The Rumor

MADELINE

The first two calls were from Marlo, Angie’s assistant, but the third call was from Angie herself, and Madeline let it go straight to voice mail.

She knew what Angie was going to say because Marlo had been quite effective at hammering home the point: they needed catalog copy for the new novel by Friday, or Monday at the very latest. Theirs was a business of deadlines.

As Madeline listened to Angie’s message, she held the phone several inches from her ear, as if the distance would soften the blow.

New novel. Friday. Monday at the very latest. As I’m sure you’re aware, Madeline.

Madeline was at her kitchen counter, with her blank legal pad sitting in front of her. Her previous novel, Islandia, had come to her like cold syrup out of a glass bottle. The progress was slow-line by line, paragraph by paragraph-but the path it would take had always been clear to her. Islandia had been a dystopian tale of Nantucket four hundred years in the future; the island was being consumed by the Atlantic Ocean, thanks to global warming. Everyone was doomed except for Madeline’s teenage protagonists, second cousins Jack and Diane (so named after Madeline’s favorite song growing up), who survived in a dinghy until the novel’s end.

Madeline credited inspiration for this novel to the seven months she had spent nursing her father-in-law, Big T, before he died. His prostate cancer had metastasized to his brain and then his liver, and though this had crushed Madeline’s spirit, it had been beneficial to her imagination. Her prevailing thoughts were ones of illness, the decay of the body, the decay of mankind. She had then read a fascinating article about global warming in The New Yorker (which she had started subscribing to at age nineteen, in order to better herself). The article said that if humankind didn’t change its pattern of consumption, islands like Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and barrier islands like the Outer Banks, would be subsumed in less than four centuries.

Islandia was a departure from the autobiographical nature of her previous two novels, The Easy Coast and Hotel Springford. It had been warmly welcomed by her publishing house and deemed a “bigger” book. Madeline’s agent, Redd Dreyfus, had negotiated a brilliant deal, a low-six-figure advance for two books. This was such an exciting and unexpected development that it had nearly set Madeline’s curly blond hair on fire.

Now, however, most of the advance was gone in an investment with Eddie, and Madeline was on the hook to deliver at least an idea for a second novel. She was supposed to come up with a hundred-word description for the catalog that would go to the sales reps.

But Madeline didn’t even have that much.

She was blocked.

She was disrupted from her anxiety by the rumble of the UPS truck and the thump of a package on the front porch. She hurried out, hoping to find a box containing an idea for a brilliant new novel, but she was treated instead to the school portraits of her son, Brick.

Wow, gorgeous.

Madeline sat down on the front step of the porch, even though it was freezing and she didn’t have a coat on. She was mesmerized by how the portrait contained both the little boy Brick used to be-with his thick blond hair and the deep dimple in his right cheek-and the man he was rapidly becoming. He would look like Trevor and Big T, but with Madeline’s blue eyes and her smile (which showed a little too much gum, she’d always self-critically believed). She carried the portraits inside and pulled all of Brick’s school photos from the secretary, lining them up on the rug, from kindergarten through high school.

Good-looking kid, she thought. She had desperately wanted another child, but after three miscarriages, she gave up.

She wondered if Grace had gotten the twins’ portraits and if she was going through this exact same ritual at her house on Wauwinet Road. Madeline grabbed her phone, thinking only briefly of the awful, soul-shrinking message from Angie, and she called Grace.

No answer at the house. Maybe she was out with the chickens. Maybe she was in the garden. Maybe she had a migraine. Madeline used to keep track of Grace’s migraines on a special calendar, until Trevor found the calendar and told Madeline that one of the reasons she might not be as productive with her writing as she wanted was that she allowed herself to worry about things like Grace’s migraines. Madeline had thrown the calendar away.

Should she call Grace’s cell? Grace never answered; she checked her texts every two or three weeks. Madeline would have better luck mailing Grace a letter.

She hung up without leaving a message and then collected the pictures of Brick. It was official: she could get nothing done in this house. The dishwasher called to her: Empty me! The laundry in the dryer called to her: Fold me! The countertops said: Wipe me down! There was always something-the house phone rang, the garbagemen came, there was dinner to plan, shop for, prepare-every single night! Brick needed to be dropped off or picked up; the car had to be inspected, the recycling sorted, the checkbook balanced, the bills paid. Other mothers commented on how nice it must be that Madeline was able to “work from home.” But working from home was a constant battle between the work and the home.

Friday. Monday at the very latest.

