Rich soil for a rich house, Miranda thought, digging in the rose garden behind the Beachside Avenue house. House? It really was a mansion, there just was no other name that fit. It had been built as a show of wealth, not as a shelter. The rose garden had been neglected for years, but the tendrils and vines still crawled vigorously over the trellises. Miranda pulled at the weeds. Henry was taking his nap inside, Leanne was working on the paper she would soon have to present at some epidemiology conference. Miranda, who had no paper to write, no nap to take, was weeding. She did not know how to garden. But she could weed. Anyone could weed. Even a failure, even a bankrupt, even a woman who was silently, odiously betraying her best friend.

Miranda had fallen in love so many times, each of them a dizzying ascent of need and a sickening drop of disappointment. But this was Leanne, Henry's mother, her new friend, this person to whom she confided everything. Except one thing. The most important thing.

How odd, how private, how intimate to keep quiet about your feelings. Miranda cherished her secret. It sickened her, literally, leaving her breathless and queasy, but she somehow didn't mind. She reveled in her misery. Ironic, this Romantic extravaganza all bottled up inside.

It began to rain, hard. Perhaps she would catch pneumonia and die. That would be very Romantic.

Miranda had read plenty of books about women falling in love with women. They were a niche part of her business, a popular subgenre, a little out-of-date now but very big in the nineties. She had sold two of them herself, one to Knopf, a huge advance, quite a coup, she had to admit. The women discovered their real selves, etc. Could no longer live a lie, etc. She had felt some sympathy, yet the whole business had always seemed so unnecessary, extravagant even. An act of excessive imagination, if not sheer will. She had been far too busy falling in love with unsatisfying men to think very much about it, much more than: What would be the point?

You're the point, Miranda thought. Now I know.

She watched Leanne, dry and warm and shuffling papers inside. The rain fell dramatically, and the Long Island Sound waves, waves that had caused so much mischief months ago at this very spot, splashed behind her. She didn't really know how she had gotten from there to here, and she didn't really care. As long as she could stay.

From her vantage point of rain and rose stalks, Miranda saw Roberts enter the room and speak to Leanne. She saw Leanne run her hands through her hair, a gesture of despair. Roberts was showing her a sheaf of legal-looking papers. Leanne threw her head back, staring at the ceiling. She stood and made helpless, questioning gestures, her arms wide and flailing. Her hands became fists, and her mouth opened and closed. Miranda walked through the rain to the window. She gestured weakly at Leanne: Should she come in? Leanne, shouting and waving the papers at Roberts, did not even see her, and Miranda slogged her way to the car and drove to the station to wait for Annie.

Felicity marched through the same downpour. The trees in Central Park, budding but black in the rain, rattled their branches ominously. The doorman held his umbrella for Felicity, and she walked beneath it with as much dignity as she could muster under the circumstances. She was soaked, her mink coat matted and limp, a sad family of vermin drowned and slung across her body. Her hair was drenched, her umbrella blown inside out and abandoned long ago. She had been walking and walking and walking. Her shoes were ruined, of course. In the elevator she could smell the wet fur, musky and animalistic, reeking like a dripping dog.

"Joe!" Her shoes squelched on the marble she'd had installed in the entrance hall. "Joe!"

He came out of the kitchen looking warm and unruffled, a glass of Scotch in his hand. In general, she approved of his meticulous clothing, his careful grooming, his unchanging habits. Now his smooth comfort infuriated her.

"Can't you see I'm soaking wet?"

He took her coat and held it away from him. "Towel?" he said, walking toward the bathroom. He wondered if he would always be supplying towels for hysterical women. At least Felicity had not thrown a glass of good whiskey at him the way Betty had. He had just phoned Miranda. He called every day. She hung up on him every day. The girls did not bother to hide their contempt for him. But he had to find out how Betty was. Meningitis. Betty rarely got even a cold. How had she gotten this terrible infection? Somehow he knew it was his fault. Miranda and Annie obviously felt the same way. At least she was out of the hospital now. They never let him speak to her. He was sure Betty would want to talk to him if they let her. After all these years together. But they were no longer together, Annie had reminded him. She has cut the cord, Annie had said. She's recuperating physically and emotionally. Do you want to make her feel worse? Are you that selfish and self-centered? I don't care how guilty you feel, she had said, you are not going to upset my mother.

