Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Book

One day is all it takes for three women’s lives to come undone …

Janice Miller knows this: she loves her husband, her two spirited daughters and the beautiful home in which she has raised her family. But what she doesn’t know is how to stay afloat when a devastating discovery tears that familiar world apart.

It is only once the damage has been done that she finally realises how distant her daughters have become – and that schoolgirl Lizzie and 28-year-old Margaret now have dark secrets of their own. After years of following separate lives, they are reluctantly drawn back together under the same roof. It’s the outside world that has unravelled their dreams, but what they all fear most now is each other. Yet it’s there, in the family home, that they are forced to confront their crises – and where, slowly, each of them begins to heal.

About the Author

Janelle Brown is a freelance journalist and essayist. Her writing appears regularly in Vogue, the New York Times, Elle, and the Los Angeles Times among other publications.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the filmmaker Greg Harrison. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything is her first novel.

For Pam, Dick, Jodi and Greg – family first and always

We are all failures; at least, the best of us are.

– J.M. Barrie

1

JUNE IN SANTA Rita is perfect, just perfect. The sun sits high in the sky – which is itself just the right shade of unpolluted powder blue – and the temperature averages a mild eighty-three. It isn’t too hot to play tennis. Silk doesn’t stick. The pool at the club is cool enough so that swimming is refreshing, and the summer fog that usually creeps in off the ocean is held at bay, its gray tentacles undulating just off the shore.

Janice Miller wakes up on the last Monday of the month to the sound of a song from her youth playing softly on the radio alarm clock. In the vast king bed, where the impression from her husband’s body has already grown cold, the lyrics wash over her as she drifts up toward consciousness: ‘Imagine me and you, I do / I think about you day and night / It’s only right / To think about the girl you love / And hold her tight / So happy together!’ A frivolous little tune, one she hasn’t heard in decades, and yet she can suddenly recall every word, even the cover of the album. The record had been a bribe from one of her mother’s transient postdivorce boyfriends, and ten-year-old Janice had played the song over and over ad nauseam until the record finally disappeared during one of their moves. Thirty-nine years later, and Janice is once again hooked in by that uplifting refrain, the curious minor key: ‘So happy together!’

She yawns widely; she did not sleep well the night before. Paul crept out of bed at four in the morning in order to make it to the stock exchange before the starting bell, and although he tiptoed around silently in the dark, trying not to wake her – though she really wouldn’t have minded if he had kissed her goodbye, not today – she had tossed and turned for the rest of the night. Really, though, she was too giddy with anticipation to sleep well anyway. This song, dredged up from the dusty archives of her consciousness, feels like an appropriate soundtrack for the day. ‘I can see me lovin’ nobody but you / for all my life!’ The refrain matches her upbeat mood.

Glancing at the clock, Janice is jolted out of her reverie – it’s seven forty-five, almost two hours since the stock market opened. She turns the radio to a news station, cutting off the last refrain of the song (‘So happy tog—’), and climbs out of bed. She takes a shower, listening with one ear as she lingers under the two-way adjustable head, but hears nothing about Applied Pharmaceuticals. The morning news – a heatwave in the South, fifty-four dead in a suicide bombing in Israel, a congressmen caught taking handouts from lobbyists – plays as she remakes the bed, folding in hospital corners and replacing the dozen or so pillows, shams, bolsters, and decorative blankets in their designated positions. There’s still nothing by the time she’s dressed in her tennis whites, and, itching with impatience, she finally goes downstairs to turn on the coffeepot. En route, she snaps on the television in the family room so she can watch CNBC through the kitchen door as she prepares an egg-white frittata with feta and roasted zucchini for her daughter Lizzie.

The frittata sizzles on the stove, the nutty aroma of browning butter warming the kitchen while Janice watches the set with one eye and waits (nearly jumping out of her skin, she can hardly stand it anymore) for the commentator to drop the name Applied Pharmaceuticals. Finally, at eight-thirty, the chesty redhead perched behind the anchor desk clears her throat and turns to the camera. ‘… And now, the stock market story of the morning, the meteoric ascent of Applied Pharmaceuticals, whose IPO shares are currently sitting at $113 and a quarter only two hours after opening bell.’

Janice gasps in surprise. Below the commentator, the stock ticker crawls across the bottom of the screen and – there it is, APPI, and her heart palpitates again – she sees that yes, it’s true: $113! And if Paul – if they – possess 2.8 million stock options that means … The rush of blood in her ears makes it hard to hear the rest of the report: ‘Experts cite the strategic timing by CEO Paul Miller, riding the wave of the booming biopharm industry, for this impressive Nasdaq debut, despite the fact that the company’s much-anticipated new drug, Coifex, has yet to arrive in pharmacies …’

Janice has the urge to scream or jump up and down or run around the house or something, but that would wake Lizzie up and alarm the neighbors. Instead, she just smiles and automatically moves back to the stove to put the frittata in the oven. Inside, though, she feels like she’s exploding and wishes she had someone to share the news with, just to make it more real. She can’t call her friends – it would come off as bragging. There’s her elder daughter, Margaret, in Los Angeles, but Margaret always seems to be so busy with that magazine, and, considering the precariousness of their relationship these days, it’s probably not a good idea to pester her at work. Besides, Margaret would probably balk at the sums of money at stake and make some kind of comment about ethnic cleansing in Darfur that would make Janice feel materialistic and selfish. And Lizzie isn’t really an option either. They haven’t explained to Lizzie exactly what this IPO will mean to the Miller family’s bottom line, because at fourteen Lizzie is far too young to need to worry about these kinds of financial matters. Besides, they don’t want it to go to her head.