The mudroom door opened and shut, and Madeline heard whistling, something from Mary Poppins. Was it that late already? Madeline’s husband, Trevor, strolled in, wearing his very cute pilot’s hat. “Chim-chiminey, chim-chiminey, chim-chim-cheroo!” Trevor fancied himself the second coming of Dick Van Dyke.

“Hey,” he said. He gathered Madeline up in his arms, and she rested her face against the front of his shirt and airline-issued polyester tie. Trevor was a pilot for Scout Airlines, which flew from Nantucket to Hyannis, Boston, and Providence. “How was your day?”

Madeline started to cry. She couldn’t believe it was five o’clock already. How was her day? What day? Her day had evaporated. She had exactly nothing to show for herself. “I’m blocked,” she said. “I don’t have a single idea, and the wolves are at the door.”

“I’m telling you,” he said. “You should just…”

She shook her head to silence him. She knew what he was going to say. He was going to tell her to write a sequel to Islandia. It was a logical solution to her problem, but in her heart, Madeline felt this was a cop-out. She had ended Islandia with her characters heading safely into an unknown future; that, she felt, was the right ending. She didn’t want to tell readers what happened next. If she wrote a sequel, she would be doing so only because she couldn’t come up with new characters and a new plot.

She couldn’t come up with new characters or a new plot.

So maybe Trevor was right. A sequel. Could she undo the end of the world?

She wiped her eyes and raised her face for a kiss. Trevor said, “What’s for dinner?”

“Pizza?” she said. “Thai food?”

His expression fell. She hadn’t gotten any writing done, but she hadn’t shopped for or made dinner, either. How could she explain that trying to come up with an idea to write about was even more time consuming than writing itself?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He kissed her forehead. “It’s okay,” he said. “Let’s get pizza from Sophie T’s. Is Brick getting a ride home from practice?”

“Yes,” Madeline said. “With Calgary.”

Trevor loosened his tie and pulled a beer from the fridge. “Guess who was on my first flight this morning.”

“Who?” Madeline said.

“Benton Coe,” Trevor said.

“Really,” Madeline said.

Benton Coe was the owner of Coe Designs, the island’s most prestigious landscape architecture firm. He was the man who was turning Grace’s three-acre property into the most dazzling yard and gardens on Nantucket Island and possibly in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Benton Coe was back.

Well, that would explain why Grace hadn’t answered the phone.

GRACE

She had started her transformation secretly, just after the first of the year, in anticipation of this very day.

Benton’s return.

She had started taking spinning classes at the gym, and she had lost twenty-one pounds-most of it weight she had gained when the twins were born and that she’d never quite been able to shed. Now, she was down two dress sizes and in need of new jeans. She had also, finally, allowed her stylist, Ann, to get the gray out of her part and add some chestnut highlights to the front of her dark hair. And all of the time she’d spent outside getting the preliminary gardening done and dealing with the hens had given her face the glow of the season’s first sun.

She felt better about herself than she had in years.

Madeline had commented on this on Saturday night, when they were out to dinner at American Seasons. She and Grace had gone to the ladies’ room together, and when Madeline caught sight of Grace in the mirror, she said, “You look hot, sister. Downright gorgeous.”

Eddie had noticed the weight loss (“You look good, Gracie-skinny”) but not the hair, and the girls had noticed the hair (“Highlights,” Allegra had said, “-smart move”) but not Grace’s new, svelte figure. Grace wasn’t surprised. Eddie was consumed with his spec houses, Hope with her studies and the flute, Allegra with her romance with Brick Llewellyn and her potential modeling career. To the three of them, Grace was wife, mother, cook, housekeeper. She was the raiser of chickens and purveyor of organic eggs, she was a hypochondriac with her “recurring migraines.” She was Eddie’s lover every Sunday morning and on certain random nights of the week. Grace knew that her family loved her, but she wasn’t their focus the way she had been when she and Eddie were first married and the girls were small.

Did she feel taken for granted? Sure, a little. She supposed she was hardly the only wife and mother to feel this way.

At ten o’clock on the dot, Benton’s big black truck pulled into the driveway, and the tops of Grace’s ears started to buzz. They would be turning pink, a sure sign that she was nervous. She had a bit of a crush on Benton Coe, a harmless crush that was never going anywhere, because Benton had a girlfriend named McGuvvy, and Grace, of course, was married.

