The Rumor

MADELINE

Redd Dreyfus, Madeline’s agent, called to say he’d bought her two more weeks with the catalog copy.

“And when I say bought, I mean bought,” he said. “I cashed in a favor that Angie Turner has owed me for eight years, a favor I have been saving and polishing like a diamond. And I am using it on your behalf. Don’t make me sorry, Madeline. Come up with something great.”

This should have made Madeline feel better-she had two more weeks-but instead, the mounting pressure made her head ache.

She meant to spend her first day of reprieve really brainstorming… but when she went in search of her favorite pen, it turned into an hour of organizing the junk drawer. In her defense, that drawer really needed to be cleaned out. Madeline found half a petrified peanut butter sandwich in there, along with broken scissors, an empty tin of ground pepper, four lanyards from Scout Air, a campaign pin from 2006 for a selectman who no longer lived on Nantucket, three bottles of dried-up nail polish (when was the last time Madeline had worn nail polish?), as well as rubber bands, paper clips, expired coupons, safety pins, screws, nails, picture hooks, bottle caps, Elmer’s glue, a baby’s pacifier, and, yes, thankfully, her favorite pen-bright pink, for breast-cancer awareness.

The second hour Madeline spent on eBay, looking for drawer organizers. She had a crazy idea that if she cleaned the clutter from the junk drawer, she would clean the clutter from her brain.

Drawer organizers ordered: $21.99 with shipping.

Then, shockingly, it was three o’clock in the afternoon and time for her to go to Brick’s baseball game.

In the bleachers, Madeline sat with Rachel McMann, Calgary’s mother. Rachel was a nice woman, if a touch overbearing and a bit rah-rah for Madeline’s taste. Rachel always wore her Nantucket Whalers apparel to games, and she carried a navy-and-white pom-pom, which she shook at every possible opportunity. Rachel had gone to the University of Delaware, where, she liked to tell people, she had been social director of her sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta.

Rachel worked as a real-estate agent for Bayberry Properties, which was the rival of Eddie’s agency, Island Fog Realty. For this reason, Eddie and Grace did not care for Rachel.

Plus, there was the thing that had happened between Grace and Eddie’s daughter Hope and Rachel’s son, Calgary, at Christmas. If Grace knew Madeline was voluntarily sitting with Rachel McMann, she would strongly disapprove.

But Madeline believed that the parents of her child’s friends and teammates were a necessary part of her personal community. Brick and Calgary had been friends since preschool. Madeline and Rachel had been attending sporting events together since the kids were five years old, playing T-ball. And today, Madeline could use a dose of Rachel’s optimism.

Madeline had actually brought her legal pad to the game, just in case inspiration struck between the second and third innings or during a trip to the concession stands for sunflower seeds.

Rachel eyed the notebook with her usual sunny enthusiasm. She said, “How’s the writing going?”

Madeline couldn’t help but be truthful; it was her nature. She said, “Working from home is killing me. Today, I organized the junk drawer and spent an hour on eBay.”

Rachel said, “You need a writing studio.”

Madeline said, “You got that right.”

Rachel said, “I’m serious. Like Virginia Woolf said, every woman writer needs five hundred pounds a year and a room of one’s own.”

Madeline blinked. She was impressed that Rachel McMann had just quoted Virginia Woolf. Even Grace might have been won over by that.

Rachel leaned in. She said, “Seriously, Madeline, I have just the place.”

Madeline should have stopped Rachel then and there. She should have said that, while a writing studio would have been nice, it was a pipe dream, because she and Trevor couldn’t afford such an extravagance. Some months, their mortgage was a stretch-not to mention utilities, insurance, groceries, cell phone bills, gas, car repairs, Saturday nights out, Brick’s college fund, and a large leftover hospital bill from when Big T died. Life is expensive, Madeline should have said. Virginia Woolf will have to wait.

But instead, Madeline said, “Really?”

Rachel said, “Yes, really! A one-bedroom unit in the blue Victorian on the corner of Centre and India. The last time one of those units became available was in 2004.”

And Madeline said, “Wow.”

Much to Madeline’s relief, Rachel had let the subject drop there. She resumed watching the game and shaking the pom-pom, and Madeline held her blank legal pad protectively on her lap.

The next day, as Madeline was trying to brainstorm but was also chopping onions, potatoes, and carrots for a pot roast-because she couldn’t let dinner slide once again-Rachel called and said, “What time can you come look at the unit on Centre Street?”

Madeline had stammered before finally saying, “You… mean today?”

“Today,” Rachel said. “It will go today, or tomorrow at the latest. It’s exactly what you’re looking for, Madeline, I promise.”

Madeline stared at the mess of onion skins, potato peels, and carrot tops on her cutting board. The pot roast would go in the slow cooker, but all of this would have to be cleaned up, and she had to run to the store for more beef broth. How did other women get anything done?

I need to get out of this house, she thought.

“I’ll come right now,” Madeline said.

The apartment was ideal, in its simplicity and location. Madeline had hoped the price would be outrageous, way beyond her means, so that she could automatically dismiss it. But it was far less than Madeline had expected. And Rachel was willing to give her a six-month lease… because she was a friend.

“Let me call Trevor,” Madeline said.

“Naturally,” Rachel said.

Madeline listened to the ringing of Trevor’s phone. If he didn’t answer, she would have an excuse to back out.

“Hello?” Trevor said.