Instead, she goes to the phone and dials Paul’s cell. The call goes straight to voice mail, which is not a surprise – he had warned her that his day would be madness – but she leaves a message anyway. ‘Paul, I saw it on television,’ she says, trying to keep her voice calm and collected but squeaking a bit nonetheless. ‘And it’s thrilling. We did it! Don’t eat before you come home – we’re going to celebrate tonight, okay? Would eight o’clock give you enough time to get back down here from San Francisco? I am just so proud …’ She stays on the phone for a minute, feeling the impulse to babble on, but curbs it and hangs up.

And although Janice is just a bit frustrated that, once again, Paul is impossible to get ahold of, she cheers herself with the knowledge that this is finally the end of all that. This day has loomed in her calendar for almost a year now, a period during which she has become intimately familiar with the machinations of the stock market and the vagaries of the pharmaceutical industry and the interior workings of the FDA, while, simultaneously, becoming less and less familiar with her own husband. Every few days, he has had to jet off to Reykjavik or Brunei or Kobe on the Applied Pharmaceuticals IPO road show, in order to convince investors to part with ridiculous sums of money. The rest of the time, he’s been in his office in a sprawling industrial park in Millbrae, with a view of the sludgy gray San Francisco Bay, working until he collapsed on his leather couch.

During the long weeks that Paul’s been absent, Janice has sometimes stood before his medicine cabinet in their bathroom, gazing at the little plastic bottles of green Coifex pills lined up in a row and thinking about him. She’d taken a Coifex once, just to see what it felt like when Paul took it, curious about what it would do – not that she was going bald herself, but maybe it would bring back some of the natural blond or make her hair somehow softer – but the pill had mostly made her feel bloated. It was almost too big to swallow: another innovation of Paul’s, who had argued that larger pills appealed to men’s need for masculine potency. Janice thought that was a bit ridiculous; but then again, no one ever said that product marketing made sense.

She kept one pill in her pocket, though, and would turn it round in her hand sometimes, fondling the pebbled surface of the pill as if it were a rabbit’s foot or a good luck charm. And that wasn’t so silly after all, was it? Because the charm worked, and today the IPO is over, and it looks like those unwieldy green pills will be paying her family’s bills for a long, long time to come. Which means that Paul will finally have time at home again, giving them a chance to return things to the way they were before all this Applied Pharmaceuticals insanity began. She imagines their marriage as a pendulum: they have grazed the bottom and are poised at the beginning of an upswing.

The old grandfather clock in the living room chimes out the half hour, which means that it’s time to get down to the country club for her tennis date with Beverly. She finishes her coffee, puts the mug in the dishwasher, and gathers her car keys, errand lists, and tennis racket. There is much to be done today; she has been planning a grand fête for tonight, something as memorable as the day promises to be. The evening lies before her, as vivid as a magazine spread: Janice, crisply attired in a flattering new dress, her family assembled around a table heaped high with a home-cooked feast, everyone tipsy on champagne, everyone so filled up with love and abundance that they could almost burst. The only disappointment is that Margaret won’t be there to celebrate with them, having dispensed with Janice’s request that she use her father’s IPO as an impetus for a long-overdue visit home with a mumbled excuse about publishing schedules.

Lizzie has still not gotten up yet by the time Janice leaves for town, so she just sets the frittata on the counter under a towel with a note (At tennis. Eat me. Have a good day. Love, Mom). Then she slips out the door, starts up the Porsche Cayenne, and drives down the oak-lined streets toward town.

The low morning sun blinks at Janice through the canopy of leaves as she navigates through the residential streets. The neighborhood is still quiet – a new local ordinance, voted into law by citizens grown weary of pre-dawn bulldozers, has forbidden any construction before nine o’clock – and the enormous half-built villas that Janice passes on nearly every block loom blankly with their windows gaping, their gray facades still raw concrete. Sometimes it is difficult to remember how Santa Rita looked just two decades ago, when she, Paul and Margaret first moved into a modest, ranch-style home; before the technology industry explosion turned the sleepy bedroom communities of Silicon Valley into boomtowns; before the bulldozers began scraping up those post-war ranch homes and replacing them with multimillion dollar Tuscan villas and Craftsman mansions and goliath Spanish missions complete with screening rooms and temperature-controlled wine cellars and five-car garages; before Janice and Paul and their friends realized how much money was within their grasp if only they bullied their way into it.

