“We need to stop meeting like this,” he said.

  “You’re right,” I replied. “You know how this town talks.”

  We finagled our way into adjacent seats and spent the entire flight deep in conversation. By the time the plane touched down, we’d made plans to meet for dinner. Standing in JFK’s baggage claim area, both of us flushed from flirtation and reluctant to part, I said, “My car is waiting outside. I should go.”

  “Of course.” Len paused, suddenly shy. “Can I get a kiss first?”

  I obliged, my head spinning like one of the luggage carousels piled high with Samsonite suitcases.

  Six months later, we got married at city hall, with Marnie and my mother as witnesses. Len didn’t have any family of his own. At least none that he wanted to invite to his impromptu wedding. His mother was thirty years younger than his father, pregnant and eighteen when they wed and twenty-three when she abandoned them. His father took it out on Len. Not long into our relationship, Len told me how his father broke his arm when he was six. He spent the next twelve years in foster care. The last time Len spoke to his father, now long dead, was right before he left for UCLA on a full scholarship.

  Because of his past, Len was determined not to make the same mistakes as his parents. He never got angry and was rarely sad. When he laughed, it was with his whole body, as if there was too much happiness within him to be contained. He was a great cook, an even better listener, and loved long, hot baths, preferably with me in the tub with him. Our marriage was a combination of gestures both big—like when he rented an entire movie theater on my birthday so the two of us could have a private screening of Rear Window—and small. He always held the door for me. And ordered pizza with extra cheese without asking because he knew that’s how I liked it. And appreciated the contented silence when the two of us were in the same room but doing different things.

  As a result, our marriage was a five-year period in which I was almost deliriously happy.

  The happiness part is important.

  Without it, you’d have nothing to miss when everything inevitably turns to shit.

  Which brings us to Step Five: Spend a summer at Lake Greene.

  The lake house has always been a special place for my family. Conceived by my great-great-grandfather as an escape from New York’s steaming, stinking summers, it was once the only residence on this unassuming slash of water. That’s how the lake got its name. Originally called Lake Otshee by the indigenous tribe that once lived in the area, it was renamed Lake Greene in honor of the first white man intrepid enough to build here because, well, America.

  My father spent every summer at the lake that bore his family name. As did his father before him. As did I. Growing up, I loved life on the lake. It was a much-needed reprieve from my mother’s theatrics. Some of my fondest memories are of endless days spent catching fireflies, roasting marshmallows, swimming in the sun until I was as tanned as leather.

  Going to the lake for a summer was Len’s idea, proposed after a frigid, slushy winter during which we barely saw each other. I was busy with the Broadway thriller I’d chosen over the Transformers movie, and Len kept having to return to LA to bang out another draft of a superhero screenplay he’d taken on because he mistakenly thought it would be easy money.

  “We need a break,” he said during Easter brunch. “Let’s take the summer off and spend it at Lake Greene.”

  “The whole summer?”

  “Yeah. I think it’ll be good for us.” Len smiled at me over the Bloody Mary he’d been drinking. “I know I sure as hell need a break.”

  I did, too. So we took it. I left the play for four months, Len finally finished the screenplay, and we set off for Vermont for the summer. It was wonderful. During the day, we whiled away the hours reading, napping, making love. In the evenings, we cooked long dinners and sat on the porch sipping strong cocktails and listening to the ghostly call of loons echoing across the lake.

  One afternoon in late July, Len and I filled a picnic basket with wine, cheese, and fresh fruit bought that morning at a nearby farmers’ market. We hiked to the southern end of the lake, where the forest gives way to a craggy bluff. After stumbling our way to the top, we spread the food out on a checkered blanket and spent the afternoon snacking, drinking wine, and staring at the water far below.

  At one point, Len turned to me and said, “Let’s stay here forever, Cee.”

  Cee.

  That was his nickname for me, created after he had deemed Case too hard-boiled for a term of endearment.

  “It makes me think of a private detective,” he said. “Or, worse, a lawyer.”

  “Or maybe I don’t need a nickname,” I said. “It’s not like my name’s that unwieldy.”

  “I can’t be the only one of us with a nickname. That would make me incredibly selfish, don’t you think?”

  We’d been officially dating two weeks by then, both of us sensing things were getting very serious very quickly but neither of us ready to admit it. It’s why Len was trying too hard that night. He wanted to dazzle me with wit. And even though the wit might have been strained, I was indeed dazzled.

  I remained that way most of our marriage.

  “Define forever,” I said that July afternoon, hypnotized by the sunlight sparking off the lake and the summer breeze in my hair.

  “Never leaving. Just like Old Stubborn there.”

  Len pointed to a petrified tree stump that jutted from the water about fifty yards from the shore below. It was legendary on Lake Greene, mostly because no one knew how this sun-bleached piece of wood came to be poking twenty feet out of the water or how much more of it stretched from the surface to the lake’s bottom. We all called it Old Stubborn because Eli, who researched such things, claimed it had been there for hundreds of years and would remain long after the rest of us were gone.

  “Is that even possible?” I said.