She explained the situation sotto voce: looking at a writing studio, in town, not a bad price, six-month lease. Should she try it out, like an office where she could go to write?

“Hell yes,” he said. “It’s exactly what you need.”

It was exactly what she needed. But it was money out the door, the last of her advance.

She said, “I’m just worried… I mean, we promised Brick a car, and we still have six installments due to the hospital for your dad…”

“You have to spend money to make money,” Trevor said. “We can buy Brick a car when your next royalty check comes, and we’re on a payment plan with the hospital. You shouldn’t have to give up a dream situation because of bills my father left behind. This is an investment in your next book.”

Madeline took a deep breath. The only way she could describe this moment was as one where she decided to jump off a cliff, or out of an airplane.

She said, “I’m going to take it.”

Trevor said, “Good girl.”

Madeline hung up. She said to Rachel, “I’m going to take it.”

Rachel said, “You are the luckiest woman in the world to have a husband like Trevor. Andy would never let me do this. He would think it looked bad.”

She squinted at Rachel. “Do you think it looks bad?” she asked. “That I got my own place?”

“No!” Rachel exclaimed. “You have a reason. You’re an artist. A novelist.”

An artist. A novelist. Madeline basked in the warmth of those words.

Virginia Woolf. A room of one’s own.

Rachel handed Madeline the keys and gave her a squeeze. “Congratulations,” she said.

The next morning, Madeline packed up her legal pad, her pens, the novel she was reading-Family Happiness, by Laurie Colwin, for the fortieth time-and her own brown-bag lunch. Down the road, she would stock the apartment with groceries, but not today. Today, she was going to write write write write write.

The apartment was part of an old whaling captain’s home. It had been built in 1873, refurbished in 1927 and then again in 2002, when it was subdivided into apartments. Rachel said that the woman who had been living in the unit before Madeline had moved to the Virgin Islands because she couldn’t handle another Nantucket winter. It included a parking spot-that alone, Madeline thought, made the place worth the rent. Across the street was Madeline’s favorite breakfast restaurant, Black-Eyed Susan’s. It wasn’t open for the season yet, but soon enough Madeline would be able to pop over and get a veggie scramble and a latte to go. City living!

Madeline fit her key into the lock and stepped into… her apartment!

It was so exciting-although, in truth, the space was nothing special. The walls were painted flat eggshell white. The previous renter had, thankfully, left behind some basic pieces of furniture: a sofa and two armchairs covered in beige linen slipcovers, a plush area rug in squares of varying aquas and blues, a round blond wood dining table with four chairs, and-the only thing of interest-a wooden box with fifteen compartments, covered with a thin sheet of glass. In each compartment lay a bird’s egg nestled in straw-plover, eastern gray gull, black-backed gull, long-tailed duck, oystercatcher, least tern.

Rachel had apologized about the box with the bird eggs and had offered to dispose of it, but Madeline wanted to keep it.

There was a small galley kitchen with particleboard cabinets, a tiny bathroom with a fiberglass stall shower, and a bedroom containing nothing but a full-size box spring and mattress, bare of linens.

The apartment wasn’t remarkable in any aspect-except that it was hers.

So here was something she’d missed out on all her life: a place of her own. Madeline wanted to walk down the street to Flowers on Chestnut and buy a fresh bouquet, she wanted a selection of herbal teas, she wanted colorful throw pillows and a soft chenille blanket, she wanted beeswax taper candles that she would light when the sun started to go down, she wanted a wireless speaker so she could listen to Mozart and Brahms.

No time to dream about that now. Madeline needed to write! She turned her cell phone off. Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

Madeline took her legal pads, her pens, and the Laurie Colwin book out of her backpack and set up a “desk” at the round dining table.

Candles would be nice.

And Mozart.

But for now, she would have to go without.

Madeline had wanted to be a writer since she was old enough to hold a pencil. The desire was coded in her genes, but it was also a result of how she had been raised, or not raised. She had grown up in the help quarters of the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, where her mother worked as a banquet waitress. In the long nights of her mother’s absence-every night potentially terrifying, as the Hotel del was known to be haunted by the ghost of Kate Morgan-Madeline would keep her imagination occupied by writing stories about a girl hero named Gretchen Green. Gretchen Green was the oldest of seven sisters, she had two glamorous parents, she lived in a beach mansion in La Jolla, and she was followed everywhere by her dachshund, Walter Mondale. Madeline had lost all of her Gretchen Green stories, but if she were to come across them now, she knew she would find blatant documentation of every single element that had been missing from her own childhood. Sisters. Parents. A home. A pet. A sense that she, Madeline, was special.

The passion for writing lasted into college. Madeline attended San Diego State, where she studied with a female writer who was so fabulous and inspiring that Madeline was terrified to disappoint her and therefore had handed in only incomplete stories. It’s not quite finished had been Madeline’s standard excuse. Since none of her pieces was ever truly done, they could not be criticized for imperfections.

The writing professor was encouraging, nonetheless. “You have a way with language,” she told Madeline. “Your pieces have a lot of surface energy. I would be interested in seeing you delve deeper. You should try and finish at least one of these stories. You seem to have an issue with resolution.”

In her senior year, Madeline applied to four MFA programs, but she was accepted at only one, her last choice, Bellini University in Florida-otherwise known as Bikini University.

