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“Mom, I’m in the middle of something,” Louisa said, jumping up and lifting the needle on her turntable. “You can’t just start making demands on me.”

“Actually, honey, I can make demands on you.” Virgie opened the top drawer of her daughter’s white wicker dresser, lifting out her favorite striped bathing suit and tossing it to Louisa. “C’mon, scoot.”

“I’m old enough to stay here alone.” Louisa tapped her pen against her hairless thigh, clean and smooth since she’d started using Wisk hair removal cream a few years before.

How much younger Louisa had seemed then.

Even last summer, the girls had lined up shells on their bedroom windowsills as a form of decoration, and they were still there: clamshells, oysters, slipper shells.

“I know you’re old enough, and I leave you alone all the time, but right now, we’re going to the beach.”

Louisa threw her pen at the blanket. “Well, don’t expect me to swim. I’m not putting my suit on.”

After calling her name through the house, Virgie discovered Aggie on the front porch in a white wicker chair, her legs draped over the peeling arm, a sketchbook balanced in her lap.

She’d drawn in detail a basketball court, a full roster of players symbolized by small circles, with arrows arranging them in various plays.

It was lovely if it didn’t portend a conversation Virgie was tired of having.

“Can you go get your bathing suit on? We’re headed to Katama.” Of all the Whiting women, Aggie was the one you’d look to if you needed saving from a rip current; her muscles pulled at the water with the strength of an Olympian.

Aggie shaded the free throw line. “I just don’t get why I can’t play, Mom.”

“Oh, Agatha, I’m not sure how much clearer we can be.

Your father said no, I said no, and our answers aren’t going to change.

” Virgie should have known that forbidding her daughter from joining the private Bethesda–Chevy Chase women’s basketball team would only deepen Aggie’s desire to play.

The idea had felt like a Dear Virgie column, and before everything with Charlie unraveled, she’d planned to propose the idea to her editor: Virgie would pen a fake letter from a mother feeling frustrated that her daughter was insisting on playing a sport that was rough and physical, and then Virgie would respond with step-by-step advice on how to disengage from a power struggle with your daughter.

First: rather than emphasizing what she can’t do, find something else for her to focus on.

But alas, Virgie would never see that column in print.

She’d no longer run to the front door for Sunday’s edition of the paper, smelling the newsprint before she saw her byline, opening to the Styles page, where she’d find a small square photo of herself running beside the Dear Virgie logo.

She had been so angry with Charlie in these last few days that Virgie hadn’t had a moment to grieve the column.

Now it hit her square in the chest, the weight of it like a ferry boat plowing right over her. All to protect his campaign.

Virgie still had to pack the thermos with ice water; she hoped Louisa was gathering the towels.

The day felt like it was slipping away from her, or maybe it was that her life was slipping away.

“Why is it so hard to get us to the beach?” she hollered at Aggie, louder than she’d intended.

“It’s eighty-five degrees out and your cheeks look as red as strawberries. The ocean will cool you down.”

All last winter, Aggie had begged her parents to let her try out for the team—she’d sat in Charlie’s study in their Kalorama house on numerous evenings, Charlie smoking a cigar, while Aggie tried to make the case that basketball was no different from any other sport.

This was a league for girls—it’s not as though she was joining a men’s team.

“A woman’s body isn’t made for that kind of strain,” Charlie argued.

“Your arms don’t even have the strength to get the ball up in the net. ”

“Oh, Charlie. I’m sure she could make a basket. I’m more worried the boys will tease her at school for playing a man’s sport.”

Her husband swiveled his chair, placing his stockinged feet on the desk. “And what if another player slams into her and she falls on the court and gets hurt?”

“I agree with Daddy,” Virgie said, nodding and leaving the study to make clear the conversation was over.

The mailman walked a letter up the steps of their front porch, making small talk about the island’s fireworks that night in Oak Bluffs.

“I’m going to find a way to play,” Aggie said when the mailman left, like it was a fact that Virgie would just have to accept. Her daughters made these kinds of declarations all the time. Virgie had learned to tune them out. Was it possible that she could simply tune out Charlie as well?

Thirty minutes later, they all piled into the car. The little ones, James and Betsy, squeezed into the front seat and took apart Oreo Cremes. There was a parking spot near the first entrance to the beach and Virgie pulled into it. In the blazing heat, they set up near a large driftwood log.

“See you later.” Virgie smiled at the girls.

She peeled off her sundress and raced to the water, diving in.

When she surfaced, Aggie and Betsy were right behind her, laughing and swimming nearby; on the beach, Louisa rubbed tanning oil onto her fair skin while a couple of teenage boys shyly approached.

A zap of fear coursed through Virgie. It was as though her fifteen-year-old wore a sign on her chest that flashed the words: Come get me into trouble .

She noticed James in the shallows, kicking at the water.

“Why won’t he come in?” Virgie called to Betsy, who was floating up and over each gushing wave as it rolled in. Aggie began swimming laps.