She watched him climb out of the truck. Did he look different? No, he looked the same. Tall, tall, tall-a full eight or nine inches taller than Eddie-and he had the shoulders of a king or a conqueror. He had ginger-colored hair that curled up from under his red Ohio State Buckeyes hat, and laugh lines at his brown eyes. He was wearing his usual spring uniform of a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt with a four-leaf clover on the front-the logo for Coe Designs-jeans, and work boots. He was lightly tanned. He had spent the winter in Morocco.

They were friends. She had missed him. Grace ran to the door to greet him.

“Benton!” she said.

When he saw her, he did a double take that made Grace’s heart sing.

“My God, Grace,” he said. “You look… wow. Just wow. I’m speechless.”

She stepped out onto the front porch and hugged him tightly. He was so strong, he picked her clear up off the ground. And then they both laughed and Benton set her down.

“Good to see you!” he said.

“And you!” she said.

They stared at each other. Grace couldn’t tell if it was romantic or awkward. Awkward, she decided. They were friends; conversation was supposed to come easily. She couldn’t work with the man all summer and achieve their goals if she was going to act like a thunderstruck thirteen-year-old girl. She had to snap out of it!

“Thank you for the postcards,” she said.

“You got them?” he said. “You never know with foreign mail.”

“I got four or five,” Grace said, trying to keep her tone casual. Those postcards, numbering five and tucked safely into her lingerie drawer, had fueled her little crush throughout the chilly, gray winter.

Benton Coe. His reputation preceded him: the most talented landscape architect on Nantucket, even though he was barely forty. He had been on the island five years by the time Grace had hired him, having been brought over originally by the Nantucket Historical Association to overhaul the grounds of their twenty-four properties. Before coming to Nantucket, Benton Coe had designed gardens in Savannah, Georgia, and Oxford, Mississippi-places so lush, he said, that he could hear the grass grow. He’d grown up in Youngstown, Ohio, and gone to college at Ohio State, where his work-study job had been with the grounds crew, fostering his love of landscaping. He did a semester abroad in Surrey, England; he was still partial to English gardens. Nothing like them, he told Grace. The British were good at world domination but even better with phlox, foxglove, boxwood, and the rose.

By the time Benton Coe had finished with the NHA properties-winning awards from every horticultural and historical preservation organization in New England-he was in high demand. He did gardens for the Amsters out in Dionis, and the Kepplings in Shimmo-work that Grace was lucky enough to see through her involvement with the Nantucket Garden Club.

When Eddie bought the house in Wauwinet, with its three undeveloped acres of surrounding land, Grace had her chance. She hired Benton Coe.

They had been in sync from the beginning. Last summer, they had planted grass and carved out beds; they dug, tiled, and filled the swimming pool, and they constructed a footbridge that spanned the creek. Benton supervised the building of the garden shed and the henhouse. There were fifty decisions a day. Normally with clients, Benton was given free rein. But, he admitted, he was enjoying collaborating with Grace. It was more fun than deciding everything himself, he said. It was stimulating to execute plans with someone whose sensibility dovetailed so nicely with his own.

Grace was charmed by Benton Coe’s choice of words. Sensibility: Had anyone before ever appreciated Grace’s sensibility? Her aesthetic? Her taste? Her instincts? No, she didn’t think so. She had been a dutiful daughter and granddaughter, a tolerant sister, a diligent student, a halfway-decent breakfast waitress, a devoted wife and mother, and an exceptional friend. But had anyone-including Eddie, including Madeline-appreciated Grace’s sensibility?

Dovetail: it was such a delicate word, such a sweet and tender way of describing how Grace and Benton matched up, how they fit together without gaps or leaks, without strife or collision.

It was stimulating, he said, a word too sexual for Grace to properly contemplate.

At the end of last summer, Benton confessed that coming to Grace’s house out in Wauwinet had been the high point of each day. He said that the reason he had never brought along his manager, Donovan, was because Benton had wanted to keep this project for himself.

Grace understood. She had begun to feel a flutter in her chest every time his black pickup pulled into the driveway.

Benton stopped by at ten o’clock, Monday through Saturday, even when it wasn’t required. Sometimes, he stayed only ten minutes, enough time for a quick tête-à-tête, another phrase of his that Grace relished. She imagined their foreheads touching. She imagined them kissing.

But… only imagined.

