“Yes.”
“Why?”
Cruz gives the Chief an exasperated look. “Leo is my friend. I wanted to talk to him.”
“Did going over there have anything to do with this picture?”
“Yeah. I could see Leo had gotten the picture from Peter as well, so I wanted to talk to him about it. Plus, we’d had that fight…”
“When he punched you? And gave you the shiner?”
“See? You already know everything.”
“Do you mind my asking what the picture was of?”
“Yes,” Cruz says. “I mind.” They’ve arrived back at the store. “Can I go, please?”
The Chief will talk to the night custodian, Donald. And also to the Bridgeman kid. “Yes,” he says. “You can go.”
Amy
She comes home from work with a bottle of Cliff Lede cabernet, one of JP’s favorite splurge wines, and the bourbon-marinated steak tips from the Nantucket Meat and Fish market. It’s too early for local corn but this is the perfect opportunity for Amy to try a warm potato salad recipe that she found in the New York Times cooking column.
Amy finds JP sitting in their bedroom with the air-conditioning running on high. （Note: If she were in the bedroom alone with the AC running full blast like this, he would turn it down, saying, This thing burns money.）
“Hello?” she says. She’s surprised to see him here. She thought he said he’d be home around eight.
He whips around as though she’s caught him at something. And sure enough, in front of him on the bed is a cardboard box filled with pictures—of Vivi, of him and Vivi together, of the kids when they were little. Amy is so busy scanning the pictures that it takes her a minute to realize that JP is crying.
Amy walks out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her, and goes into the kitchen to compose herself. Wine; she needs wine. The Cliff Lede is too precious to open, but she finds half a bottle of Whispering Angel rosé from the night before. She pours a glass and takes a sip. It wasn’t pornography, she thinks, and she knows plenty of women who surprise their husbands or partners while they’re in the middle of that. But this is maybe even worse—all those pictures of Vivi overlapping one another. It was like something pulled from Amy’s nightmares.
Vivi is dead, Amy reminds herself. She is never coming back, so she is no longer competition. JP can pine for her all he wants. Lorna said, “The man should be allowed to grieve. They were married sixteen years, Pigeon. She’s the mother of his children.”
Does Amy have it in her to be a supportive partner right now? Yes, of course.
Holding the wine, she reenters the bedroom. She places a gentle hand on JP’s back. “How’re you doing?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t believe she’s gone. I just can’t wrap my mind around it.” He holds up a picture of Vivi with a red rose between her teeth. Amy wants to snatch it out of his hand and rip it in half.
Amy will not nurture this jealousy. She will let it go. “She was so pretty,” Amy says. “So…alive.”
JP smiles up at Amy, grateful for this compliment about his ex-wife. Amy sits on the far corner of the bed and sifts through the photographs. Where has he been hiding these? She thought she had checked out every nook and cranny of the house. This is a treasure trove of images of JP’s life before Amy: Vivi and JP in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, Vivi falling forward on ice skates, Vivi drinking hot chocolate with a dab of whipped cream on her nose. There are wedding photos—Vivi’s dress was an off-the-shoulder snow-white satin gown with a nipped-in waist and a full three-quarter-length skirt poofed by tulle underneath. It’s not Amy’s taste at all but Vivi, of course, looks radiant with her cute pixie cut and her dramatic red lips. Savannah, her maid of honor, wore a dowdy Laura Ashley print; this must have been before Savannah made her switch to neutrals, or maybe this dress was the reason for the switch. There are pictures from various travels—a deserted beach, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in some far-flung, dusty town, a ski slope, Big Ben, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House, Vivi in front of a cityscape that is either Toronto or Seattle, Amy is afraid to ask which. There are the new-baby pictures—Vivi in a bed at Nantucket Cottage Hospital with Willa, then with Carson as Willa grumpily looks on. There are Christmas pictures （one of the babies tucked under the tree like a present） and Thanksgiving （Vivi, JP, two of the kids, Savannah, Lucinda, and Penny Rosen）。 There are Nantucket summer photos—picnics on the beach at Fortieth Pole, striped bass on the line; Vivi lying across the bow of Lucinda’s sailboat, Arabesque; JP and Vivi at the Galley for dinner; Vivi in a beach chair with a blanket draped over her in Lucinda’s front yard as fireworks are shot off a barge in the harbor on the Fourth of July.