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From behind me Victor’s gaze seemed to linger wistfully, but that was surely just my imagination. I hoped. “No kidding,” I said to the housekeeper. “I mean it, now. ” She turned reluctantly. “Miz Tiptree,” she began, her tone implying that whatever the story turned out to be, I was dragging it from her. I wasn’t. Bella had engineered this moment and we both knew it. She didn’t like asking me for favors, so she worked it around until I made her do it. “Jake,” I corrected. Getting her to call me by my first name was an ongoing battle, too.

Monday, my black Labrador retriever, came and sniffed me, then went away again, bored. The trashman came, and the meter reader. Neither heard my shouts, and the mail carrier passed by without stopping. Finally my son Sam came home from school and found me there, furious and humiliated. “Mom,” he said gently, looking down at me and taking in the whole sad situation. “You know, I think maybe the next time you decide to make a hole in the floor… ” Right. Cut it with a saw. Although at the time I’d have preferred just using a bomb, and if it blew me up, too, I might not have minded very much.

Then he’d built a fire in the enormous granite fireplace that formed one whole wall of the room, piling it with chunks of aged driftwood so it flamed extravagantly before settling to a fierce red glow. After that, with a scant two fingers of Laphroaig in a chunky cut-crystal lowball glass to keep him company, he’d sat down with his book to wait. Despite the chilly spring evening the fire let him keep the window open, admitting salt air and whiffs of wood smoke along with the distant, varied hoots and moans of the foghorns on the dark water a few hundred yards distant.