Fall arrived, as it always did, and they put the garden to bed. Then it was winter, and Benton embarked on his travels. The first postcard arrived from Casablanca, postmarked January 4, the day he arrived. Two weeks later, one came from Essaouira, on the coast; a week later, one from Agdz, in the desert; two weeks later, one from the Ourika Valley, in the Atlas Mountains. All of these were signed exactly the same way: Look at this! XO, Benton

Twenty days passed with no postcards, during which time Grace figured he’d forgotten about her; or possibly his girlfriend, McGuvvy, had flown over for a visit. But then a postcard arrived from Marrakech that said: My favorite place by far. I wish you could see what I’m seeing. XO, B

This card set Grace’s “sensibility” ablaze; she read it a thousand times. She used it as a bookmark in the novel she was reading, The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, chosen because it was as close as she could get to wandering through the souks and traversing the sand dunes of northern Africa herself.

She thought endlessly about Benton’s change of wording. I wish you could see what I’m seeing. The skeptic in Grace said that this was merely a variation on the old postcard message Wish you were here. But the blossoming romantic in her pictured a tête-à-tête, their heads together, their eyes seeing the same thing, their sensibilities dovetailing.

She loved that he had shortened Benton to B.

Grace had gathered all the postcards together and placed them in her top dresser drawer with her underwear, bras, and her black silk pajamas.

Grace said, “Can I get you anything to drink?”

Benton snapped his fingers. “Darn it. I got you a present while I was away, but I forgot it. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Grace said. A present from Morocco! Grace’s mind raced. She thought of the gauzy harem pants that belly dancers wore. She thought of silver finger cymbals, tasseled silk pillows in deep, rich colors; she thought of burled wood boxes with secret compartments. She thought of a hookah pipe packed with strawberry tobacco. She thought of exotic oils and fragrant spices-threads of saffron, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods. She thought of the belly dancer again. Benton had bought her a present!

“Did you bring back gifts for all your clients?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Only you.”

Only her! She practically backflipped her way out to the garden.

They spent nearly an hour inspecting each section of Grace’s property, discussing possible changes and enhancements. They started at the far edge, way out by the Adirondack chairs that overlooked Polpis Harbor-the water still resembled a cold steel plate-and they meandered over the rolling, grassy knolls to the swimming pool and hot tub (both still covered, although Grace and Eddie had used the hot tub late one night back in January, when the spec houses were on schedule and Eddie was more relaxed). They lingered at the tulip bed-Benton’s baby-and at the rosebushes, which over the winter had become a thorny, inhospitable tangle.

“Things are coming along,” Benton said. He touched Grace’s back lightly, and an electric current ran up her spine, to her neck. “I think this year is our year.”

They had a shared goal: they wanted a photo shoot in a major media outlet. Benton was partial to Classic Garden magazine, but Grace was thinking of a spread in the home-and-garden section of the Sunday Boston Globe. She had convinced Eddie to hire a publicist, Hester Phan, to whom he was paying a small fortune-but it was the only way to get news of their collaboration out there.

“Let me see the shed,” Benton said. “I’ve missed it.”

Grace unlatched the door. Benton ushered Grace through the door first, then followed. The space was tight with both of them inside; Grace feared he would hear her heart pounding.

The garden shed had been modeled after a traditional Nantucket home: gray shingles with white trim. Inside, it featured a soapstone counter and a copper farmer’s sink. The far wall was covered with pegboard, on which hung Grace’s rakes, hoes, spades, trowels, and pruners. There was a potting bench, handcrafted from reclaimed pine barn board, and shelves that held Grace’s collection of watering cans and her decorative pots. A painted sign hung over the farmer’s sink: A garden is not a matter of life or death. It is far more important than that. The shed had an annex off the side that held the riding lawn mower and the three weed whackers. Although Grace had hired Benton, she did all of the hands-on gardening herself-the mowing, the weeding, the mulching, the pruning and deadheading. Along with tending the hens and running her organic-egg business, it was a full-time job. It was her passion.

The shed was the crown jewel of the yard. A garden was a garden was a garden, but magazine editors loved bricks and mortar. They wanted an interior space that was crisp, organized, and as whimsical as Santa’s workshop.

Grace and Benton stood facing each other, their hips leaning against the edge of the sink. Benton was so tall that the top of his head grazed the slanted ceiling. Grace’s ears were bright pink; she could feel it.

Benton took an exaggerated breath. “I love how this place smells,” he said. “Cut grass and potting soil.”

Grace too loved how the garden shed smelled. She loved it better than almost anything in the world.

“Do you want to see the hens?” she asked. “You know they’ll cluck themselves into a frenzy for you.”

Benton laughed. His eyes crinkled. Grace’s ears burned like glowing coals. He said, “I have to hit the road, I’m afraid. Things to do, people to see.”

People to see. Even this innocent phrase made Grace jealous. Her face must have shown her disappointment, because Benton said, “Don’t worry, Grace. We have all summer in front of us.”

