The good times had started with the diving board. Meredith had felt herself transform as she pulled off her wig and climbed onto that board. She hadn’t taken a dive in years-decades-and while she expressed doubts to Connie about her ability to flip and twist and enter the water headfirst, inside she knew she could do it. There were dives still trapped inside of her, dives that had been waiting for thirty years to get out.

Meredith had been meant to dive at Princeton; it was one of the things that led to her admission. Coach Dempsey had one other diver-a junior named Caroline Free who came from California and who was breaking all kinds of Ivy League records. But Caroline Free would graduate, and Coach Dempsey wanted to bring Meredith up in her wake. But when Meredith’s father died, Meredith lost all interest in diving. It was amazing how one of the most important things in her life suddenly seemed so pointless. Coach Dempsey understood, but he came right back to her sophomore year. By sophomore year, Meredith was ready. She had gained ten pounds her freshman year from the beer and the starchy food in the dining hall and the late-night fried chicken sandwiches with Russian dressing that Freddy made for her in the Dial kitchen. Back home in Villanova for the summer, she had returned to the Aronimink pool and swum laps alongside her mother, wearing one of her mother’s hideous bathing caps festooned with lavender rubber flowers over the right ear. The laps had worked; Meredith was back to her slender, petite self, and she meant to stay that way. Plus, she wanted to dive. She missed it; it was part of who she was.

When she told Freddy, he went straight to work talking her out of it. If she dove for the Princeton team, he said, it would be all-consuming. There would be early-morning conditioning practices and regular afternoon practices. There would be home meets and, more sinisterly, away meets-whole weekends at Penn and Columbia and Yale with the squeaky-skinned, green-haired members of the swim team. He predicted that Meredith would miss the Dial holiday formal-a look at the team’s schedule confirmed this-and with Meredith gone, Freddy would have to find another date.

Meredith took the opportunity to ask him who he’d taken to the formal the year before.

He said, “Oh, Trina.”

“Trina?” Meredith said.

Freddy studied her to see if there were going to be any mildly annoying follow-up questions. They had, of course, talked about Trina early on in their relationship, and Freddy had corroborated Trina’s story-though it had felt to Meredith like the corroboration of a story-that Trina was his tutoring student and not much else. Those had been Fred’s exact words, “not much else.” Now, Meredith found he had taken her to last year’s formal! She didn’t think she even needed to ask the annoying follow-up questions.

He said, “I didn’t have anyone else to ask, and she was good for things like that. She presents well.”

Meredith knew she shouldn’t care about something as frivolous as the Dial holiday formal, but she did. Holiday formals at the eating clubs were glamorous events with twinkling lights and French champagne and sixteen-piece orchestras playing Frank Sinatra. The prospect of missing the formal and of Freddy going, instead, with Trina was enough to seal the deal: Meredith met with Coach Dempsey and gave him her regrets. He begged her to reconsider. Princeton needed her, he said. Meredith nearly buckled. She loved the university with near-militant ferocity; if Princeton needed her, she would serve. But Freddy laughed and said that Dempsey was being manipulative. Freddy was the one who needed her. This was his senior year. He wanted to spend every second of it with Meredith.

Meredith gave up the diving. Her mother, as it turned out, was happy. She had feared that diving would distract Meredith from her studies.

Meredith hadn’t dived in any structured or serious way again. Freddy didn’t like her to. He was jealous that she excelled at something that had nothing to do with him. He wanted Meredith to focus on sports they could do together-swimming, running, tennis.

And so, that was where Meredith put her energies. She and Freddy swam together in the Hamptons, in Palm Beach, in the south of France-which really meant that Meredith swam in the ocean or did laps in their sapphire-blue, infinity-edge pools while Freddy talked to London on his cell phone. They had played tennis regularly for a while, but ten years into the marriage, Freddy was far too busy to ever make a court time, and Meredith had been left to play tennis with women like Amy Rivers.

Diving from Dan’s boat the day before had been a pleasure long overdue. How many other forty-nine-year-old women could pull off a front two and a half somersault? Meredith could have gone even further; she had been tempted to do her front one and a half with one and a half twists, but she didn’t want to seem like a show-off, and she didn’t want to injure herself. Dan Flynn had been impressed by her diving, which was gratifying, and Connie, reverting to high-school type, had been proud and proprietary. I used to go to all of Meredith’s meets. It was fun to remember those meets, especially home meets where Connie always occupied the same seat in the pool balcony and used hand signals to assess Meredith’s entry into the water. A little over. A little short. Two palms showing meant Perfect 10! There had been one meet when they had been down a judge, and after much conferring, Meredith convinced both team coaches to allow Connie to fill in. Connie knew the dives inside and out, and Meredith knew Connie would be fair. Connie had ended up being harder on Meredith than the other two judges, but Meredith won anyway.

To dive again had been to return to her real, deep-down, pre-Freddy self. But there had been other great things about yesterday-the sun, the water, the boat, the lunch. Meredith had loved being on the boat, feeling its speed and power, enjoying the salty mist on her face. She was, for the first time since everything happened, buffered from the outside world. She had enjoyed talking with Dan about lobstering, and he had asked her if she wanted to fish with him. Yes, certainly-she wasn’t going to let a single opportunity get past her. At the end of the afternoon when the sun was mellow and golden and the water sparkled and Meredith was enjoying a cold glass of wine with Connie and there was the promise of a real, true lobster dinner ahead, Meredith had realized that she could experience happiness. Fleeting, perhaps, but real.