Over the years, Santa Rita has become an enclave for Silicon Valley’s super-rich; Janice has watched her friends and neighbors march into ludicrous wealth, buoyed by the information age and stock options and seven-figure salaries. It’s a community made affluent by acronyms – CEOs and VCs and IPOs and MBAs – a community where the lowest common denominator is actually astronomically high. And now, Janice realizes, after years of swimming along in the wake of these wild successes – doing quite well for themselves but certainly not doing spectacularly – she and Paul have finally joined their ranks. As she drives by, Janice eyes a particularly sizable villa with a separate guesthouse and at least a two-acre lot – not that there’s anything wrong with the 5,200-square foot Colonial they moved to seven years back. Still, she can’t help luxuriating in the knowledge that they could afford even better now, if they so chose.

As she pulls into town, Santa Rita’s main street is coming to life. The Italian café expels a steady stream of husbands on their way to work with their steaming commuter mugs; in the plate-glass window of the gym, young women half-dressed in jog bras (so blithe about their public display of bare flesh, and still firm enough to get away with it) churn away on treadmills. The specialty shops and designer boutiques and gourmet restaurants remain shuttered, and in front of them, the ornamental magnolia trees that line the sidewalks are weeping soft pale petals, each the size of a child’s hand, down onto the parking spots below.

As she drives, she composes a master plan for the day. After tennis with Beverly, she’ll get her hair done for tonight. Then, the grocery store. For dinner, she’s preparing Cornish game hens with peppercorn-honey glaze, butternut-squash gnocchi with duck confit, and chocolate-lavender pots de crème, and, for appetizers, her melon puffs and maybe those lemon-ahi crostini that she was saving for next month’s cocktail party. She’ll need to pick up flowers, some candles, a bottle of champagne. Then her new dress, waiting at the tailor’s. Janice regards her schedule with satisfaction, each errand a stepping stone on a path that will logically deposit her, by day’s end, back at home.

As she’s driving, that song pops back into her head again. ‘If I should call you up invest a dime / And you say you belong to me / And ease my mind / Imagine how the world could be / So very fine / So happy together!!!’ In the privacy of the car, Janice tries singing the tune out loud, thinking that maybe this will release her from its grip, but instead she just sounds ridiculous (she never could carry a tune).

Randy – that was the name of her mother’s boyfriend, the one who gave her the album; she remembers it now. They must have been living, where, Indiana? Michigan? Sometimes her childhood feels so out of focus. After her parents divorced when she was seven and her father moved off to Ohio (where he promptly died in a car accident), Janice’s school years were spent drifting around the Midwest, as her mother found and lost work, and moved them from decrepit apartment to the spare bedroom of relatives’ houses to motel and back again. Mostly, her mother worked as a cleaning lady for the enormous homes on the shores of the Great Lakes, dusting porcelain knickknacks and polishing mahogany. After school, Janice would often sit at the kitchen tables of these grand houses, watching her mother mop floors, and feel a sense of protectiveness (Her mother! Cleaning their toilets!) but also shame (Her mother! Cleaning their toilets!).

From those years, Janice acquired a taste for gourmet food – tinned sardines and salty caviar, boxes of water crackers and hand-cut Italian pastas and brined kalamata olives, which her mother fed her as an after-school snack from the pantries of her employers. Sometimes, when no one was home, she would wander through the palatial bedrooms upstairs and linger in the girls’ rooms. These were studies in pink, always, and she would examine their contents like a visitor to a museum: postcards from summer vacations in the south of France, stiff sateen-upholstered daybeds heaped carelessly with porcelain dolls, snapshots of boyfriends strategically stuffed into the carved mirror of a vanity. Mementos of lives lived without fear or pain or worry. Before she left, she would often take a memento – a mohair sweater, a silk blouse with a loose button, a scarf of snagged cashmere extracted from the bottom of a forgotten pile. She could never wear these things outside, of course. She kept her purloined wardrobe in a cardboard box at the back of a closet, behind the second-hand corduroy skirts her mother bought for her at Henny Penny’s Shop-n-Save, and played dress-up as a treat for benchmarks achieved: an A on her French exam, a date at the drive-in, a scholarship offer to a good college out West. With the expensive fabrics against her skin, she would imagine herself propelled toward some shiny future that winked at her from a distance, like a mirror catching the sun and reflecting back the promise of a more perfect life.

Her senior year, she reluctantly sold her collection at a consignment shop in order to help cover the car payments for their sputtering Buick, just a few months before her mother’s latest useless boyfriend vanished with the keys. One kleptomaniac done in by another. In retrospect, she can almost laugh at the irony, although it certainly didn’t seem funny at the time.

THE MONUMENTAL IRON GATES OF THE COUNTRY CLUB LOOM on her left as she leaves town and enters into the foothills, with their pine forests and wildflower-filled meadows. The Forest Heights Country Club, once an estate owned by a tycoon who made his fortune selling shovels during the California Gold Rush, is situated on two hundred acres just north of town. Its meandering gardens have been replaced by a golf course; the stable has room for twenty-eight mounts and an equestrian ring out back; and a phalanx of tennis courts flank the two Olympic-sized swimming pools. The estate’s sprawling stone mansion is now the club’s main building, and from its grand ballroom – kept in its original, parquet-floored grandeur, and normally used as the club restaurant – you can look over the grounds, an expanse of manicured green that rises up to meet the sky.