Depression ensued. Madeline had had her heart set on the University of Iowa. When the rejection letter came, she burst into tears. If it wasn’t going to be Iowa, then she wanted Columbia, but that didn’t happen either (the applicant pool, the letter said, was especially strong that year); nor did she get into the University of Michigan. It looked like it would be Bellini or nothing.

At that time, Madeline was dating a former USC football player named Geoffrey, who worked as a bouncer at the Coaster Saloon, on Mission Beach. She knew Geoffrey had strong feelings for her, but he was a loser. Mission Beach was seedy, and Geoffrey sold drugs on the side. When Madeline told Geoffrey that she was applying to graduate school, he panicked about her moving away and said he would go with her. When Madeline expressed skepticism about this plan, he got a tattoo of her name on the soft underside of his forearm. MAD, the tattoo said, because this was what he called her.

Geoffrey was excited to move to Florida and get something going there, which meant getting a job at a bar and finding people to sell drugs to.

No, Madeline decided. She wasn’t going to Florida. She would not settle for Bikini University, and she would not settle for Geoffrey. Late one night, after his shift, she broke up with him.

What transpired next was the worst thing that had ever happened to Madeline. On a night shortly after the breakup, Geoffrey went on a bender of tequila and cocaine, and he showed up at Madeline’s dorm room at three o’clock in the morning, when both Madeline and her roommate were fast asleep, and he carried Madeline out of the building. He loaded her into the back of a panel van he had stolen from the parking lot of the Coaster Saloon and bound her wrists and ankles with plastic zip ties. He gagged her with a bandanna and took her to a motel in Encanto, where he kept her for fifty-two hours, until he finally ran out of cocaine and passed out cold. Madeline was able to make enough noise banging her elbows against the flimsy hotel wall that a Hispanic cleaning lady heard her, opened the door, and called the police.

After Madeline testified and after Geoffrey was sent to jail, she wanted to get as far away from Southern California as she possibly could. With the help of her former San Diego State professor, Madeline found a bed for the summer in a “writer’s retreat” on Nantucket Island. The “writer’s retreat” ended up being a bunch of Chi O girls from the University of North Carolina who had majored in English and liked to host poetry slams. But the room was cheap, and Madeline found a job busing tables at 21 Federal, leaving her days free to write.

By the end of summer, she had finished her first piece of writing ever-a novel entitled The Easy Coast, about a young woman who is brutally kidnapped by her loser drug-dealing boyfriend.

With further help from her former San Diego State professor, Madeline sent The Easy Coast to three agents in New York, and within a week, all three had called saying they wanted to represent her. Madeline flew from Nantucket to New York to meet with these agents, and this was how she met Trevor.

He had been her pilot.

Trevor liked to describe the way Madeline looked when he first met her: she was a beautiful blond from Southern California on the day her greatest dream was about to come true.

That year, in Madeline’s memory, was a giant starburst, an explosion of heat and light. Her book found an agent-Redd Dreyfus-and shortly thereafter, a thirty-thousand-dollar advance from an up-and-coming editor named Angie Turner at the publishing house Final Word. And Madeline met Trevor Llewellyn, and the two of them fell in love. Nine months into the relationship, they were engaged. By that time, Madeline’s book had received two starred prepublication reviews, from the notoriously cranky Kirkus and from Publishers Weekly, both announcing the emergence of a startling new talent.

“Startling new talent.” Madeline turned that phrase over and over in her mind as she stared now at her blank legal pad.

The Easy Coast hadn’t been a huge commercial success-it sold around fifteen thousand copies in hardcover-but it did well enough that Angie offered her a contract for a second novel.

Madeline’s next book, Hotel Springford, had been about a girl growing up in a grand old storied and haunted hotel with her banquet-waitress mother. It hadn’t sold as well as The Easy Coast, but Madeline had written it when Brick was a baby and she was too consumed with changing diapers and pureeing squash to worry about book sales.

After Hotel Springford, Madeline was surprised to feel the urge to write subside, for the first time in her life, supplanted by the joys and exhaustion of motherhood. She decided to take a hiatus from writing and just enjoy being a mom for a while. She loved life with Brick; it made the bumps in the road-her three lost pregnancies, Big T’s illness and death-bearable.

When Brick entered middle school and Madeline’s hopes for another child were pretty much dashed, she got back to writing fiction on her own timetable. The result was Islandia, which earned her the six-figure, two-book deal and ultimately landed her in her current predicament.

It had seemed like so much money last year, but after Redd’s cut and taxes, what was left was enough to pay off their backed-up credit cards, invest the fifty thousand dollars with Eddie, who seemed to make money in his sleep… and rent the apartment.

Madeline stared at the blank page. Would scented candles help? It was quiet in the apartment, but Madeline could hear voices and passing traffic out on the street. Mozart or Brahms would block that out. Writing a novel on deadline was hard work, especially when she was so preoccupied.

She gazed out the window, down onto Centre Street. Back in the whaling days, Centre Street was known as Petticoat Row, because the men had all gone off on whaling expeditions, leaving behind the women to run the businesses.

Petticoat Row wasn’t a bad title, but Angie was allergic to historical novels. They didn’t sell unless your name was Philippa Gregory.

The streetscape wasn’t as inspiring as Madeline had hoped.