  “Sure, we’d still have to go to the city and LA a lot for work, but there’s no law saying we must live in Manhattan. We could live here full-time. Make this place our home base.”

  Home.

  I liked the sound of that.

  It didn’t matter that the lake house technically belonged to my aunt and mother. Or that eastern Vermont was quite a hike from Manhattan, not to mention a world away from LA, where Len had been spending so much time. The idea was still appealing. Like Len, I longed for a life removed from our bicoastal grind.

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  I never got the chance. A week later, Len was dead.

  That’s Step Six, by the way.

  Have your husband die while on vacation.

  The morning it happened, I was tugged out of bed by the sound of Eli knocking on the front door. Before opening it, I checked the clock in the foyer. Seven a.m. Way too early for him to be paying a neighborly visit.

  Something was wrong.

  “Your boat got loose,” Eli announced. “Woke up and saw it drifting on the lake. Guess you didn’t tie it up right.”

  “Is it still out there?” I said.

  “Nah. I towed it back to my dock. I can take you over to get it.” Eli looked me over, noticing my nightgown, hastily-thrown-on robe, out-of-control bedhead. “Or I can take Len.”

  Len.

  He wasn’t in bed when I woke up. Nor was he anywhere in the house. Eli and I searched the place from top to bottom, calling out his name. There was no sign of him. He was gone.

  “Do you think he could be out for a morning run or something?”

  “Len’s not a runner,” I said. “He swims.”

  Both of us looked to the lake, shimmering beyond the tall windows in the living room. The water was calm. And empty. I couldn’t help but picture our boat out there, unmoored, drifting aimlessly. Also empty.

  Eli pictured it, too, because the next thing he said was, “Do you know if Len had any reason to take the boat out this morning?”

  “Some—” I paused to swallow the lump of worry that had suddenly caught in my throat. “Some mornings he goes fishing.”

  Eli knew this. He’d seen Len out on the water, wearing that silly fisherman’s hat and smoking his disgusting cigars, which he claimed kept the mosquitoes away. Sometimes the two of them even went fishing together.

  “Did you see him go out this morning?” Eli took another look at my bedclothes and puffy eyes, rightfully concluding that he was the reason I got out of bed. “Or hear him?”

  I answered with a short, scared head shake.

  “And he didn’t tell you last night that he was thinking about going fishing?”

  “No,” I said. “But he doesn’t always tell me. Especially if he thinks I won’t be up for a few hours. Sometimes he just goes.”

  Eli’s gaze drifted back to the empty lake. When he spoke again, his voice was halting, cautious. “When I fetched your boat, I saw a rod and tackle box inside. Len doesn’t always keep them there, does he?”

  “No,” I said. “He keeps them—”

  In the basement. That’s what I intended to say. Instead, I went there, down the rickety steps to what’s technically the first level of the lake house but is treated like a cellar because it’s built into the steep hillside that slopes to the water. Eli followed me. Past the room with the furnace and hot-water heater. Past the Ping-Pong table that had last been used in the nineties. Past the skis on the wall and the ice skates in the corner. Stopping only when I stopped.

  The mudroom.

  The place where Len and I entered and exited after swimming and boating, using the old blue door that had been part of the house since the very beginning. There’s an old sink there, and a long wooden rack on which hung jackets and hoodies and hats.

  Except one.

  Len’s fishing hat—floppy and foul smelling, colored army green—was missing.

  Also, the shelf that should have held his tackle box and fishing rod was empty, and the creaky blue door that led outside was open just a crack.

  I let out a choked sob, prompting Eli to spin me away from the door, as if it were a mutilated corpse. He gripped my shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and said, “I think we might want to call the police.”

  Eli did the calling. He did everything, to be honest. Rounding up the Fitzgeralds on his side of the lake and the Mitchells, who lived on mine, to form a search party.

  And he’s the one who eventually found Len, just after ten that morning.

  Eli discovered his hat first, floating like a lily pad a few yards from shore. He waded out to fetch it, and when he turned to head back to dry land he spotted Len a hundred yards away, washed ashore like the victim of a shipwreck.

  I don’t know any other details. Neither Eli nor the police told me exactly where my husband had been found, and I didn’t ask. I was better off not knowing. Besides, it didn’t really matter. Len was still dead.

  After asking me a few questions, the police pieced everything together pretty quickly. Len, always an early riser when at the lake, woke up, made coffee, and decided to go fishing.

  At some point, he fell overboard, although authorities couldn’t tell me how or why or when. An autopsy found alcohol in his system—we had been drinking the night before—and a large amount of the antihistamine Len took for his allergies, suggesting he had double-dosed before going out that morning. All the medical examiner knew was that he had dropped into the water and drowned, leaving behind a boat, a tackle box and fishing rod, and a thermos of still-warm coffee.

  I was also left behind.

  At age thirty-five, I had become a widow.

  After that happens, there’s just one final step.

  Unlucky Number Seven.

  Fall apart.

  My unraveling happened rather slowly, thanks to the many people who cared for me. Eli stayed by my side until Ricardo was able to drive up from Manhattan with my mother and Marnie in tow. We spent a sleepless night packing up my things and left early the next morning.