Janice parks her SUV in the side lot, already filled with the cars of the morning golfers, and walks out toward the tennis courts. The pock-pock-pock of tennis balls bouncing off clay echo across the grounds, but when Janice arrives down at the courts Beverly is nowhere to be seen. Janice waits for her at the edge of the courts and watches Linda Franks rally with Martha Grouper. Back and forth the ball sails, and Janice averts her eyes from the women’s frantic lunges, wondering if she looks as stiff as they do when she plunges after a ball. Ever since she pulled a ligament in her elbow in the spring tournament she’s grown more aware of her age, of the vague creaking in her joints and the slowness of her muscles to fire.

Martha finally sends Linda flying backward in pursuit of a perfectly sliced backhand, then walks over to the low fence and leans toward Janice, gesturing her in close. Horizontal sweat lines dampen the yellow knit of Martha’s tank top, marking the exact location of the folds of her stomach. Janice unconsciously touches her own belly, which is definitely pushing against her waistband but has not yet succumbed to gravity in the way that her rear end and hips have. Fifty is looming, just a year off now, and she sometimes thinks she can see her looks falling away by the day. Men don’t stare at her on the street anymore, the way they used to. Worse, she and Paul haven’t had sex in six months, and although he’s been overwhelmed by the IPO and she hasn’t felt much of a sex drive herself, she can’t help but worry that he has stopped desiring her altogether. Tonight, she thinks. Tonight she will initiate it.

‘I bet you’re in a good mood today,’ Martha says, pushing up her visor and dropping her sunglasses down so that she can peer directly into Janice’s eyes. ‘It’s all over the news. They’re saying you’ve gone Forbes 400 – what, trillionaires?’

The number, Janice has already calculated in her head, is actually around $300 million – it is surreal to even summon up the figure – but she wouldn’t dare tell Martha that. Still, she can’t quite prevent the grin of embarrassed pleasure that pinches her face. ‘Oh, please. We both know it’s just numbers on paper. Stock options are just accounting figures, not actual money.’ Yet, she thinks.

‘What on earth does a person do with so much money?’ Martha marvels, as though it’s an utter mystery to her, despite the fact that Janice knows that Martha’s husband, Steven, a venture capitalist specializing in wireless technology, has already made his own fortune. (Their vacation home in Aspen has eight – eight! – bedrooms.) Nonetheless, Martha’s question has crossed Janice’s mind many times lately. Not that the Millers need much, but suddenly they have been catapulted into that upper strata of Santa Rita society that can have anything it wants. What Janice has told no one – not Paul, not even Margaret, the one person who she thinks might appreciate this – is that when she imagines what she might afford now, the only thing she truly covets is art. A painting. Specifically (and yes, it’s ludicrous, but …) she covets a van Gogh, one like those she saw a few years back when they last visited France. Janice had spent a rainy day at the Louvre by herself – Paul was back at the hotel taking business calls – and had felt a curious sense of liberation as she walked the great halls alone, addressing the stoic museum guards in her somewhat rusty French. Egyptian antiquities, Greek sculpture, Italian Renaissance, Impressionism: she took in each one in order, spending no more than ten minutes in each room, making sure not to skip the smaller galleries, carefully noting every important piece. She wanted to absorb it all, methodically, sequentially. But when she got to the van Gogh exhibition she came to a dead stop. She had seen photos of his work before and found them interesting, but this – the paintings themselves – was something else entirely. The violence of the paint applied in furious layers so thick that she could see the impressions of the artist’s fingers, clawing at the canvas – she felt like she’d been slapped. The color! As vivid as a hallucination. There was something wild and abandoned in that gallery, and she stood there, trembling, unable to leave the room for well over an hour. She never made it to see the Dutch Masters.

She imagines one of those paintings hanging over the mantle in her living room, and shivers at the thought of what it might let into her home. Not that they could (or should) buy an $80 million painting. Still, they could start with a minor drawing – like the landscape study she earmarked in the Sotheby’s catalog last month – and work their way toward a collection. They could become patrons of the arts, even start a foundation, and she could take guided tours across Europe to really cultivate a discerning eye. She envisions paintings in the de Young Museum, limned by placards boasting From the Collection of Paul and Janice Miller. A suitable title for a generous life, well-lived.

Regardless, the truth is that what she might buy with all that money sometimes feels besides the point; mostly she just likes to think of this money as a safety net, vast and tightly woven, a guarantee that from this point on everything will be okay. Her children will never have to worry about money, ever; they will never suffer the gnawing panic of wondering where the rent will come from, the way she once did.

