You move back in,” says Meredith, in her lovely, low, dishonest Southern voice. Carter asks, “But—Adam?” “I’m not seeing him anymore.” Her large face, not pretty but memorable, braves his look of disbelief. Her big, deep-brown eyes are set just too close; her shapely mouth is a little too full, and greedy. Big, tall, dark, sexy Meredith, who is still by law his wife. She adds, “I do see him around the campus, I mean, but we’re just friends now.” That’s what you said before, Carter does not say, but that unspoken sentence hangs there in the empty space between them. She knows it as well as he does. They are sitting in the garden behind her house—their house, actually, joint ownership being one of their central problems, as Carter sees it. In any case, now in early summer, in Chapel Hill, the garden is lovely. The roses over which Carter has labored in seasons past—pruning, spraying, and carefully, scientifically feeding—are in fragrant, delicately full bloom: great bursts of red and flame, yellow and pink and white.