Grace was still in a daze-she had broken two of Hillary’s eggs accidentally-when the twins walked in, home from school.

Hope entered first, carrying her flute case. Then Allegra, carrying only the twelve-hundred-dollar Stella McCartney hobo bag she had bullied Eddie into buying her when Eddie took her to Manhattan for the modeling interview. Not a book or paper in sight, which was why Allegra had straight C’s. Eddie let her slide because he had graduated from New Bedford High School with C’s, and look at how successful he was now! Grace shook off the residue of whatever inappropriate emotions she’d been having for Benton Coe and focused on her girls, her sun and moon. Allegra was the sun-bright and hot and shining. Hope was the moon-placid, serene, inscrutable. Grace was a little more in awe of Allegra because… well, because she was Allegra. And Grace was more protective of Hope because they had almost lost her at birth.

“Hello, lovelies,” Grace said. She tried to scoop both girls up in an embrace, but they executed a perfectly synchronized bob-and-weave to avoid her-Allegra to the left, Hope to the right-and headed toward their bedrooms, where they would remain with the doors shut until dinner.

Which, tonight, would be quiche Lorraine and spinach salad. Eddie liked meat and potatoes, but since he’d taken on the spec houses, he appreciated the frugality of eating their own home-farmed eggs.

Grace tried not to take offense at the evasion-not a word of greeting, no thought to ask how her day had been. If Grace were to be very honest, she might admit that lately her daughters made her feel more lonely instead of less so.

“How was school?” Grace called after them. But there was no response.

“We’re having quiche for dinner!” Grace said. “Around six!” No response.

There had most certainly been days this past winter when being so thoroughly ignored had sent Grace into a fog of depression. She yearned to make the girls cups of hot tea and bake them chocolate chip cookies and sit around looking at fashion magazines while Allegra talked about her weekend plans with Brick and Hope pulled out her flute and played a few bars of a Mozart concerto. But even Grace realized this was unrealistic. They were, after all, teenage girls and could be counted on to think only of themselves.

Today, Grace didn’t care. Today, Grace headed back to her master bathroom to paint her toenails.

Benton Coe had returned. This year was their year. They had all summer in front of them.

HOPE

Sometimes she wished her parents had never told her the story of her birth, and yet it had been part of her personal narrative since she was old enough to understand it. Hope-or baby number two, the smaller, weaker twin-had had her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, a fact that escaped the obstetrician’s notice because Allegra had popped out healthy, whole, and hogging the entire room’s attention for the first time of a million in her life. Once the doctor noticed that baby number two was in distress, Grace was raced to the operating room, where Hope was delivered by emergency C-section four minutes later. But she was nearly dead by the time they got her out. She was, her father liked to dramatically say, the color of a damson plum, and he had thought, There’s no chance. But the doctor had resuscitated Hope, kept her alive on a ventilator, and she and Eddie had been taken in the MedFlight helicopter to Boston while Grace and Allegra stayed at Nantucket Cottage Hospital.

Hope had been in the NICU for a week before she was named. The name her parents had picked out was Allison-Allegra and Allison, for nauseating twin symmetry-but after all that transpired, they changed their minds and decided to call her Hope, no explanation needed.

She was a survivor, an underdog who had prevailed; she was the smaller, weaker twin, all but ignored while her sister took center stage; she was lucky just to be alive. The doctors had told her parents that Hope might be brain damaged or hindered in some other way.

“But,” her mother said, “you are just as right as rain.”

Hope had no idea what that meant, but she did wish her parents had kept the story of her birth to themselves. She wished it were secret history that nobody ever talked about, rather than being the event that defined her.

Smaller, weaker, lucky to be alive. Whereas Allegra was bigger and stronger, her easy life an apparent birthright. In the fourth-grade class play, Allegra had been cast as Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and Hope as the Dormouse. Then, as now, this had pretty much summed up their differences.

Allegra was okay. At times. Not as smart as Hope, or at least not as book smart; in school, she put forth minimum effort. Hope had one class with Allegra: health, taught by the phys ed teacher, Ms. Norman. It was a layup, the easiest A in the world, because it was nutrition and exercise and personal hygiene, basic stuff everyone on earth already knew from being a human and being raised by other humans. And yet Allegra never handed in her homework, and when Ms. Norman called on her in class, asking her to name the most prevalent nutrient found in milk, Allegra gave a derisory laugh and said, “Um? Don’t know?” She sounded like a moron, and Hope was embarrassed to have shared a womb with her. Anyone who had ever watched a cereal commercial knew the answer was calcium.