Everyone always says that the early years of struggle are the happiest, but Janice knows better than that. A photograph that she has in an old album of hers shows Paul in the tiny peeling bathroom of their very first apartment, the one above the dry cleaner’s in San Francisco that smelled like mold, extending his fingertips so that he is touching both walls; the grin on his face says, ‘Look at me, slumming it!’ But Janice remembers taking that photograph and thinking, He has no idea, even as she laughed along with him. Because in the morning, he would leave for his job and she would be alone in that depressingly familiar apartment with Margaret, a fussy and demanding baby even if she was the first of their friends’ children to toddle and talk, and that sense of shared adventure would dissipate. She battled an oblique discontent, a sense that she had run up against a wall without any doors, and even though she had every reason in the world to love where she was – beautiful baby! charming husband! a whole apartment of her own to work on! – somehow she didn’t feel satisfied. Perhaps it was just the couch? If they could just get rid of that avocado plaid Sears couch and get a nice leather one? The miscarriages came, then, one after another, like a punishment; and Paul began to work longer and longer hours, pulling himself rung by rung up the corporate ladder, a snappish companion even when he was home to admire the secondhand side table she’d spent all day decoupaging. It wasn’t until later – when they’d bought their first house, had some money to spend and room to breathe, gave up on a second child – that she discovered a sense of peace. Janice can remember a morning, their ninth anniversary, when they went up in a hot air balloon over the Napa Valley, on an obscenely expensive whim, and she looked over at her husband and realized that his eyes were bright with excitement and free of worry, and he looked back at her and laughed and she felt like they’d seen each other for the first time in years. Napa Valley unfolded below them, a blanket of green vines planted in reassuring geometric rows, and farther out was the ocean, where they could see the clouds rolling in, but where they floated the sun was hot and the sky clear. Janice remembers thinking then that they’d made it through the worst years and now they were being lifted up, lifted like the balloon, and feeling pure joy. When had that feeling waned? Sometime after Lizzie was born, she thinks, once Paul was swept up in the technology boom, once Margaret had abandoned them for another life. Maybe it’s time to plan another trip to Napa, another balloon ride.

Janice checks her watch as Martha and Linda finish their game. It’s nine-thirty, and Beverly is a half hour late, which is so unlike her – Beverly, like Janice, is of the school that believes that promptness is a sign of respect – and when Janice finally calls her at home to see whether she forgot, no one answers. Perhaps there’s been an emergency with her son, Mark? Janice feels a vague sense of anxiety, a slight pull in the fabric of her morning. She waits fifteen more minutes, trying Beverly’s cell phone, too, and then gives up altogether. As she walks back up to the car she struggles to remember another time when Beverly failed to appear for a date and can’t recall a single incident.

The loss of her morning game throws Janice’s plans off and she arrives back in downtown Santa Rita half an hour before her hair appointment, annoyed at the upheaval of her meticulous schedule. To kill time, she picks up a box of truffles at the patisserie – cardamom and black pepper chocolates for him, violet and rose petal creams for her, and walnut-cinnamon for Lizzie – and a $150 bottle of Dom Pérignon that the gentleman at the wine cellar describes as ‘transcendent’ (blatant hyperbole on his part, perhaps, but she is compelled nonetheless). She leaves both in the car, worried that they’ll melt and spoil, while she goes to have Peggy doctor her graying roots back to their original blonde.

Janice reclines in the salon chair, finding it difficult to lose a tension that’s settled in between her shoulder blades (excitement? anxiety? she can’t tell), while Peggy – who seems out of sorts this morning, her eyes puffy and her responses terse – slaps the stinging peroxide on Janice’s scalp. By the time her hair is blown out and coaxed into submission around her shoulders, Janice can tell that the color is a little too brassy this time, a shade too yellow – the color, she thinks, of a woman trying to cling to youth, rather than of one aging with grace. Peggy watches her staring at herself in the mirror, and Janice forces a smile. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely.’ She will not let this ruin her day, she decides, and when it comes time to pay the bill, she impulsively adds a $100 tip – a little something to improve Peggy’s spirits. Besides, if today isn’t the day for frivolous generosity, when is?

As she leaves the salon, she checks her cell phone and is frustrated that there is still no message from Paul. The stock market won’t close for another hour, though, and it’s probably too much to expect him to call before then. Janice tucks the phone in her bag and shoulders on to the grocery store, where they have no Cornish game hens at all, the ahi looks mangy, and the cantaloupe that she needs for her melon puffs is completely unripe. As she stands in the produce aisle, morosely contemplating the rock-hard melons, Cecile Bellstrom clips by in her jogging suit, a quart of orange juice in her hands. ‘Janice!’ Cecile exclaims. She pauses, and then bursts out: ‘Okay, I just can’t stand here and pretend that I don’t know, but of course I do, I saw the news just like everyone else, so I just wanted to say congratulations! Couldn’t happen to a nicer family!’

This lifts Janice back up, out of her strange slump, and she bounds off toward the florist, where she picks up an armful of stargazer lilies for the dinner table. On the way back to her car she spies Noreen Gossett, who just last weekend had been in a golf foursome with her and Beverly – their daughters are in the same class, although Noreen’s rather self-entitled daughter, Susan, has never shown the slightest bit of interest in Lizzie – and she perks up in anticipation of yet another flattering conversation. But instead of coming over to say hello, Noreen twitches and then jerks sideways as if someone had seized her shoulders, veering off without even a wave.

