“Don’t be sorry.”

“Also, I don’t have bad breath,” said Jane. “I’ve checked with my dentist. Many times. But we’d been out for pizza beforehand. I had garlic breath.”

So that was the reason for the gum obsession.

“Your breath smells like daisies,” said Madeline. “I have an acute sense of smell.”

“I think it was the shock of it more than anything,” said Jane. “The way he changed. He seemed so nice, and I’d always thought I was a pretty good judge of character. After that, I felt like I couldn’t really trust my own instincts.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Madeline. Could she have picked him? Would she have fallen for his Mary Poppins song?

“I don’t regret it,” said Jane. “Because I got Ziggy. My miracle baby. It was like I woke up when he was born. It was like he had nothing to do with that night. This beautiful tiny baby. It’s only as he’s started to turn into a little person with his own personality that it even occurred to me, that he might, that he might have, you know, inherited something from his . . . his father.”

For the first time, her voice broke.

“Whenever Ziggy behaves in a way that seems out of character, I worry. Like on orientation day, when Amabella said he choked her. Of all the things to happen. Choking. I couldn’t believe it. And sometimes I feel like I can see something in his eyes that reminds me of, of him, and I think, ‘What if my beautiful Ziggy has a secret cruel streak? What if my son does that to a girl one day?’”

“Ziggy does not have a cruel streak,” said Madeline. Her desperate need to comfort Jane cemented her belief in Ziggy’s goodness. “He’s a lovely, sweet boy. I’m sure your mother is right, he’s your grandfather reincarnated.”

Jane laughed. She picked up her mobile phone and looked at the time on the screen. “It’s so late! You should go home to your family. I’ve kept you here this long, blathering on about myself.”

“You weren’t blathering.”

Jane stood up. She stretched her arms high above her head so that her T-shirt rose and Madeline could see her skinny, white, vulnerable stomach. “Thank you so much for helping me get this damned project done.”

“My pleasure.” Madeline stood as well. She looked at where Ziggy had written “Ziggy’s dad.” “Will you ever tell him his name?”

“Oh, God, I don’t know,” said Jane. “Maybe when he’s twenty-one, when he’s old enough for me to tell him the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“He might be dead,” said Madeline hopefully. “Karma might have gotten him in the end. Have you ever Googled him?”

“No,” said Jane. There was a complicated expression on her face. Madeline couldn’t tell if it meant that she was lying or that even the thought of Googling him was too painful.

“I’ll Google the awful creep,” said Madeline. “What was his name again? Saxon Banks, right? I’ll find him and then I’ll put out a hit on him. There must be some kind of online murder-a-bastard service these days.”

Jane didn’t laugh. “Please don’t Google him, Madeline. Please don’t. I don’t know why I hate the thought of your looking him up, but I just do.”

“Of course I won’t if you don’t want me to, I was being flippant. Stupid. I shouldn’t make light of it. Ignore me.”

She held her arms out and gave Jane a hug.

To her surprise, Jane, who always presented a stiff cheek for a kiss, stepped forward and held her tightly.

“Thank you for bringing over the cardboard,” she said.

Madeline patted Jane’s clean-smelling hair. She’d nearly said, You’re welcome, my beautiful girl, like she did to Chloe, but the word “beautiful” seemed so complicated and fraught right now. Instead she said, “You’re welcome, my lovely girl.”

33.

Are there any weapons in your house?” asked the counselor.

“Pardon?” said Celeste. “Did you say weapons?”

Her heart was still pounding from the fact that she was actually here, in this small yellow-walled room, with a row of cactus plants on the windowsill and colorful government-issued posters with hotline numbers on the walls, cheap office furniture on beautiful old floorboards. The counseling offices were in a federation cottage on the Pacific Highway on the Lower North Shore. The room she was in probably used to be a bedroom. Someone had once slept here, never dreaming that in the next century people would be sharing shameful secrets in this room.

When she’d gotten up this morning Celeste had been sure she wouldn’t come. She intended to ring up and cancel as soon as she got the children to school, but then she’d found herself in the car, putting the address into the GPS, driving up the winding peninsula road, thinking the whole way that she would pull over in the next five minutes and call them up and say so sorry, but her car had broken down, she would reschedule another day. But she kept driving, as if she were in a dream or a trance, thinking of other things like what she’d cook for dinner, and then, before she knew it, she was pulling into the parking area behind the house and watching a woman coming out, puffing furiously on a cigarette as she opened the door of a banged-up old white car. A woman wearing jeans and a crop top, with tattoos like awful injuries all the way down her thin white arms.

She’d envisaged Perry’s face. His amused, superior face. “You’re not serious, are you? This is just so . . .”