A favor as cherished as a diamond had been cashed in on her behalf. Redd Dreyfus was an old-fashioned New York literary agent. He was rotund, he drank Scotch, he smoked cigars and took editors to lunch at the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, where he ordered the sirloin bloody rare. For some reason, Angie owed him. Angie Turner was whippet thin; she wore pencil skirts and slingbacks. She drank chardonnay and picked at salads. Madeline wondered about the favor. She imagined it involved another author, someone deeply respected and badly behaved. She imagined it involved sex, drugs, or money, though more likely it had to do with foreign rights or a publicity gaffe.

She would have liked to have parsed the particulars of her emotions with Trevor, but Trevor would be in the air. People thought that being a pilot was hard, but once one knew how to fly, it was actually pretty much the same as driving a bus, but with more sex appeal. Because of the sunglasses, Madeline liked to say.

She picked up the display box of bird eggs. They were all delicate and perfect in their eggness, each nestled in a cushy bed of straw in its compartment. Alternately speckled, smooth, and cobbled, with the subtlest variance of colors: white, cream, ivory, porcelain, tint of blue, tint of green. Was the woman who had moved to the Virgin Islands an ornithologist? Madeline had once given a magazine interview in which she said Every life contains a novel. Could she reasonably write a novel about a female ornithologist who moves from Nantucket to the Virgin Islands?

She knew nothing about the Virgin Islands.

A knock at the door startled Madeline so badly that she nearly tossed the box of eggs into the air.

Who…?

Madeline was terrified, despite the fact that it was broad daylight and she was smack dab in the middle of town. She still suffered from a lingering case of PTSD, even now, more than twenty years after her kidnapping. She was terrified of sudden noises, and she would never have been able to write an S &M novel like Fifty Shades. Ropes and blindfolds and gags made her hyperventilate to the point of passing out.

Who was at the door?

Madeline waited, holding her breath, hoping whoever it was would retreat.

Another knock. Steady, insistent. Madeline’s car was in the driveway. Any one of a thousand people would have recognized her car.

Madeline tiptoed over to the door, not wanting her footsteps to be heard.

A familiar male voice said, “Madeline, I know you’re in there. Open up, it’s me.”

Me? Madeline thought. The voice was so familiar, and yet in her panic, she couldn’t identify it.

She unlocked the door and cracked it open.

Eddie.

Madeline exhaled. “Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.”

He was wearing a white linen shirt and khaki linen pants and a Panama hat and the tan Versace loafers he loved so much. This was his summer uniform, and Madeline thought he was pushing the season a little bit. It was “warm” today, at sixty-two degrees, but it was still far from summer, and here was Eddie, dressed like a pimp in Havana circa 1955. And yet, the look worked for him. Fast Eddie. He could list a house at ten a.m., show it twice, and have it sold at ten percent above the asking price by afternoon. People loved the Panama hat, which came not from Panama, as people would likely think, but from someplace in Peru or Ecuador.

Every year, someone on Nantucket went as Fast Eddie for Halloween.

“Can I come in?” he said. “Please?”

Madeline ushered him inside. Her pride at having her own place was pretty much quashed once Eddie dragged his assessing eye around the digs.

“How did you know I was here?” Madeline asked. “I haven’t even told Grace about this yet.”

“How do I know anything?” Eddie said. “I heard it on the street. So, what are you paying?”

“Um…” Madeline thought about lying, but he would find out the truth. He probably already knew the truth; asking was just a pretense. “Two thousand a month.”

“Ha!” One short, derisory laugh.

Madeline waited for the follow-up.

He said, “I could have gotten it for you for fifteen hundred, maybe twelve.”

He’s bluffing, Madeline thought.

“Oh?” she said.

“But you went with Rachel.”

“I did,” Madeline said. “She was sort of pushy when I mentioned it. And I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

“You wouldn’t have bothered me,” Eddie said. “This is a quiet time of year for me. I could have gotten you this place, and I would have done you better on the rent. Frankly, I’m surprised you decided to use Rachel. After what Calgary did to Hope…”

Madeline thought, Calgary didn’t do anything to Hope except for break up with her a week before the Christmas formal. And, supposedly, he gave the sea-glass pendant necklace-which probably cost all of thirty dollars-to another girl, Kylie Eckers. But hadn’t teenagers been doing this kind of thing since the beginning of time? Why should Rachel be punished?

“What are you doing here, Eddie?” Madeline asked.

“Once I heard you got a ‘writing studio,’” Eddie said, “I had to come see it for myself.”

She didn’t like the way he said writing studio. It made this decision sound fanciful and absurd, like she had bought a unicorn.

“I’m working,” Madeline said, nodding at her blank legal pad.

“Are you?”

“Trying.”

“I still haven’t read your last book,” Eddie said. “But everyone else loved it.”

Madeline knew that Eddie had never and would never read any of her work. The last book Eddie had even bothered to crack open was Dune, in the tenth grade.

Eddie gave himself a tour of the apartment, his interest in her writing evaporating like a bad smell. In the kitchen, he opened the cabinets, then the creaky door to the outdated dishwasher. In the bathroom, he turned on the water in the sink. And in the bedroom, he emitted a dissatisfied hmmmpf.

Madeline rolled her eyes. Really, what did Eddie Pancik care about a piddly one-bedroom apartment that rented for two thousand dollars a month? The only rental he handled was the famous fifty-thousand-dollar-a-week house on Low Beach Road, from which he took a whopping weekly commission.