Janice comes to a halt, seized by confusion. She can feel the heat radiating off the parked cars around her as they bake in the midday sun. What could she have done to offend Noreen? Is something wrong? She has a sudden flash of understanding that the news of the Miller family’s new fortune will not be taken well by everyone and that she is not the only person in town who’s ever suffered a twist of jealousy at her neighbor’s successes. But maybe it’s just that Noreen didn’t see her after all, Janice tries to reassure herself. She restlessly pulls out her cell phone and checks it again – ten to one, the stock market closing any minute – before continuing on towards the tailor.

The tailor is two blocks up Centerview Avenue, and Janice glimpses herself in every window that she walks past: the organic Italian deli (yes, the hair is definitely too yellow), a real estate agency whose plate glass is hidden underneath photographs of Beaux Arts estates (her tennis skirt is exposing far too much cellulite), and the shop that sells four hundred kinds of artisanal soap (has her chin always had that wobble in it?). A throng of teenagers slumps over the wrought-iron sidewalk tables outside The Fountain, eating French fries; the expressions of ennui on their faces suggest that summer, only a week in, has already become a chore. Janice smiles at them as she passes, trying to recall if she knows any of their parents, but they gaze at her without interest. The traffic on the street has picked up – it’s the lunchtime rush – and someone is honking persistently, slamming down on their horn over and over.

At the tailor shop, the owner, an efficient elderly Chinese lady named Mrs. Chen – her fingers, Janice often tells her friends, move as quickly as hummingbirds – sits hunched over a suit, framed by plastic garment bags hanging on the rack behind her. Janice’s own dress, a dark blue Calvin Klein sheath that she had to purchase slightly too large in the chest in order to fit over her hips, is already waiting for her by the cash register, and she tries it on behind the faded curtain that serves as a dressing room. The minute Janice pulls the dress over her head, she knows something is wrong: it wedges at her armpits, with her arms trapped helplessly in the fabric, and refuses to go further.

‘I think you took it in too much,’ she calls.

Mrs. Chen peeks around the curtain, seemingly unperturbed by the sight of Janice in tennis panties and a jog bra. She tugs firmly down on the dress, and there’s a sound of popping thread. ‘You too big,’ Mrs. Chen observes mildly, yanking the garment back over Janice’s head.

Janice picks up her tennis shirt to shield her nakedness. ‘You measured me,’ she complains. ‘I certainly haven’t changed sizes in the last week.’

Mrs. Chen examines the seams of the dress and picks at the zipper. ‘No worry, I can fix,’ she says. ‘You come back next week.’ Janice looks down at the dress – feels the image of herself as the stylish and still-attractive wife effortlessly serving her family a gourmet meal, fading away – and is taken aback when tears well up in her eyes. She blinks them away before Mrs. Chen can see them. It’s just a dress, she reminds herself; just a bad haircut, a missed game, an unripe melon.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘It’s not a problem.’

As she returns through the sheltering oaks toward her house – the car radio, tuned to the news, announces that the Nasdaq has closed up thirteen points but mentions nothing about Paul’s company – Janice goes back over her day. She senses that things have shifted out of alignment, like a house that’s slipped off its foundation; trying to identify the origin of this feeling, she fixes on Beverly once more. Something was definitely wrong this morning – it’s not like Beverly not to call – and she is suddenly overwhelmed with a rush of concern for her friend. Maybe, she thinks, if I just sort that out, everything else will fall back into line. When she reaches the edge of town, instead of turning toward her house, she impulsively turns right, toward Beverly’s.

The Weatherloves live in a two-story Tudor, with a shake roof and green shutters. The Fourth of July is still a week away, but Beverly has already hung up bunting and a flag and planted red and white impatiens in the flower beds by the front door. Beverly’s BMW is not in the driveway. Janice rings the doorbell, peering through the front window into the dim living room, but sees no sign of life. She can hear footsteps echoing through the hallway, though, bare feed thudding along the wood floors toward the door.

When the door swings open, Beverly’s teenage son, Mark, stands there, sullen and silent, his hooded sweatshirt yanked over his head despite the heat, his eyes bloodshot, his mottled skin angrily mapping every red pimple.

‘Hello, Mark. Is your mother here?’ Janice asks.

‘No,’ he says. His voice is nasal and stuffy – has he been crying?

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s gone,’ he says, which elucidates nothing at all. Janice stands looking at him dumbly, pondering that word: Gone? Gone where? Gone to the grocery store? Gone away? She looks at the boy – he’s definitely been crying, and despite her general alarm she feels a stab of tenderness for the dour child.

‘Mark, is everything okay?’ She steps toward him, her hand half-lifted, tugged by a desire to pull him into her bosom. But Mark shrugs and punches the door slightly toward her, as if to block her way.

‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘Thanks. I’ll let her know you were here.’ And then he closes the door, leaving Janice baffled on his front steps. There is nothing for her to do but go back home and hope that she’s making something out of nothing. A forgotten date, a crying kid, it could be anything and nothing at all. But she remembers a confession Beverly made a few months back, after a couple of Bloody Marys in the club lounge, about how her relationship with Louis had been strained for some time, and she can’t help but wonder now if Louis has left her. If she doesn’t hear back from Beverly by the morning, Janice decides, she’ll come marching back and sit on her friend’s doorstep until Beverly tells her what’s wrong.