Out of the classroom, however, Allegra and her best friend, Hollis Brancato, ruled the school. They were the real twins, matched in their prettiness, their long, shiny hair (although Hollis’s was blond to Allegra’s brunette), the makeup right out of magazines, their carefully curated clothes. Who knew how many thousands of dollars Allegra had wheedled out of their father so that she could have “pieces” by Parker and Alice + Olivia and Dolce Vita. Allegra’s one coup over Hollis was that she had been invited to New York City for a modeling interview. Allegra had told Hollis and everyone else at school that she was “still waiting to hear,” meaning she might start her climb up to the ranks of Gisele and Kate any day. Only Hope knew that the woman at the modeling agency had declared Allegra three inches too short and too “standard issue” in the beauty department to ever get any work.

The other thing that only Hope knew was that, although Allegra had been dating Brick Llewellyn for the past two years, she was cheating on him with Ian Coburn, a rich kid who had graduated from Nantucket High School the year before and who was now a freshman at Boston College.

To Hope’s knowledge, Allegra had seen Ian three of the past four weekends. Allegra was supposed to be flying over to the Cape every Saturday to take a fancy, expensive, guaranteed-to-get-results SAT prep course at the community college, but Allegra had ditched the class, and Ian picked her up in his red Camaro and they “drove around,” whatever that meant. This past weekend, they had gone to the Cape Cod Mall, where Ian bought Allegra three Chanel lipsticks from the makeup counter at Macy’s; then they enjoyed a long, boozy lunch at the Naked Oyster, Allegra using a fake ID saying that she was a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Allegra had asked Hope to cover for her-both with Brick and with her parents. She had offered to pay Hope, or lend Hope the fake ID, even though Allegra and Hope both knew Hope would never need it.

Hope agreed, but not because she wanted the ID or the money.

She wanted Brick.

For two years, Hope had assumed there would be no way Brick would ever break up with her sister. They would be one of those couples who grew up together, made it work long distance through four years of college (if Allegra got into college, which at this point seemed doubtful), and then married, had children, and found themselves celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Although Brick might have shared this vision, what neither he nor Hope had considered was that Allegra was Allegra, which meant not smart enough to know a good thing when she had it. Allegra was a seeker and a climber and an opportunist, and she had a short attention span. Allegra would get caught with Ian Coburn, and that would be the end of her and Brick. Hope just had to wait.

Hope and Brick texted each other regularly about their honors chemistry homework, a fact that Hope did not share with her sister, and she knew Brick didn’t either. Allegra hadn’t been selected to take honors chem; she was in regular chem with other underachievers like Hollis and their friend Bluto.

At five thirty, when Hope knew Brick would be home from baseball practice, she shot him a text: Hot glass looks like cool glass. This was how they started every conversation about their chem homework, an inside joke referring to the enormous sign hanging over the Smart Board in their classroom. Mr. Hence lived in mortal fear of one of his students picking up a beaker that had recently been over the Bunsen burner.

No response. Maybe Brick wasn’t ready to tackle chem yet. Maybe he was taking a shower or hanging out with his parents. Brick liked to spend time with his parents-whereas Hope, and especially Allegra, avoided it like the plague-because Trevor and Madeline were so cool, and the three of them in their family were, like, friends.

Sometimes Hope thought that she might not want to date Brick as much as become his adopted sister.

She texted: Have you looked at the questions on page 242? Inert gases?

No response. Hope could send two unanswered texts but not three. That would make her look desperate and pushy.

A second later, her phone pinged.

Brick wrote, Was your sister really at class on Saturday? Or did she ditch and go to the mall?

Hope ogled her screen. Here it was, then, at a time she least expected it. Brick was on to Allegra. It was all Hope could do not to spill the beans.

She wrote: Class, I think. Why?

Brick wrote: Someone said they saw her at the mall.

Hope wrote: Which someone?

Brick wrote: Someone.

Hope wrote: Come on. Who.

Brick wrote: Parker Marz. He said she was with some guy in a Boston College sweatshirt. Doesn’t your cousin go to BC?

Hope chewed her pencil eraser. Her cousins were all older, although one of them-the biggest, most pompous jerk of the bunch-had gone to BC, prompting Eddie to tell his favorite joke. How do you know if someone goes to BC? They’ll tell you.

Hope wrote: One of our cousins went to BC. A while ago.

Brick wrote: Oh. Okay.

Hope wrote: Did you ask Allegra about it?