Eddie popped out of the bedroom and readjusted his Panama hat in that way he had, giving Madeline a glimpse of his shaved head. Madeline had known him so long, she remembered his curls.

“What does Trevor think of this place?” he asked.

“He was very supportive,” Madeline said.

“Of course he was,” Eddie said. “You deserve your own time and your own space, Maddie. There’s no reason to feel guilty about it.”

“I don’t feel guilty,” Madeline said.

“Except you’re paying too much,” Eddie said.

“Speaking of money…,” Madeline said. She couldn’t believe she was going to bring this up, but there were so few times when she and Eddie were alone together that she felt compelled to at least ask. “Is there any way Trevor and I might see our investment back from you sooner rather than later? I’m not going to lie to you, Eddie. Taking this apartment was kind of a stretch. And Brick wants a car. I would honestly be okay with not making a dime in profit if you could just return the fifty grand to us.”

“I’m confused,” Eddie said. “Why did you invest with me if you didn’t care about profit?”

Why had she invested? Greed, she supposed, and hubris. Eddie had come to her and Trevor with the opportunity to double their money, and Madeline had been tantalized by the prospect. She and Trevor had been struggling financially for so long-while Grace and Eddie bought a huge house on three acres, bought a brand-new Range Rover and a Porsche Cayenne; while they let the twins shop online at Saks and Neiman Marcus-that Madeline had been determined to invest with Eddie because she finally could.

However, she didn’t want to admit this to Eddie. She had outkicked her coverage.

“Is there any way we could get it back, say, next month?” she asked.

“Next month?” Eddie said. He raised his eyebrows and gave her a devilish smile, one of his facial expressions that Madeline found attractive. “You do understand what I’m in the middle of, right? I’m building spec houses. I’m going to build them and then sell them, and we will all see our profit when I sell them. Right now, I’m just trying to get them finished.”

“Are you close?” Madeline said.

There was a long silence, long enough that Madeline thought perhaps Eddie hadn’t heard her, and she was about to ask again when he said, “No, Maddie, not really. I’m not really close at all.”

“But we’re still thinking June for a return, right?” she said. “June, or at the latest August. That’s what you told us back in January, Eddie.”

“Yes, Maddie, I know that’s what I told you, but things have changed since January. You have to take into account market variations.”

Madeline tried not to panic. Eddie was such a canny businessman that she hadn’t worried about investing with him for one second. Trevor had warned Madeline that financial deals-loans, investments, what have you-were exactly the kind of thing that ruined friendships. But Madeline had insisted.

“Market variations,” she said. She didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but she figured it meant her money was tied up for the time being.

“Yes,” Eddie said.

He was giving her his sensitive expression now, which she also liked. Eddie did have a sweetness to him, although it appeared only rarely, and mostly when he was dealing with his daughters.

“I should go,” he said. “Leave you to work your magic. We’ll see you tomorrow night for dinner. Grace is making shrimp tacos.”

Madeline exhaled. One small blessing, dinner at the Pancik house. Trevor and Brick wouldn’t have to eat pizza again. Grace was a phenomenal cook.

“Don’t tell her about this place,” Madeline said. “I want to surprise her.”

“Will do,” Eddie said. He suddenly looked keen to leave, pronto.

Madeline saw Eddie to the door. “See ya, Eddie,” she said. “Thanks for stopping by.”

After Eddie was gone, she flopped onto the sofa. Market variations? They would get their money back, though, right? There was a signed paper somewhere. But Madeline was worried. If she wanted money, she would have to get to work, write this book, make it something special. The mere thought was overwhelming.

She needed a nap.

NANTUCKET

Sultan Nash, who had been hired to repaint the outside trim on Black-Eyed Susan’s, watched Madeline King park her car in one of the three spots of the blue Victorian across the street.

Sultan knew Madeline because he had grown up on the island with her husband, Trevor, playing football at the Boys & Girls Club. He noticed Madeline’s turquoise Mini Cooper in the parking spot because he’d tried to park his pickup truck in that same spot the week before, and he’d narrowly escaped being towed. Sultan Nash had been irate about this. He knew it was private property, but he also held tight to the belief that anyone who had been born and raised on the island should be able to park wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. He had appeared at town meeting for a string of ten years running and aired this opinion.

He waved at Madeline and said, “I wouldn’t park there if I were you.”

She grinned. “I’m renting one of the apartments in this building.”

Renting one of the apartments? Sultan thought. Had the unimaginable happened? Had Trevor and Madeline split? Sultan had seen them both at a wedding the previous fall, and he had noted how deliriously in love they seemed, like newlyweds themselves. At the end of the night, Trevor had done a soft-shoe dance for Madeline-he was actually pretty good-and when he was done, Madeline had laid a kiss on him that made Sultan blush. He would have given his right arm for a marriage like that.

About half an hour after Sultan saw Madeline enter the Victorian, he noticed Eddie Pancik knocking on the door. Madeline opened the door, and Eddie disappeared inside.

Sultan mentioned this to Darlene Lanta, a waitress at the Downyflake, which was where Sultan ate lunch every day in an as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to date Darlene Lanta.

Darlene said, “So let me get this straight: Madeline King got an apartment in town and Eddie Pancik stopped by to visit?”

Sultan nodded and took a bite of his BLT.

