“It’s outrageous,” said Madeline. “I am incandescent with rage.”

There was a burst of laughter in the background. It sounded like a cocktail party, not a book club. The sound of their laughter made Jane feel stodgy and left out, even though she’d been invited.

“I’d better let you go,” said Jane. “Have fun.”

“I’ll call you,” said Madeline. “Don’t worry. We’ll fix this.”

As Jane hung up, there was another knock on the door. It was the woman from downstairs, Chelsea’s mother, Irene, holding out the fifty-dollar note. She was a tall, austere woman with short gray hair and intelligent eyes.

“You’re not paying her fifty dollars for doing nothing,” she said.

Jane took the money gratefully. She’d felt a twinge after she’d given it to Chelsea. Fifty dollars was fifty dollars. “I thought, you know, the inconvenience.”

“She’s fifteen. She had to walk up a flight of stairs. Is Ziggy OK?”

“We’re having some trouble at school,” said Jane.

“Oh dear,” said Irene.

“Bullying,” expounded Jane. She didn’t really know Irene all that well, except for their chats in the stairwell.

“Someone is bullying poor little Ziggy?” Irene frowned.

“They say that Ziggy is doing the bullying.”

“Oh rubbish,” said Irene. “Don’t believe it. I taught primary school for twenty-four years. I can pick a bully a mile off. Ziggy is no bully.”

“Well, I hope not,” said Jane. “I mean, I didn’t think so.”

“I bet it’s the parents making the biggest fuss, isn’t it?” Irene gave her a shrewd look. “Parents take far too much notice of their children these days. Bring back the good old days of benign indifference, I reckon. If I were you, I’d take all this with a grain of salt. Little kids, little problems. Wait till you’ve got drugs and sex and social media to worry about.”

Jane smiled politely and held up the fifty-dollar note. “Well, thanks. Tell Chelsea I’ll book her up for babysitting another night.”

She closed the door firmly, mildly aggravated by the “little kids, little problems” comment. As she walked down the hallway she could hear Ziggy still crying: not the angry, demanding cry of a child who wants attention, or the startled cry of a child who has hurt himself. This was a grown-up type of crying: involuntary, soft, sad weeping.

Jane walked into his bedroom and stood for a moment in the doorway, watching him lying facedown on the bed, his shoulders shaking and his little hands clutching at the fabric of his Star Wars quilt. She felt something hard and powerful within her. Right this moment she didn’t care if Ziggy had hurt Amabella or not, or if he’d inherited some evil secret tendency for violence from his biological father, and anyway, who said the tendency for violence came from his father, because if Renata were standing in front of her right now, Jane would hit her. She would hit her with pleasure. She would hit her so hard that her expensive-looking glasses would fly off her face. Maybe she’d even crush those glasses beneath her heel like the quintessential bully. And if that made her a helicopter parent, then who the f**k cares?

“Ziggy?” She sat down on the bed next to him and rubbed his back.

He lifted his tear-stained face.

“Let’s go visit Grandma and Grandpa. We’ll take our pajamas and stay the night there.”

He sniffed. A little shudder of grief ran through his body.

“And let’s eat chips and chocolates and treats all the way there.”

Samantha: I know I’ve been laughing and making jokes and whatever, so you probably think I’m a heartless bitch, but it’s like a defense mechanism or something. I mean, this is a tragedy. The funeral was just . . . When that darling little boy put the letter on the coffin? I can’t even. I just lost it. We all lost it.

Thea: Very distressing. It reminded me of Princess Diana’s funeral, when little Prince Harry left the note saying “Mummy.” Not that we’re talking about the royal family here, obviously.

44.

It didn’t take Celeste long to realize that this was going to be the sort of book club where the book was secondary to the proceedings. She felt a mild disappointment. She’d been looking forward to talking about the book. She’d even, embarrassingly, prepared for book club, like a good little lawyer, marking up a few pages with Post-it notes and writing a few pithy comments in the margins.

She slid her book off her lap and slipped it into her bag before anyone noticed and started teasing her about it. The teasing would be fond and good-humored, but she no longer had the resilience for teasing. Marriage to Perry meant she was always ready to justify her actions, constantly monitoring what she’d just said or done, while simultaneously feeling defensive about the defensiveness, her thoughts and feelings twisting into impenetrable knots, so that sometimes, like right now, sitting in a room with normal people, all the things she couldn’t say rose in her throat and for a moment she couldn’t breathe.

What would these people think if they knew there was someone like her sitting across from them, passing them the sushi? These were polite, nonsmoking people who joined book clubs and renovated and spoke nicely. Husbands and wives didn’t hit each other in these sorts of congenial little social circles.

The reason no one was talking about the book was because everyone was talking about the petition to have Ziggy suspended. Some people hadn’t heard about it yet, and the people who did know had the enjoyable task of passing on the shocking development. Everyone contributed what information they had been able to offer.