Even dinner was lovely-to a point. Dan appeared with the lobsters and a blueberry pie-he’d granted Connie’s one wish without realizing it-and when they were out on the deck, Meredith couldn’t thank him enough.

While Connie was in the kitchen pulling dinner together, Dan said, “I hope you won’t think I’m too forward in saying this, but you’re nothing like I thought you’d be.”

This might have suggested a thorny conversation ahead, but Meredith had spent enough time with Dan to know that he wouldn’t try to stick it to her. The bizarre thing was being faced with her own notoriety. Freddy had turned her into a public persona. People like Dan Flynn, a power washer on Nantucket Island, had formed an impression of “Meredith Delinn” without knowing her. Everyone in America had.

She cocked her head and said, “Oh, really? And how did you think I’d be? Tell me the truth.”

Dan said, “I thought you’d be a society bitch. A fallen society bitch. I thought you’d be materialistic, demanding, entitled. I thought, at the very least, that you’d be bitter. Self-absorbed. A fun-sucker.”

“A fun-sucker?” Meredith said. “Me?”

“Now, I’m not going to pretend I know you know you. I mean, we’ve only been on two dates, right? Sunday night and today.”

Meredith glanced back at Connie in the kitchen. “Those weren’t properly our dates…”

“Point taken,” he said. “But I got to know you a little bit, right? And I think you’re a wonderful woman, Meredith. You’re smart, you’re interesting, and you’re a hell of a good sport.”

“Well, thank you,” Meredith said.

“You’re an accomplished diver, you can cast a fishing line… does the world know this about you? No, the world sees you as… what? The wife of Freddy Delinn. A possible conspirator in his crimes…”

“I wasn’t a conspirator,” Meredith said. She hated herself for even having to say this. “I knew nothing about his crimes, and neither did my sons. But there are still people I have to convince of that.”

“I believe you,” Dan said. “I more than believe you. I know you’re innocent in this. I can tell… because of how you are.”

“Well, thank you,” Meredith said. She said this to end the conversation while things were still relatively light. But she was tempted to remind him that he didn’t know her and that he couldn’t accurately tell anything about her. She was tempted to say that none of us knows anyone else-not really. If there was one person Meredith had thought she had known in this world, it was Freddy Delinn, and she had been wrong.


As soon as they settled at the table, it became clear that Connie was drunk. Dan glanced at Meredith, and Meredith made a helpless face. She felt responsible and embarrassed. She had noticed Connie drinking wine on the boat, a lot of wine, two bottles minus the one glass that Meredith had had, but she’d said nothing. What would she have said? Connie was a grown woman and she liked her wine. Some women were like that; they drank chardonnay like water, and it had no obvious effect. Meredith was comforted by the fact that Connie drank wine. Connie’s mother, Veronica, had been an abuser of gin and could be found at any time of day with a Tervis tumbler at her elbow. There were always half-filled bottles of tonic around the kitchen and lime wedges in various stages of desiccation on the cutting board and in the sink drain.

Of course, Connie liked her gin, too. (Meredith decided there must be an inherited predilection for the juniper berry, because no one would have grown up watching Veronica destroy herself like she did and then voluntarily choose to drink gin.) Meredith had watched Connie pour herself a gin and tonic at the kitchen counter, but she didn’t comment. It was, after all, cocktail hour. Furthermore, Meredith was in no position to judge or scold. Connie had saved Meredith’s life; she had brought Meredith to this place and had put her in a position to have a wonderful time today. If Connie wanted to drink, Meredith wasn’t going to pester her.

Now, though, Meredith felt negligent. Dan helped Connie into her chair, and she slumped. He pulled the meat from her lobster. Meredith pulled the meat from her own lobster thinking that the best idea was to act normal and see if they could make it through the meal. Meredith fetched Connie a glass of ice water with a paper-thin slice of lemon, the way she liked it. Then she helped herself to an ear of corn and some salad. She was impressed that Connie had been able to pull dinner together in her condition. Meredith could take a few pointers from Connie in the kitchen. There would come a day in the not-too-distant future when she would have to prepare her own meals, and she had never learned to cook. She was ashamed of this. Her mother had been a classic housewife of her era-veal saltimbocca, chicken and dumplings on Sundays, the best tuna salad Meredith had ever eaten. Meredith could microwave hot dogs, and she could fry or scramble an egg; that was how she’d managed when Leo and Carver were small. And then, magically, overnight it seemed, there was money to go to restaurants every night and hire a cook for breakfast, lunch, snacks, and any dinner party that Meredith wanted to throw.

But Meredith couldn’t let her mind veer off this way. The meal before her was enticing, yet simple. Surely with a little instruction, Meredith could one day manage this?

“Cheers!” Meredith said.

Dan met her glass with a clink, and Connie, too, reached for her glass, but hesitated, realizing it was ice water. She succumbed, picking up the water and touching glasses with both Dan and Meredith.

“This looks delicious!” Dan said. He was using the too-loud, overly cheerful voice that one used with the infirm.

Connie made a move on her salad. Meredith said, “Eat!”

Meredith dug into her lobster. Her face was pleasantly warm and tight from the sun. There was no conversation, but that seemed okay. They were all busy eating.

Meredith said, “Boy, being out on the water really gave me an appetite!” She eyed Connie. Connie cut a piece of lobster, dragged it long and lavishly through the clarified butter, then left it impaled on the end of her fork, dripping onto the tablecloth.