Rachel McMann told her husband, Andy (or Dr. Andy, as he was known to his dental patients), that she had rented Madeline “a room of her own.” Which Dr. Andy-who was a habitual half listener, due to the fact that the people he was most often conversing with had their mouths wide open and at least one metal tool inside and therefore were unintelligible anyway-construed to mean “a place of her own.” He had never read Virginia Woolf.

Rachel also said, “I basically lucked into the rental, right place at the right time, as I keep telling you, sweetheart. I can’t believe Madeline didn’t go with Eddie Pancik.”

Dr. Andy wondered if Madeline and Trevor had split. He didn’t care to surmise. But he accidentally mentioned what Rachel had told him to Janice, his hygienist, the next morning. Janice was married to a title examiner named Alicia, so she frequently lent a different perspective to the dramas that Dr. Andy told her about, all of which he heard from Rachel.

Janice said, “Madeline King moved out? That doesn’t make any sense. Are you sure that’s what Rachel told you?”

Dr. Andy was sure, or pretty sure. He said, “I guess Rachel expected her to go with Eddie Pancik.”

Janice, being a hygienist, was also something of a half listener. She heard this as Rachel expected that Madeline would get together with Eddie Pancik.

“Really?” Janice said. “That doesn’t seem likely, does it? Eddie Pancik? Isn’t she best friends with his wife?”

Dr. Andy said, “I suppose anything is possible, Janice. But we shouldn’t say anything one way or another about Eddie Pancik. He’s our landlord. We could easily find ourselves out on the street.”

Janice said, “I’ve always thought that Madeline King should write a novel about a dentist’s office.”

Dr. Andy agreed that she should, then walked off to scrub up for his nine a.m. root canal, leaving Janice to ask her next patient, Phoenix Hernandez, whom Janice counted as one of her many trusted confidantes, whether she thought Madeline King should get together with Eddie Pancik now that Madeline had her own place in town.

GRACE

Grace’s perennials were starting to sprout, her spring bulbs were in blossom-narcissus, hyacinths, tulips-and her Japanese cherry trees had thousands of nascent buds. Two more weeks and those trees would be in full-on luscious pink bloom, just like Grace’s heart.

Benton came to the house every day at ten.

The gift Benton brought her from Morocco was an elaborately cast silver pot for brewing mint tea, and two etched crystal glasses. When Benton first showed Grace the teapot, her spirits fell. A teapot was neither sexy nor romantic. He might as well have brought her a tagine pot.

But going through the ritual-harvesting the most robust spearmint leaves from Grace’s indoor herb garden, then boiling water and adding just the right amount of sugar into the curvy silver pot, then pouring the elixir into the etched crystal glasses and sipping-turned out to be a sensual shared experience.

“Do you like it?” Benton asked.

“I’ve never tasted anything so pure,” Grace admitted. “It tastes like the color green.”

Relief and, Grace thought, tenderness mingled on his face.

They brewed mint tea every day and drank it as they discussed their plans for the yard. They decided to put in a long, narrow bed of daylilies off the front of the deck.

Benton said, “I haven’t had much experience with daylilies.”

“Well then,” Grace said, “this is where I will teach you.”

Grace’s grandmother Sabine, a woman Grace had worshipped for her refined tastes, had raised daylilies in her garden, and as a child, Grace had become entranced not so much with the flowers themselves as with their poetic names: ‘Jock Randall,’ ‘Ice Carnival,’ ‘Ginger Creek,’ ‘Maude’s Valentine.’

She and Benton sat side by side at Grace’s kitchen table and pored over the catalog.

“I think we need some masculine varieties,” Benton said. “How about ‘Rocket Booster’? Or ‘Piano Man’? Or ‘Freedom’s Highway’?”

“‘Wolf Eyes,’” Grace said.

“‘Apple Jack,’” Benton said. His fingers grazed hers as he turned the page, and her ears started to buzz.

“I’m partial to sweeter names,” Grace said. “We should get some ‘Baby Darling.’”

“Please,” Benton said. “Please don’t make me plant a flower called ‘Baby Darling.’”

Grace laughed. “What about ‘Butter Cream’?” she said.

“I’ll give you ‘Butter Cream,’” Benton said, “if you give me ‘Broadway Starfish.’”

“Look at this one,” Grace said. “‘Bullfrog Kisses.’” She pointed to the photo in the catalog.

“That is not a particularly attractive flower,” Benton said. “Then again, who would want to be kissed by a bullfrog?”

Grace turned the page. She picked out the best-looking flower on the page and said its name before she thought to stop herself. “‘Blue Desire.’”

“‘Blue Desire,’” he said. “I like it.” He raised his head, and their eyes locked. Grace knew the tips of her ears must be flaming red.

He’s going to kiss me, she thought. He moved in. Their lips were just about to touch. Grace sucked in her breath, and the soft sound this made seemed to send a jolt through Benton. He backed away.

“Whoa,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Grace. I think the names of these flowers are getting me riled up.”

“Don’t be sorry!” she said quickly. She was devastated that he’d stopped. She wanted to go back to where they’d been a moment before, the fun intimacy of selecting flowers, but the magic of that had passed. She closed the catalog and decided to ask him the question she’d been wanting to ask for the past two weeks. “Did McGuvvy go with you to Morocco?”

“She didn’t,” Benton said. “She got a job teaching sailing out in San Diego. We broke up.”

As this news settled over Grace, he drummed his fingers on the table nervously.

She said, “So you’re a free man.”

