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You’ve been sleeping since yesterday.” Pamela sat on the edge of the bed in Virgie’s Martha’s Vineyard bedroom, holding a cool compress to her head like Virgie was sick with fever.

She sat up in her blue bouclé jacket; why hadn’t she changed out of her stiff skirt suit?

She felt okay, no aches or sore throat. Then the reality came to her.

Melody’s face, the girl with the strawberry bathing suit, the house on Nantucket—why did Charlie have anything to do with a house on Nantucket?

—and Virgie felt the weight of an iron anchor press against her chest.

“When you didn’t get out of bed this morning,” Pamela said, a kerchief tied around her head like she’d been doing housework, “Betsy came to get me.”

Virgie couldn’t remember getting home from Nantucket, parking the car, climbing into her bed. It scared her. “Has Charlie phoned?”

“Twice,” she said. “I told him you weren’t feeling well, and Louisa would call him tonight with an update.”

The ugly details of what she’d discovered on Nantucket wasn’t something she could share with her daughters.

As angry as she was with Charlie, she wouldn’t take him away from her girls.

Virgie turned on the shower, letting the bathroom grow cloudy with steam.

Lathering her hair, her mind went to the reporter who stopped her last week.

The photo he’d snapped. If the news of this other woman made its way into the world, the morality police would close in.

There was only so much decency you could expect from a newspaper, even the Sun , who would call it something obnoxious like “Mr. Whiting’s Love Nest.”

The humiliation she would suffer as his wife, forced to smile despite the gossip rags, holding his hand at a campaign rally. Unless she refused.

Unless she filed for divorce. She certainly had the grounds.

With her damp hair brushed straight, Virgie padded down the crooked stairs.

Pamela was in the kitchen preparing a fresh bouquet of hydrangeas and daylilies.

It was two p.m. and sailing let out at three.

Then the girls would waltz in with smiles and happy stories.

Virgie needed to pull herself together. There was a bologna sandwich waiting on a plate, and Pamela fetched her a glass of ice water.

Virgie stood at the window and nibbled the sandwich, staring out at the weeping willow. Pamela appeared next to her.

“Thank you for being here,” Virgie said, forcing herself to eat and drink despite the bowling ball spinning in her stomach.

“You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong, Virgie.

By the look of you, I know it’s bad. But you asked me what would make me happy recently, and I think I know what it is.

” She wrapped her fingers around the back of the chair.

“It’s faith. I need to have more faith in what’s possible and what seems impossible too. ”

“Faith and trust and pixie dust.” Virgie smiled weakly.

She was repeating the quote from Peter Pan that she’d said to her girls often when they were younger.

The words had rung true all these years because it had made her think that everyone needed to believe in the unknown.

It always made her think of Charlie too.

His faith that he could be elected, that his background as an orphan would be his greatest strength.

Everywhere he went, a little pixie dust followed. To her, Charlie was magic.

“Maybe some pixie dust, sure.” Pamela smiled wanly, then she pulled Kate Chopin’s The Awakening out of her apron. “I finished it.” A few pages were dog-eared. “It’s such a sad story, and some of the racy scenes made me blush, but I think I see why you like it.”

It touched Virgie that Pamela had read it; she didn’t think she’d bother. “I just wanted you to know that a woman is not alone in her feelings. Anyone can feel empty inside, even the women you met here who seemed to have everything with their baubles and beautiful houses.”

Pamela adjusted the folds of her skirt. “I think I can stop drinking, and I think you can get over whatever happened in Nantucket.”

Virgie fell silent. She imagined going to a divorce attorney.

Carrying a stack of papers over for Charlie to sign, his grimace when he realized what she was asking for.

A darker thought emerged too. Charlie in their bedroom with the shades drawn, the depths to which she’d seen him despair when he’d fallen into his nervous condition.

It had happened only once, but the doctors had said extreme stress may cause it to resurface.

As much as Virgie hated him right now, as much as he’d hurt her, she knew what a divorce would do to him.

For once, it had nothing to do with the campaign.

He would be losing the only family he ever had.

Well, he should have thought about that before he had a love child with your best friend.

Virgie moved outside to the porch, pulling a soft throw over her on the wicker sofa, despite the day’s warmth.

