John and the gossip machine.

As we know, John is currently in a lot of deserved-for-the-wrong-reasons trouble with Jean and pretty much half of the librarians because of his refusal to be specific about what crazy woman he was 'getting away' from and why he got an apartment. Lynn's need to (as she puts it) 'rant' about the sort of small-town gossip machines she was glad to get away from when she moved to Ontario has gotten him into a fix wherein they go from believing that his response to having to change a diaper was to run off with some hussy they're never going to meet to believing that he came crawling back to Elly because his mistress wasn't interested in being a housewife. He deserves to be treated like garbage for jerking Fiona around because she didn't wanna be Alice from Brady Bunch so I don't mind that and don't especially care if the truth ever comes out.

The problem is trying to figure out how it is Jean is connected to Elly's co-workers. Lynn never seems to have troubled herself with questions like that because the source of a story (in this case, her still resenting having her doings discussed behind her back) matters more to her than how that'd work in the setting she created. This means that we're starting to see a sort of cartoon scenario in which people magically seem to know something about the Patterson family because they act as if they know that they're the central characters. This makes little sense in the real-world setting that we were used to because the real answer to "Did you hear that Dr Patterson and his wife were separated for a month?" is "Who cares?"