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Meredith said.
    “Even you,” Connie said.

MEREDITH
    At ten minutes to five, Meredith couldn’t put it off any longer: she had to call her attorneys and give them her coordinates. She was still under investigation. She wasn’t allowed to leave the country; the Feds had her passport. Burt and Dev needed to know where she was.
    She sat on her bed and turned on her cell phone. This had become a suspenseful moment in Meredith’s daily routine: Had anyone called her? Had anyone texted her? Would Carver and Leo break the rules and text her the
I love you
that she so desperately needed? Had any of Meredith’s former friends found enough compassion in their hearts to reach out? Would she hear from Samantha? Had Burt or Dev called? Did they have good news or bad news? How bad was the bad news? Would this be the moment when Meredith received the worst news? Indeed, the reason Meredith kept her phone turned off was to limit the torture to this one moment, instead of living with it all day long.
    There were no messages and no texts. This presented its own kind of misery.
    She dialed the law firm and said a Hail Mary, which was what she always did when she dialed the law firm. She could hear the sounds of Connie making dinner downstairs.
    Meredith had thought she might feel safer on Nantucket, but she was plagued by a low-grade terror. Nantucket was an
island,
thirty miles out to sea. What if she needed to escape? There would be no hopping in a cab uptown or downtown or across the bridge or through the tunnel into New Jersey. There would be no hightailing it to Connecticut if Leo or Carver needed her. She felt both exiled and trapped.
    Meredith had $46,000 of her own money. This was the savings that she’d tucked away in a CD earning 1.5 percent, from her teaching job in the 1980s. (Freddy had ridiculed her for this.
Let me invest it,
he’d said.
I’ll double it in six months.
) But Meredith had kept rolling over the money in that CD for no reason other than personal pride—and how relieved she was now! She had something to live on, actual legitimate money that she’d earned and banked. Forty-six thousand dollars would seem a fortune to many people, she knew, but to her it felt like a pittance. She had run through that much in an afternoon of antiques shopping.
Disgusting!
she thought as the phone rang.
How had she become that person?
    The receptionist answered.
    “May I speak with Burton Penn, please?” Meredith asked.
    “May I ask who’s calling?” the receptionist said.
    Meredith cringed. She hated identifying herself. “Meredith Delinn.”
    The receptionist didn’t respond. The receptionist never responded, though Meredith had called and spoken to this selfsame receptionist dozens of times.
    The phone rang. Although Meredith had asked for Burt, the person who answered the phone was Dev.
    “Hi Dev,” Meredith said. “It’s Meredith.”
    “Thank God,” Dev said. “I was just about to call your cell. Where are you?”
    “I’m on Nantucket,” Meredith said.
    “Nantucket?” Dev said, “What are you doing on Nantucket?”
    “I’m with a friend,” Meredith said.
    Dev made a noise of surprise. Clearly, he had been under the impression that Meredith didn’t have any friends. And he was right. But Meredith had Connie. Was Connie her friend? Connie was something; Meredith wasn’t sure what.
    “What’s the address there?” Dev asked.
    “I have no idea.”
    “Phone number? Please, Meredith, give me
something.
The Feds want us to have contact information for you on the ground.”
    Meredith had written down the phone number at the house. She recited it to Dev.
    He said, “First things first. I’m glad you’re safe.” Meredith smiled. Dev was one person, aside from her sons, who didn’t want to see her jump off the George Washington Bridge. Her other attorney, Burt, would never have expressed this kind of sentiment. Burt didn’t dislike Meredith, but he was detached. She was a case, a legal problem. She