Brick wrote: Nah. Not a big deal. Never mind.

Burying his head in the sand, Hope thought. She couldn’t blame him. The truth was too awful to contemplate.

Hope went to church every week with her mother. She was a spiritual person, she believed in God, she bought most of the tenets of the Catholic Church but not all of them. She did believe in prayer, and so she said a heartfelt one for Brick, and then she opened to page 242 and started learning about the inert gases.

EDDIE

He bounced up the cobblestone street in his Porsche Cayenne, wearing his lucky Panama hat, waving at everyone he saw. Grace liked to accuse him of what she called “indiscriminate waving.”

“You didn’t even know that person,” she said once. “Why did you wave?”

The fact was, Eddie was a little nearsighted, and he feared not waving to the wrong person more than he feared waving to a complete stranger. A not-wave in the real-estate business could mean a killed deal or a lost rental; it could mean missing out on thousands of dollars of potential income.

Next to Eddie, on the passenger seat, were four bills from the spec houses on Eagle Wing Lane. Or, more correctly, four bills from 13 Eagle Wing Lane, because Eddie had been forced to stop construction on numbers 9 and 11. He simply didn’t have the cash.

Getting four bills in one day should be illegal, Eddie thought. Three should be the maximum. But today’s mail had brought four; his secretary, Eloise, had handed them over, pinched between her thumb and index finger, as if she were giving him someone’s snotty handkerchief.

The first bill, for putting in the foundation, came in at twenty-two grand. Eddie blinked, then felt a rush of relief when he realized he had already paid that one. But a call to Gerry, the foundation guy, revealed that Eddie had paid for the foundations of numbers 9 and 11 but not for the foundation of number 13.

His Panama hat was not lucky. He would have taken it off and thrown it into the way back, but he so believed in its powers that he feared taking it off in anger would cause him to crash the Porsche and die, leaving Grace and the girls in debt.

Before he’d left the office, he’d stopped by the desk of his sister, Barbie, who was the only other broker that worked with him, because she was, essentially, the only person on Nantucket that he trusted other than his wife and children.

He said, “What am I gonna do about money?”

Barbie looked up at him through her frosted bangs. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman on the island, but she presented what she had to maximum advantage. She always wore a dress-she favored Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses (Eddie had no clue, but Allegra had schooled him as to Aunt Barbie’s tastes), always heels (Manolo Blahniks), always the perfume (he didn’t know what it was called, but it was so distinctively her that it might as well have been called Barbie). She was wearing her signature piece of jewelry: a black pearl that was the same size as the jawbreakers they used to steal from the five-and-dime when they were kids.

They had grown up on Purchase Street in New Bedford, dirt poor. High school for Eddie had been two pairs of corduroy pants (gray and beige) and two pilled sweaters (gray and beige), two button-down shirts (white and red plaid), and a pair of zippy red-and-blue running shoes that his mother had found at Goodwill. The shoes had come to define him as he proceeded to break every sprinting record at New Bedford High School and other high schools across the Commonwealth, earning himself the nickname Fast Eddie.

Eddie was able to run away from his disadvantages, but Barbie, eleven months his junior, had been forced to face them. She had been teased mercilessly about her clothes, her shoes, her hair, her smell-and she had gotten into fights and was suspended three times before she graduated from high school. In Barbie’s mind, he knew, there could never be enough money.

“I have a novel idea,” she said. “Try selling a house.”

“Funny,” he said. The market was a frozen tundra.

“Well,” Barbie said, checking her desk calendar, “that guy is coming with his group to Low Beach Road next week.”

“What guy?”

“You know what guy,” Barbie said. “The guy who asked.”

The guy who asked: Eddie wished he didn’t know what his sister was talking about, but he did. She was referring to Ronan Last-Name-Withheld.

One of the perennial aces in Eddie’s hand was the house at 10 Low Beach Road. This was a showcase house right on the Atlantic Ocean with six-count them, six-master suites, an infinity-edge pool, two gourmet kitchens (one indoor, one outdoor), a grass tennis court, a five-thousand-square-foot basement with a movie theater, an arcade filled with vintage pinball machines, a gym that was exactly like the one the New England Patriots worked out in during the off-season, a sauna, a mahogany-paneled billiards room, and a walk-in cigar humidor. Also, there was a stucco-walled wine cellar with a table that had originally been built for William of Orange. The house rented for fifty thousand dollars a week, and Eddie had the exclusive listing. The owner was a thirty-year-old graduate of Nantucket High School who had gone to Cal Tech, where he invented a computer chip that was used in every ATM in America. The owner had married a supermodel and lived out in L.A. The owner and supermodel came to Nantucket for two weeks every August; the rest of the season, the house was Eddie’s to rent.