“I’m free, yes,” Benton said.

“Benton…”

“You’re married, Grace,” he said. “To Eddie, who pays my bills.”

“I…”

“Don’t say it,” Benton said. He let out a long exhale and stared into his tea. “You have a house, you have children, you have a whole life with Eddie.” Benton took a sip of his tea. “I’m your gardener.”

“You’re a lot more than my gardener,” Grace said. “This winter, when I got your postcards…”

“Don’t say it.”

“I realized how much you meant to me,” Grace said. “My… friendship with you. This garden, this yard, what we’re trying to create here, means something to me.”

Benton said, “You have to stop.”

“Stop what?” Grace said. “Stop how I feel? Stop how you feel?”

“You don’t know how I feel,” Benton said.

This clammed her up. She thought, Oh God, it’s one sided. Unrequited. The loneliest word in the English language.

“How do you feel?” Grace asked.

“Confused,” he said.

She sat with that in silence.

“I am not that guy,” Benton said. “I never have been. And it’s not like you’re just some random married woman I met at a bar. You’re my client.”

“I know,” Grace said.

“I am not that guy,” he said. He backed his chair away from the table. “I need to shift my focus.”

“Away from me,” Grace said.

“Away from you.”

“But you do like me,” Grace said.

“Oh, Grace,” he said. “I more than like you.”

The next morning, Benton showed up twenty minutes later than usual, and for those twenty minutes, Grace thought he might not be coming at all. She thought, He’s going to drop me as a client. He’s going to fire me. He “more than liked” her, but because of this, they would have to stop working together.

When Benton’s truck did finally pull into the driveway, Grace felt faint with relief. She hurried out to the backyard, and in order to seem like she hadn’t been standing around, waiting for him to show up, she started pulling nonexistent weeds in the tulip bed.

“Hey, Grace,” Benton said as he rounded the house. He held out a brown box from Petticoat Row Bakery. “I brought you something.”

His tone was light. Normalcy had been restored. Grace was relieved but also crushed. She said, “Should I pick some mint?”

“Hell yes!” he said.

In the kitchen, Benton made the tea while Grace washed her hands and tried to calm her nerves. Then, together, they took their established places at Grace’s kitchen table.

Benton opened the brown pastry box to reveal four pale-green macarons with pale-pink filling.

“I became partial to macarons from a French bakery in Marrakech,” he said. “But I think these are just as good.” He held one out to her.

Grace accepted the cookie and took a bite. She couldn’t help herself; she groaned with pleasure.

He said, “Try it with the tea.”

With a sip of the tea, yes. It was a taste explosion.

He said, “Do you like it?”

“Nirvana,” she said.

He held her eyes and smiled at her, and her heart fell to the bottom of her stomach. He set down his glass of tea. He shook his head at her like she had done something wrong. He said, very softly, “Oh boy.”

And then he cupped her chin, and he kissed her.

MADELINE

Brick didn’t want to go to the Pancik house for dinner.

“Honey,” Madeline said, “why not?”

Brick shrugged. He had come home from baseball practice and collapsed on the sofa; now, his eyes were glued to the TV-ESPN, The Sports Reporters.

Madeline sat down carefully next to him. “Honey?” she said.

“Don’t feel like it.”

This was a first. Brick normally chomped at the bit to get over to the Panciks’ whenever Grace invited them for dinner. It was the only time he was allowed to hang out with Allegra in her bedroom-with the door open, of course.

“Honey, is everything okay with Allegra?” Madeline asked.

He shrugged. “Dunno.”

Madeline stared at her hands. Sixteen years she had raised this child, but she had never quite mastered the art of getting him to confide in her. Trevor was much better at it. She waited, literally biting her tongue until she tasted the metallic tang of blood.

She was rewarded. He said, “I’m not sure what’s going on. She’s been acting weird. I thought maybe it was a bad time of the month for her or whatever, but now I’m thinking she’s probably sick of me.”

Would it be awful of Madeline to say that she wasn’t surprised? Allegra had positive qualities, chief among them her beauty, her composure, her confidence. What sixteen-year-old girl had such confidence? She could also be quite funny; she did a dead-on impression of the kids’ English teacher, Mrs. Kraft. But there had been something about Allegra since she was young, something superior and entitled and not quite nice that she mostly saved for her mother. She brought Grace to tears on a regular basis, and, as Grace’s best friend, Madeline had always been there to listen. Yes, that was a horrifying thing for your daughter to say. Yes, that was a selfish and thoughtless action. But she’s young, she’ll grow out of it.

Allegra made Madeline feel relieved that she’d never had a daughter herself.

“Sick of you, honey?” Madeline said. “How could anyone ever be sick of you?”

Weak smile.

Madeline didn’t let her true opinions of Allegra surface very often, because Allegra was Brick’s girlfriend; he was besotted. At the beginning of the romance, there had been so much kissing and hands everywhere, too, that Madeline had asked them to please stop. She was far from a prude, but all of that newly discovered desire on display was embarrassing. Allegra’s blue eyes had flashed silver with her triumph. She had converted Brick to the Church of Allegra. He worshipped her.

Allegra made Brick happy, and it was more than sex; when he heard her voice, his face lit up.

Madeline and Grace had made a promise when the kids started dating. We won’t get involved. They would let Allegra and Brick work out their differences. Madeline had always wondered what would happen if they broke up. She had hoped it would be a mutual decision made when they both headed off to separate colleges.