"It's Frederick," Felicity was saying, squelching behind him.

He pulled an enormous white bath towel from a shelf. "Here, darling."

"I'm speaking to you! Didn't you hear me? Frederick!"

The wet coat hung heavily at the end of his outstretched arm, dripping. He dropped it in the bathtub, half expecting damp revengeful minks to rise up from its folds. He hated that coat. Why was she wearing it in April anyway? If Miranda had ever seen it, she would have been furious. Of course, she was furious anyway. He threw the towel around Felicity's shoulders. "What about Frederick, darling?"

"He's marrying her. That... girl."

Joe put a smaller towel on Felicity's head. She looked like an angry nun. "Which girl? The one who was here? Which one? I couldn't really tell them apart. Are you sure? Neither one of them seems at all like Frederick's type. And they're just children."

"Hah!" said Felicity. "There you have it. Children."

"Well, it's better that he's marrying a girl than a boy, isn't it?"

"No, don't you see, they're going to have one. She's pregnant, or so she claims. I don't believe a word of it. She's not showing at all. Of course, how could you tell, she's always going to some gym. I told him to demand a paternity test. Gwen is beside herself. Think how she feels! After all she's done for that girl. And me! I let her live here!"

Joseph held the glass of Scotch to his lips. He could see Betty on the couch in her crumpled bathrobe, a fury. The glass had hurtled through the air. The perfume of the Scotch had hung around him like a cloud. The apartment had been a battleground. Now it was just an apartment. Felicity shuffled ahead of him, draped in terry cloth. He would have to tell her soon, he knew.

"And Frederick!" she said, her words drifting back to him, muffled by the towel around her head. "How he could do that to his own daughter. Is he from Alaska? That's where they'll move, no doubt. That's what they'll tell us next. And don't even ask about Evan — he's beside himself. He's furious. It's so humiliating for the family. I mean, Frederick is a public figure. Everyone will know. I'm so upset, I walked home. But when it rains it pours, and it poured, and I'm soaked. Thank you," she added, turning into the kitchen, rubbing her hair with the towel. "That little gold digger."

"Where is she, anyway?" Joseph said, glad to be able to postpone his own news. "She didn't come home with you?"

"Oh, she'll never set her scheming little foot in this apartment again."

He put the kettle on and poured some whiskey and sugar in a mug. "Sit down," he said gently. He took a lemon out of the refrigerator, cut it, squeezed it in the mug. When the water boiled, he poured it into the mug and handed the concoction to Felicity.

She breathed in the fumes. "Just what the doctor ordered. We'll have to change all the locks."

"Yes," Joseph said. "We will definitely need to do that. Or someone will."

At his tone, Felicity stopped sipping from the mug. "What?"

"I just got the final word from the lawyers."

Felicity stood up, very straight within her nun's habit of towels. "Yes?"

"The apartment is Betty's."

Felicity took a moment, then said, "Fine."

She sat back down, drank a little more of her toddy.

This was the part of her Joseph loved, he realized. The hard part. The unyielding part. Felicity was strong. She was not always entirely human, he had discovered. But she was always strong.

"I've always wanted to live downtown anyway," she said. "The West Side is so over."

In the Museum of Natural History, beneath the dinosaur, where she and Crystal had taken refuge from the rain, Amber held her cell phone in one hand. With the other she pinched her sister's arm as punctuation to every other word. "It's all her fault, Frederick. Everything was going so well," she said into the phone, administering three pinches.

"Ow... It just slipped out, Amber... Ow..."

The day before the rainstorm, Betty had gone to the doctor with a bad cough. She hadn't wanted to, but when Annie got home from work and heard her, she had called the doctor and made the appointment without even asking Betty, treating her like a child, and Betty did not have the energy to argue.

"I don't like the way you sound," the doctor had said.

I don't like the way you sound, thought Betty. He was a young man and condescending. But at least he didn't call her dear and talk very slowly and loudly the way some of them did.