It was true. She should be coming up with a plan to pack up her things in Washington.

Maybe she and the girls could move to the island full-time, but she knew it wasn’t what she wanted.

It would make the most sense for Virgie to rent another apartment in the District with at least two bedrooms—they could squeeze in—but she didn’t exactly have a job to pay for it.

The fighting, the confrontations that would ensue, a shared custody plan where she and Charlie avoided each other on the days they exchanged the girls.

The idea left her feeling like she’d been zipped into a corset. She exhaled, folding her hands in her lap, watching Pamela as she joined her outside. “I just don’t know how to fix it this time.”

The wicker sofa squeaked under Pamela’s weight. “No, Virgie. Don’t say that. You told me that I must keep getting up. I must keep trying. You must too.”

It felt so natural to slide her arm around Pamela’s shoulders, to feel her drop her head against Virgie’s upper arm.

Weeks ago, she had looked at Pamela and thought her circumstances quite different from her own, but they weren’t really.

They were two women saddled with the greatest responsibility of all: taking care of those that they loved while trying to take care of themselves.

“I will try, I promise,” Virgie said. She had always said she wouldn’t leave Charlie because he needed her, but maybe it was vice versa.

Maybe she wasn’t as strong as she thought.

She considered what her life would look like without Charlie.

She was always telling her girls that they didn’t need to be married, that they could do anything on their own.

But maybe she was selling them a falsehood.

Because it was so much harder to do everything on your own.

Look at how challenging this summer had been.

Her head felt wobbly then. Did she want a divorce or didn’t she?

Of course you don’t want a divorce , she heard herself say.

She wasn’t ready to leave Charlie. They had met for a reason in 1947—they had given each other strength and security and possibility—and cosmically, she believed, they were not finished with each other yet, even if she wasn’t sure how she’d ever forgive him.

“Do you remember the part in The Awakening when Edna learns to swim?” Virgie had always been drawn to the scene.

It was in the first third of the book, a turning point for Edna’s character, because learning to swim gave her certain freedoms to move through her life (and the sea) without fear of being swept away.

Pamela went inside and fetched the novel, opening it to the appropriate page.

“Yes, here,” she said. After her life-affirming solo swim, Edna lies in the hammock, her husband beckoning her into the bedroom: “She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did.”

The Awakening had given Virgie strength when she’d read it as a college student—whispering ideas to her about marriage that her parents had never displayed—and the book had given her a boost when she’d read it last year, just before she wrote her first Dear Virgie column.

Books didn’t just transport you to faraway places, Virgie believed.

They could sharpen your identity and remind you who you aspired to be.

She was hungry then, suddenly famished, and she went inside to get her sandwich, Pamela on her heels.

“Well, Pamela, maybe that’s what you and I need to do.

Figure out how to swim.” Pamela nodded along, but Virgie could tell by the way she stared down at the book cover that she was confused.

“What I mean is, you’ll need to relearn how to live, and I will need to learn…

” Here, Virgie paused. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the rays of sun warming her face.

“I will need to relearn what it means to be Charlie’s wife. ”

It was too much to explain to Pamela, but Virgie knew she was right.

To overcome, she couldn’t give in to sadness; she needed to swim against the tide.

She would keep her principles and she’d be a good mother.

She would be strong, stronger than she believed herself to be as a senator’s wife, and she would stand on her own, cutting down those branches that had grown into Charlie’s.

She would trust that she could emerge from this mess in one piece, she would write her way out of it so her daughters learned what strength really looked like.

With her eyes still shut, Virgie imagined herself standing under a meteor shower, each spark sending a bolt of bravery through her bones.

She opened her eyes wide to the bright blue harbor outside.

The answer was in front of her all along.

All this time she’d defined herself as Charlie’s wife, Charlie’s friend, Charlie’s biggest supporter, and when she grew angry with him this summer, she’d fought back by being everything he didn’t want.

But that had failed too. Virgie had to dig down deeper, she had to look in the mirror, and she had to say to herself: What is important to you , Virgie Whiting?

She knew the answer. It was so simple, and it had been right in front of her all along. It was control. She wanted to be in control of herself, of her girls, of her future.