The year before, Eddie had rented the house to a group of businessmen from Las Vegas. They were a gaming operation called DeepWell that had chosen Nantucket for their annual retreat. The leader of the group, Ronan Last-Name-Withheld, had arrived at the house before Eddie’s team of five Russian housecleaners were quite finished, and Ronan LNW said, “Any chance these girls could come back later and entertain the guys?”

“Entertain?” Eddie had asked. He knew what Ronan LNW was getting at-or he thought he did, anyway. He squinted quizzically at Ronan. “They don’t juggle, and I’m pretty sure they don’t sing.”

Ronan said, “Ten grand extra in it for you. Per night.”

Ten grand per night. Eddie had felt dizzy.

He wasn’t going to lie: for a moment, he had considered it. He would pay the girls a thousand dollars apiece per night, and he and Barbie would split the other five-per night.

But then his good sense took over, his moral compass spun and landed on true north, and Eddie said, in a self-righteous tone of voice he didn’t even recognize, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t think that will work out.”

Ronan LNW had backed off immediately. “Okay, man, no problem, no problem. I was only asking.”

But now, as Eddie drove out of town, toward his house on the Wauwinet Road-where, it was certainly possible, more bills awaited-he thought, Ten grand per night. Over the course of a week, his cut would be seventeen-five. Could he ask the girls? Would they understand? It would be a lot of money for them, possibly too much money to turn down. It was illegal, of course, so there was the risk of getting caught.

When Eddie had posed this question to Barbie, she had snorted and said, “It’s the world’s oldest profession, Eddie. You hardly invented it.”

He gave her a look.

She said, “It couldn’t hurt to ask, you know. Just call them and ask. They love you. They would eat fire for you.”

The pile of bills on the passenger seat seemed to smolder, and at the same time, Eddie’s heartburn started, even though he had eaten only a bread-and-butter sandwich for lunch.

Fifty-eight large. There was nowhere else to get the money short of taking a third mortgage out on his house. He could probably squeeze another forty or fifty in equity there. The two commercial properties he owned were leveraged to the hilt. He was sinking. There was no other way to look at it. He, Edward Pancik, Fast Eddie, the savviest real-estate agent on this island, was going under.

There wasn’t really room in his life right now for a moral compass.

He decided to do some exploratory work. First, a call to Ronan LNW.

“Hey, man,” Eddie said. “It’s Eddie, Eddie Pancik, Fast Eddie, Nantucket.”

“Fast Eddie!” Ronan LNW said. People loved his nickname, men especially. Eddie wasn’t quite sure why.

“Hey, do you remember asking me about those Russian girls last year?”

“Yeah, man,” Ronan said. “Why? Have you rethought the idea? Possibly landed in a different square?”

“Possibly,” Eddie said.

Next, the more challenging conversation. Eddie called Nadia, the spokesperson for the five Russian girls, as her English was the best.

He explained the indecent proposal as delicately as he could. Group of American businessmen checking into the house next week… Would you be willing to get all dolled up and go over around ten o’clock at night and have drinks with the gentlemen?

It would mean a thousand dollars, cash, for each of you.

But… it’s probably not just drinks, Nadia. You girls would have to do whatever they asked.

And you can’t tell anyone-or you’ll be fired and then deported.

Nadia was silent for a second, and Eddie thought, Oh boy. Nadia and the girls were illegal, so they had no recourse against him for asking, but still, he felt like a heel. If they quit, he would have to replace them, probably at a higher wage.

But then Nadia started babbling away in Russian, presumably to Elise or Tonya. The girls squealed with what sounded like… joy? Excitement?

“Yes,” Nadia said to Eddie. “Yes, we do it.”

It sounded to Eddie like the girls were crazy about the idea. Could he be misunderstanding their tone? A thousand dollars a night was an assload of money. Besides which, these men weren’t losers picked off Times Square; nor were they thick-necked Russian thugs. These were cultured, refined, rich business executives.

Fair to say, three of the five probably had delusions of a marriage proposal somewhere down the road. They sounded as excited as girls going to the prom.

Elise took the phone away from Nadia. Elise was the smallest of the bunch, the runt of the litter. She said, “Eddie, you are best, thank you, Eddie!”

Eddie hung up the phone feeling weirdly proud of himself. Almost as if he had, indeed, invented it.