  For the next six months, I did as well as one can under such circumstances. I mourned, both publicly and in private. I dutifully attended two memorial services, one in New York and the other in Los Angeles, before returning to Lake Greene for an afternoon when, watched by a small gathering of friends and family, I poured Len’s ashes into the water.

  It wasn’t until the second six months that it all went downhill. Before then, I’d been surrounded by people. My mother visited daily or sent Ricardo when she was working. Marnie and other friends and colleagues made sure to call, to stop by, to reach out and see how I was coping. But an outpouring of kindness like that can only last for so long. People move on. They must.

  Eventually it was just me, left with a thousand emotions and no way of softening them without some form of assistance. When I was fourteen and mourning my father, I turned to drugs. Rather than repeat myself, I decided booze was the answer on this go-round.

  Bourbon, mostly. But also gin. And vodka. And wine of any color. And once, when I’d forgotten to stock up before a snowstorm, pear brandy chugged straight from the bottle. It didn’t make the pain completely go away, but it sure as hell eased it. Drinking made the circumstances of my widowhood feel distant, like it was a vaguely remembered nightmare I’d woken from long ago.

  And I was determined to keep drinking until no memory of this particular nightmare remained.

  In May, I was asked if I wanted to return to the Broadway play I’d left before going to Vermont. Shred of Doubt, it was called. About a woman who suspects her husband is trying to kill her. Spoiler alert: He is.

  Marnie recommended I say no, suggesting the producers merely wanted to boost ticket sales by capitalizing on my tragedy. My mother told me to say yes, advising that work was the best thing for me.

  I said yes.

  Mother knows best, right?

  The irony is that my performance had improved greatly. “Trauma has unlocked something in you,” the director told me, as if my husband’s death was a creative choice I’d made. I thanked him for the compliment and walked straight to the bar across the street.

  By that point, I knew I was drinking too much. But I managed. I’d have two drinks in my dressing room before a performance, just to keep me loose, followed by however many I wanted after the evening show.

  Within a few months, my two drinks before curtain had become three and my postshow drinking sometimes lasted all night. But I was discreet about it. I didn’t let it affect my work.

  Until I showed up to the theater already drunk.

  For a Wednesday matinee.

  The stage manager confronted me in my dressing room, where I was applying my makeup with wildly unsteady hands.

  “I can’t let you go on like this,” she said.

  “Like what?” I said, pretending to be insulted. It was the best acting I’d do all day.

  “Drunk off your ass.”

  “I’ve played this role literally a hundred times,” I said. “I can fucking do it.”

  I couldn’t fucking do it.

  That was clear the moment I stepped onstage. Well, stepped isn’t the right word. I lurched onto the stage, swaying as if hit by hurricane winds. Then I blanked on my entrance line. Then stumbled into the nearest chair. Then slid off the chair and collapsed onto the floor in a drunken heap, which is how I stayed until two costars dragged me into the wings.

  The show was halted, my understudy was brought in, and I was fired from Shred of Doubt as soon as the producers thought me sober enough to comprehend what they were telling me.

  Hence the tabloids and the paparazzi and the being whisked away to a remote lake where I won’t publicly embarrass myself and where my mother can check in daily.

  “You’re really not drinking, right?” my mother says.

  “I’m really not drinking.” I turn to the moose on the wall, a finger to my lips, as if we’re sharing a secret. “But would you blame me if I were?”

  Silence from my mother. She knows me well enough to understand that’s as much of a yes as she’s going to get.

  “Where did you get it?” she finally says. “From Ricardo? I specifically told him not to—”

  “It wasn’t Ricardo,” I say, leaving out how on the drive from Manhattan I had indeed begged him to stop at a liquor store. For cigarettes, I told him, even though I don’t smoke. He didn’t fall for it. “It was already here. Len and I stocked up last summer.”

  It’s the truth. Sort of. We did bring a lot of booze along with us, although most of those bottles had long been emptied by the time Len died. But I’m certainly not going to tell my mother how I really got my hands on the alcohol.

  She sighs. All her hopes and dreams for me dying in one long, languid exhalation.

  “I don’t understand,” she says, “why you continue to do this to yourself. I know you miss Len. We all do. We loved him, too, you know.”

  I do know. Len was endlessly charming, and had Lolly Fletcher cooing in the palm of his hand five minutes after they met. Marnie was the same way. They were crazy about him, and although I know his death devastated them as well, their grief is nothing compared with mine.

  “It’s not the same,” I say. “You’re not being punished for grieving.”

  “You were so out of control that I had to do something.”

  “So you sent me here,” I say. “Here. Where it all happened. Did you ever stop to consider that maybe it would fuck me up even more?”

  “I thought it would help you,” my mother says.

  “How?”

  “By making you finally confront what happened. Because until you do, you won’t be able to move on.”

  “Here’s the thing, Mom,” I say. “I don’t want to move on.”

  I slam the phone onto the receiver and yank the cord out of the jack in the wall. No more landline for her. After shoving the phone into the drawer of an unused sideboard, I catch a glimpse of myself in the gilt-edged mirror hanging above it.