“He says he can’t swim in the ocean, only the sound.”

“An islander who can’t swim?” Virgie stared at the boys near Louisa, who had convinced her to play catch with a beach ball.

She joined them near the dunes in her shorts, a tightening creating a viselike sensation in Virgie’s throat.

This is how it started with Brandon Millerton.

A few innocent flirtations that turned her daughter into a…

She exhaled, wishing she could wrap her daughter in shrink-wrap and ship her to an all-girls school.

“I’ll get James,” Virgie said, swimming toward the skinny child; his shorts were too big and sloppily stitched in the waistband.

Her youngest had met the boy back when he’d been enrolled in the local sailing school’s scholarship program, and they’d become fast friends even though he was one year older.

Virgie had a soft spot for him too. Something about James had always reminded her of Charlie, how it didn’t seem like anyone fed him, how no one was ever accounting for his whereabouts.

He was like a piece of tape always looking to get stuck to something.

The sun blanketed her as she emerged from the sea, calling to the boy, “I’ll teach you to swim, young man.”

He shielded his light eyes, curious to her since his skin was bronze like a penny. On either side of his back were two knobby shoulder bones. “But… the waves.”

She beckoned him. “It’s wise to respect the ocean, but you shouldn’t let fear stop you from doing the things you want to do. I’m terribly afraid of heights, but I’ve taken elevators up the tallest skyscrapers just to see the view.”

His eyes filled with wonder. “Have you been to the top of the Empire State Building?”

“I have.” She smiled, nudging him toward the sea. “Do you want to hold my hand?” James reached for it, and she wrapped her fingers around his.

Even if she didn’t know what to do about Charlie or her column, she knew how to help this boy.

She wondered then if avoidance was the key to a happy life; if she should simply pretend that the column meant nothing to her and return to her status quo as a senator’s wife, the mother of three beautiful, smart girls.

Still, something niggled at her, a sense that Charlie had struck her like a match, igniting an angriness that had been tamped down inside her.

As the first wave crashed toward them, Virgie lifted James up over her head, feeling his abdomen tense in her grasp. But then they were out in the deeper part of the ocean, treading water, Betsy showing James how to go over a wave or dive headfirst into it.

You can’t let fear stop you from doing what you want to do.

It was Charlie who taught her that. Charlie who had every right to discount himself as a serious contender for the U.S.

Senate when they’d walked onto stages holding Louisa’s tiny hand and Aggie in her arms, Virgie’s belly rounded to a ball, and closer to election day, Betsy in a pram.

But she’d seen him time and again, how he could convince people he was worth listening to, how he never let the fear of losing stop him from trying, like that time in Buffalo when he’d entered a rally with six people in attendance, but he’d given the same rousing speech he’d give if there had been six hundred.

Well, her column had shown her that people liked what Virgie had to say too; that maybe Charlie wasn’t the only one worth listening to.

But she was fearful. She was fearful of the way Louisa was tossing her head back and laughing at something one of the teenage boys had just said.

“Right here, James. Dive with me. NOW.”

When all three resurfaced—Virgie, Betsy, and the boy—they splashed each other. It was a good lesson. You had to be braver than anyone believed you to be.

But Virgie wasn’t brave enough to leave Charlie, not over some selfish need to feel like she was some big important writer.

That was silly of her. Charlie needed her, he’d always needed her, and she couldn’t let him down simply because she adored writing a column for housewives.

Then again, she couldn’t ignore what he’d done to her, and she wouldn’t pretend it didn’t bother her. Of course it was going to bother her.

Virgie tuned in to the roar of the ocean, the roar building inside her—and she moved away from the children and pulled herself under the surf, screaming with her mouth closed until her lungs were out of air.

Bursting to the surface, tasting the salt on her lips, she thought of the myriad bouquets of flowers she would arrange and place in every room without worrying about disturbing Charlie’s hay fever.

She thought of Charlie grimacing at a house full of kids when the girls and their friends shuffled in after school; how she was always keeping everything quiet and tidy and poised for him to comfortably slip back into a picture-perfect family life; but how those hours were never a true reflection of what she thought a happy household should look like: chaotic, loud, joyful.

How he hated eating spaghetti, but without him, they could eat it every night.

How she didn’t have to put on a pretty dress and apply mascara every morning, how she didn’t have to pretend to be engrossed in everything he was saying—because sometimes she was so bored to tears that she’d sip her crisp glass of chardonnay at the dining table and think of sentences forming paragraphs, paragraphs forming ideas for articles that would rearrange themselves in her mind.

More than cooking spaghetti and making bouquets though, Virgie could see that there was another way to quell the bitterness pooling inside her.

She would finally do all the things he didn’t want her to do.

Bigger things. Things she couldn’t even think of right now, treading water in the deep.

He would regret his decision to take away her column; she would stick it right back to him and stop considering his opinion since he’d so openly stopped considering hers.

The solution wasn’t to ignore what he’d done. The solution was to punish him for it.