stove, a porcelain farmer’s sink, a wine refrigerator, double ovens, a custom-made extra-wide dishwasher, a backsplash of cobalt and white Italian tile that she and Wolf had found on their trek through Cinque Terre. The kitchen flowed into the dining room, which was furnished with a glossy cherrywood table and twelve chairs. Beyond a break for the double doors that led to the back deck was the living area, also decorated in white and blue. At the end of the room was a white brick fireplace with a massive mantel made of driftwood that Wolf’s grandfather had found on their beach after Hurricane Donna in 1960.

“It’s wonderful,” Meredith said. “Who decorated?”

“I did,” Connie said.

“I never decorated a thing in my life,” Meredith said. “We always had Samantha.” She wandered to the far end of the living room, where Wolf’s barometer collection lined the shelves. “That always felt like a privilege, you know, to have Samantha pick things out for us, put things together, create a style for us. But it was phony, like everything else.” She touched the spines of Wolf’s books. “I like this so much better. This room is you and Wolf and Ashlyn.”

“Yes,” Connie said. “It is. It was. It’s hard, you know.” She smiled wistfully. She was happy not to be alone, but it was excruciating to hear Meredith repeating the things that Connie found it impossible to say. “Shall we go down to the water?”


It was particularly hard to be on the beach, because that was where she’d scattered Wolf’s ashes two summers earlier in the presence of Wolf’s brother, Jake, and his wife, Iris, and Toby, who had used the memorial on Nantucket as an opportunity for his last ridiculous bender. As Connie and Meredith left footprints in the wet sand-the tide was low-Connie wondered where the remains of Wolfgang Charles Flute were now. He had been a whole, warm, loving man with impressive height-Wolf was nearly six foot seven-and a baritone voice, a keen intellect, a crackerjack eye. He had been the owner of an architectural firm that built civic office buildings in Washington that were considered innovative, yet traditional enough to hold their own against the monuments. He had been a busy man, an important man, if not particularly powerful by Washington standards or wealthy by Wall Street standards. The best thing about Wolf had been the balanced attention he gave to every aspect of his life. He’d helped Ashlyn make the most dazzling school projects; he had mixed a shockingly cold and delicious martini; he had been a fanatic about the unicycle (which he learned to ride as an undergraduate at Brown) as well as paddleball, tennis, and sailing. He had collected antique sextants and barometers. He had studied astronomy and believed the placement of the stars in the sky could teach man about terrestrial design. Wolf had always been emotionally present in Connie’s life, even when he was working on deadline. On days he had to work late-and there had been two or three a month-he sent flowers, or he invited Connie to come to his office for a candlelight dinner of Indian take-out. When Connie went out with her women friends, he always sent wine to the table and the other women cooed about how lucky Connie was.

But where was he now? He had died of brain cancer, and Connie had followed his wish to be cremated and have his ashes scattered off the beach in Tom Nevers. The ashes had broken down, disintegrated; they had become molecules suspended in seawater. The body that Wolf had inhabited, therefore, was gone; it had been absorbed back into the earth. But Connie thought of him as here somewhere, here in this water swirling around her ankles.

Meredith waded to midshin. The water was still too cold for Connie, but Meredith seemed to be enjoying it. The expression on her face fell somewhere between rapture and devastation. She spoke in a voice full of tears, though as the New York Post promised, her eyes remained dry.

“I never thought I’d put my feet in the ocean again.”

Connie nodded once.

Meredith said, “How do I thank you for this? I have nothing.”

Connie hugged Meredith. She was tiny, like a doll. Once, in high school, they had gotten drunk at a party at Villanova, and Connie had carried Meredith home on her back. “I want nothing,” Connie said.


That was a lovely little Beaches moment down by the water, Connie thought, and it did feel good to have company and it did feel good to have Meredith indebted to her for life, but the magnitude of what Connie had done was now sinking in. Her best friend from childhood was married to the biggest crook the world had ever known. Meredith was persona non grata everywhere. She had millions of disapprovers and thousands of enemies. She was “still under investigation.” The “still” made it seem like being under investigation was a temporary condition that would be cleared up, but what if it wasn’t? What if Meredith was found guilty? What if Meredith was guilty?

What have I done? Connie thought. What have I done?


Meredith settled into her room-a simple guest room with white wainscoting and a small private bath. Both bedroom and bath were done in pinks, decorated by Connie herself with help from Wolf and the woman at Marine Home Center. The bedroom had French doors that opened onto a tight, Romeo-and-Juliet-type balcony. Meredith said she loved the room.

“My room is down the hall,” Connie said. The “room” she was speaking of was the master suite, which comprised the western half of the second floor. There was the bedroom with its California king bed that faced the ocean; there was a bathroom with a deep Jacuzzi tub, glassed-in rainfall shower, dual sinks, water closet, heated tiles in the floor, a wall of mirrors, and a scale that generously dropped a pound or two. There were two enormous closets. (Last summer, Connie had finally taken Wolf’s summer clothes to the hospital thrift shop.) And there was Wolf’s study, complete with drafting table, framed oceanographic maps, and a telescope that had been positioned to view the most interesting summer constellations. Connie didn’t have the emotional strength to show Meredith the master suite, and the fact of the matter was, she hadn’t spent a single night in her own bed since Wolf died. Every night she had been on Nantucket, she had fallen asleep, with the aid of two or three chardonnays, on the sofa downstairs-or, when she had houseguests, on the bottom bunk of the third-floor bedroom, which she was pointlessly preserving for future grandchildren.

She didn’t want to sleep in the bed without Wolf. The same held true at home. She couldn’t explain it. She had read somewhere that the death of a spouse was number one on a list of things that caused stress-and what had she done that morning but invited more stress into her life?

“I have to go to the grocery store,” Connie said.

Meredith said, “Would it be all right if I came along?”

Connie watched Meredith bouncing on her toes, as she used to on the end of a diving board.

“Okay,” Connie said. “But you have to wear your hat and glasses.” Connie was terrified of getting caught. What would happen if someone discovered that Meredith Delinn was here, living with Connie?

“Hat and glasses,” Meredith said.


Connie drove the six miles to Stop & Shop while Meredith made a list on a pad of paper braced against her thigh. Connie’s fear subsided and a sense of well-being sneaked up on her, which she normally only experienced after a very good massage and three glasses of chardonnay. She opened the sunroof, and fresh air rushed in as she turned up the radio-Queen, singing “We Are the Champions,” the victory song of the Merion Mercy field-hockey team, which she and Meredith had both played on for four years. Connie grinned and Meredith turned her face toward the sun, and the car was a happy place for a moment.

In the store, Connie sent Meredith for whole-wheat tortillas and Greek yogurt while she waited at the deli counter. She sent Meredith for laundry detergent, rubber gloves, and sponges, but then Meredith was gone for so long that Connie panicked. She raced through the store with her cart, dodging the other shoppers and their small children, everyone moving at a snail’s pace, drugged by the effects of the sea air and sun. Where was Meredith? Connie was hesitant to call out her name. It was unlikely that she’d left the store, so what was Connie afraid of? She was afraid that Meredith had been handcuffed by FBI agents. Meredith should rightly be in the aisle with the Windex and the paper towels, but she wasn’t there, nor was she in the next aisle, nor the next. Connie had only had her old friend back for a matter of hours, and now she was missing. And Connie wasn’t even sure that she wanted Meredith to stay-so why was she now panicking that Meredith was gone?