She pulls into her own driveway just after two and sits in her car for a moment, gazing up at her house. They painted it a pale yellow several years back, the color of a cashmere sweater, and the house seems to glow in the afternoon sun. It’s a graceful, regal building, in a classic Georgian Colonial architectural style, with manicured hedges and pilasters framing the front entrance and ivy creeping up the siding, a house that makes her feel like she’s a part of some great American tradition. Looking at it, she experiences relief, as if she’s ridden out a small squall and has arrived back in a safe port.

But inside, the house is too quiet. The answering machine is silent: no messages. Janice’s breath is loud in the empty kitchen as she puts away the groceries and the champagne, echoing off the stainless steel appliances, the Calphalon pans hanging above the kitchen island on their custom-designed iron rack, the yellow-veined granite counters. In the back garden, James, her new pool boy, has arrived for his biweekly visit. He pushes his net slowly against the current of the water, lifts a single leaf, swings the pole to the side of the pool, and taps the net to deposit the leaf on an accumulating pile of soggy greenery. Janice watches him from the kitchen window. When he looks up, she waves at him, and he lifts a hand and smiles. A worm of sweat rolls down his brow as he upends a jug of chlorine into the deep end.

Janice sets the oven to pre-heat and quickly begins arranging the stargazer lilies into a centerpiece, with one eye on the clock: she is already behind on her cooking, and she needs to clean, too (her housekeeper, fired earlier in the month when Janice discovered that the liquor cabinet was suspiciously empty, has yet to be replaced). As she sets the table with the good silver, she snaps the television back on and, standing in the middle of the living room with her arms crossed against the chill of the air-conditioning, learns that the Applied Pharmaceuticals stock has closed out the day at 141¼. She absorbs this news neutrally, unable to conjure the breathless excitement she had only six hours earlier. Instead, she just feels weary: weary of taking all of this in on her own, weary of waiting for her husband to call her. Despite his schedule, he should have wanted to share the excitement, the second it happened. In this moment of weakness, what creeps in is the sneaking suspicion that her enthusiasm for reviving their marriage is not matched by her husband, that she is going to have to do all the work.

But she perseveres with her table settings, folding three napkins into swan shapes, the way she always has for special occasions, just like Paul’s mother showed her so many years ago. The first time Paul took her back to his parents’ house in Connecticut for Christmas, her senior year of college, it felt like she had stepped into one of those homes her mother had once cleaned. There was the tree, decorated with matching gilt ornaments made of real glass; the homemade stuffing, not from a box; the napkins folded like origami; the sharp-scented pine boughs over the front portico. A portico! Cunning crystal salt and pepper shakers shaped like Christmas trees! The scene winked at her with such familiarity that she almost wept. When Paul’s mother asked her whether her own mother would miss her at the holiday, Janice thought of her, working an extra shift for the overtime pay and then eating a microwaved turkey dinner alone, and lied. ‘No,’ she said. ‘She’s celebrating with friends. She’s baking a ham.’

Despite the cordial napkin-folding lessons, Paul’s mother had been less than thrilled to hear, months later, about their shotgun wedding. Janice always suspected that Elaine had more ambitious aspirations for her only son’s wife, a suspicion that was finally confirmed a few years back, during their last visit to Connecticut, where an Alzheimer’s-addled Elaine was decaying in a senior citizens’ home. Elaine had grabbed Janice’s arm with her ropy hands. ‘I know you,’ she had croaked, her breath sour in Janice’s face. ‘You’re the tramp that trapped my son.’

It wasn’t quite that simple. If fifteen-year-old Janice had imagined college as a place where one went to meet a rich husband, twenty-year-old Janice had grown beyond that. This Janice – Jan to her friends – was a French major known, within her sorority, for her bohemian streak. During her first year at the university, an art history professor had written on one of her essays that she had a ‘sharp mind and an artistic spirit,’ and she had taken him at his word. She read Balzac in the original French, took classes in ceramics (producing a series of very respectable teapots), sewed her own skirts, learned to cook pot au-feu. She even took up smoking Gauloises at parties and liked the way they conferred upon her an appearance of continental nonchalance. By her junior year she was planning a post-graduation year in Paris, where her thesis adviser said he might be able to arrange a job at a student travel agency. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she was thrilled by herself.

Paul came as a surprise, a quiet and intense MBA student who materialized by her elbow at a sorority mixer at the beginning of her senior year and doggedly pursued her throughout the fall. When he looked at her, sometimes, she felt like a valedictory prize he had claimed as his own, and she would blush at how much this pleased her. By his side, she experienced a new stillness: he could calmly command a room like that, tilt it toward him until he seemed to be at its vortex. And yet he was vulnerable to her too. One night, they drank too much Chianti, and he told her about his banker father’s expectations for him, and his mother’s patrician coldness, and cried real tears, and she knew she was in love.

