[This account briefly mentions rape]. Bess and her sister Maureen, two teenage fiction writers, learn that the ‘70s serial rapist, Mr. Philbrick, has moved back into his house next door. Their aunt was raped near the time of his arrest. 

The death of their oldest sister and tutor, Fanny, causes the girls to return to their public high school. There, an English teacher, Mr. Woodbury, begins an affair with Bess. 

One day, Mr. Philbrick’s dog brings the girls a purse of a Katherine Mandell, whom they suspect was one of his victims. 

In an attempt to learn more about Mr. Woodbury, Bess finds a picture of him in a yearbook. She learns he graduated the same year her aunt was raped, and had written sensual lines of poetry underneath his own picture. When she casually quotes the line to Mr. Woodbury, he becomes alarmed and leaves her. 

Bess encounters Mr. Philbrick one day, and he mentions that her sister has been sleuthing on him. This leads her to do her own sleuthing. In rereading her aunt’s account of her rape, which included the perpetrator’s utterance of poetry, she realizes Mr. Woodbury, and not Mr. Philbrick, was the rapist. Devastated, she confronts him about it, then retreats to her fictional world where love is less complicated.