Of course, she hadn’t intentionally forgotten to take the pill; not at all. The pill just passed through her mind, like water through a sieve: graduation was looming, just a few months away, and the question of her future was growing less clear by the day. She had the job lined up in Paris and a room in the home of a young couple who were friends of friends of friends, but Paul no longer smiled benignly when she talked about leaving, as if her year abroad were some charming quirk; instead he glowered like she was betraying him. But if he was so angry with her, why didn’t he ask her to stay? Even though she wasn’t quite sure what her answer should be if he did beg her not to go, she grew increasingly concerned when he didn’t. Would he just allow this casual amputation? The thought made her ill. She spent most nights motionless and frozen under the old cotton sheets, unable to sleep. Lying there, in a black fugue, she would remember the smooth pink oval, wrapped in tinfoil and buried in her make-up bag in the bathroom, and think: I should get up and take the pill. I can’t forget the pill. And then the next thing she knew it would be morning and she’d be on her way to class and she would have forgotten entirely that she’d never taken it. And she wouldn’t remember again until three days later, when she guiltily gulped down four pills in a row with a glass of milk. She should have said no when Paul crawled in her bed, the way she usually would when this happened, should have told him of her mistake and insisted on a condom, but she didn’t have the willpower to turn him down, not now when he was so distant anyway. And so she lay in bed afterward as he slept beside her in a warm placid sleep and tried to forget that she had forgotten.

She could have gotten an abortion – there were girls who did, even some who treated it like a badge of honor – but the truth was that she never even considered it as an option. When she got the test results back, she was surprised by the pang of pleasure she experienced: here it was, her future as a wife and mother, the mistress of a beautiful home overlooking a lake somewhere, decided for her just like that; and it was strangely, comfortingly, familiar, like slipping on an old favorite dress she had forgotten she owned.

She knew Paul wouldn’t flee when she told him she was pregnant, just as she knew that she was relinquishing herself into good hands. And maybe she would be giving something up, but wasn’t this comfortable life of the potential Mrs. Miller far more promising, long-term, than any impulses she might have followed on her own?

The day after she told Paul she was pregnant, he took her out to the park overlooking the bay, where children were flying kites in what felt like hurricane-force gales. The setting sun caught in the fog over the city and rimmed the gray clouds with nuclear hues. Spring was late, and the temperature was just slightly above freezing. They walked to the retaining wall to look out at the water, and he dropped to one knee.

The grass was muddy but he gamely let his khakis sink into the dirt. He pulled out a black velvet box and held it in his hands. She broke out in goose bumps at the sight.

‘I know it’s been hard lately,’ he said, each hoarse word rising stiff and slow. ‘And I’m really sorry about that. But Janice, you have to know that from the very first moment I saw you, I knew you were a very unique woman, someone who is just so full of life. I can’t think of anyone I would rather have as the mother of my children. So maybe this is all very sudden – sooner than we’d wanted – and we have a lot to figure out, but I’m really optimistic. Optimistic about us. We’ll make a great team.’ He paused. The wind lashed hair across Janice’s cheeks. ‘I love you.’

Janice had started crying when his knee hit the grass, from relief and joy, and in part because of the sea salt that was being whipped into her eyes by the wind. He opened the box, revealing a simple gold band with a tiny chip of a diamond. Modest but tasteful. By the time he said the words ‘Will you marry me?’ she was sobbing so hard she could barely hear him.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I will. I’m so glad you want me.’

She let him slide the ring onto her finger and smiled, feeling strangely split, as if she’d triumphed and failed at the same time. Was this supposed to be the happiest moment of her life? She mostly felt dizzy, as if she’d just been sucked into a cyclone and was floating there in circles above the ground. Paul must have noticed the strange expression on her face as she looked at the ring on her finger, because he stood up and took her hand, covering it with his.

‘Don’t worry, I’m going to get you a bigger one soon,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to do this, we’ll do it right.’

Twenty-nine years later, she can track the progress of their marriage – and Paul’s rise through the corporate ranks – by the stack of velvet boxes in her armoire. He did get her a bigger ring, four years later, after her first miscarriage (the second and third miscarriages merited a peridot necklace and a pair of garnet earrings, respectively). And a 3 carat princess-cut diamond arrived nine years after that – long after she had taken her doctor’s advice and given up trying to have another child – when they were surprised by her pregnancy with Lizzie. And lastly, for their twentieth anniversary nine years ago, a 5.1-carat Asscher-cut diamond, with 1.5-carat baguettes, set in a platinum band – a stone that matched Paul’s latest position as CEO of an Internet start-up, their new four-bedroom house, and the Porsche SUV in the driveway. This was a diamond so big, in fact, that at first she found herself embarrassed by its ostentatiousness and nostalgic for the modest diamond she had once worn – until she saw Beverly’s fortieth-birthday present from Louis, a 7.8-carat Harry Winston shocker that drooped off her finger, and realized that size was always relative.

Janice wonders, abstractly, what this new success will merit. Maybe, she thinks, he’ll arrive home tonight with another velvet box to install in the armoire, and she tries to muster the excitement for this, but mostly she just wants him to come home.