“Please,” Madeline said. “Please come to dinner. You and Allegra can talk things over in person.”

“No,” Brick said. “Just tell everyone I don’t feel well.” He swallowed. “It’s not a lie. My heart hurts.”

Madeline smoothed the hair from Brick’s forehead. “Oh, honey.”

“Please, Mom. I would really rather hang here alone. You and Dad go.”

“What about something to eat? I can make you a grilled cheese?”

“Mom, I’m fine.”

Trevor entered the living room, wearing his green striped good-luck party shirt. His golden hair glinted, and it looked like he had gotten sun on his face-the start of his summer tan. By August, he would be deep brown and his hair three shades lighter. He looked just as Californian as Madeline, if not more so.

“What’s going on?” Trevor asked.

“Brick wants to stay home,” Madeline said. “Maybe we should all cancel. Maybe we should stay home and order pizza instead.”

“Nonsense,” Trevor said. “Grace went to a lot of trouble-you know she did, she always does-and we’re going.” He offered Brick a hand. “All of us.”

“I brought that Malbec you like,” Madeline said, setting the wine down on Grace’s gorgeous blue Bahia granite-or, as Eddie liked to call it, the sexiest countertop in the world.

Grace was busy pushing onions and peppers around in the skillet; her head was engulfed in fragrant steam. “You’re the best friend evah,” she said, imitating what they both called her “Barbie New Bedfahd” accent. “Let’s have us some.”

Outside the glass doors, Madeline watched Eddie hand Trevor a beer and Brick a Coke. Brick settled into one of the rattan deck chairs with canvas-covered cushions. One of the twins came into sight, all long brown hair and long legs in jeans. Madeline hoped it was Allegra; she hoped Allegra would give Brick a kiss from the old days and make Trevor and Eddie blush and cringe respectfully. But it wasn’t Allegra; it was Hope. She wore her hair parted down the middle and tucked behind her ears. Her face was a tick off the glorious beauty of her sister’s; her eyes were squintier, her cheeks fuller. But what Hope lacked in glamour, she made up for in grace. She had a quiet, serious soul and an easy elegance, the likes of which Madeline had witnessed before only in women like Jacqueline Onassis and Audrey Hepburn.

Of the two girls, Madeline preferred Hope. She rarely let herself admit this.

“The garden is looking good,” Madeline said. This was an understatement: the yard and garden dazzled, as always. The rest of Nantucket was still gloomy gray, the grass brown, the trees bare, and the daffodils that lined Milestone Road drooped from weeks of punishing wind and rain. But Grace’s yard was green and lush, as though these three acres had received sunshine by special order. The flower beds had sharp, precise edges; it looked like elves had trimmed the grass with manicure scissors. Everything was sprouted and ready to burst. There was an oval bed of tulips that would have made a Dutchman cry. It contained seven hundred bulbs in flame orange, snow white, cherry red, amethyst, and three luscious shades of pink-powder, shell, and deep fuchsia. The tulip bed alone was enough to make Madeline believe in God. All of the stonework had been scrubbed, as had Grace’s antique cast-iron planters and her five-foot statue of the angel Gabriel, bought from a church in Lourdes, which was where Grace had done a semester abroad when she was at Mount Holyoke. There was a park bench salvaged from the Tuileries said to date back to the era of Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. Voluptuous ferns lined the bench in the exact places where Claude and Auguste would have set their butts. At the edge of the property sat the garden shed and the henhouse. The doors to the henhouse were closed tight; the chickens were asleep.

Madeline let her eyes linger on the wooden footbridge that spanned the brook, then the handcrafted birdhouses, then the Adirondack chairs, artfully arranged to overlook Polpis Harbor. The swimming pool, a dark-tiled rectangle surrounded by old paving stones and the same cobblestones they used on Main Street downtown, was still covered, as was the hot tub. Everything about the Pancik property was paradisaical. Madeline had been to the house thousands of times, and every time the sumptuous beauty of the place stole her breath away. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live with this yard, to see it every second of every day.

Madeline’s “yard” was patches of brown dirt, sand, and crabgrass and, at the border of the property, a mess of scrubby trees, pricker bushes, and weeds. She had one hydrangea, which grew sickly purple flowers. Grace’s hydrangeas-numbering twenty-two-were all pageant winners. They bloomed in blue, purple, pink, white, and green. Madeline hadn’t even known green hydrangeas existed, but yes, they were called ‘Limelight’ hydrangeas, and Grace’s were divine.

“Benton has been here,” Grace said.

“Yes, I can tell,” Madeline said. “Because I only hear from you once every three days.”

Grace’s expression was hard to read. It was half apologetic smile, half something else. “Wine, please,” she sang out. “I’d love some wine.”

Madeline pulled two of Grace’s Baccarat goblets out of the cabinet. Grace liked to use the goblets on Wednesday nights, even though they were fragile and each one cost as much as a night’s stay in the penthouse at the Four Seasons. Madeline had broken one goblet, Grace had broken one, and Eddie had broken two in consecutive weeks. Madeline poured two lavish glasses of the plummy Malbec and brought one to Grace at the stove. “I have some news,” she said.

“You and me both,” Grace said. She took a swill of her wine, then set the goblet down on the sexy granite. “But mine is going to have to wait until later. What’s yours?”

Madeline sucked in a preparatory breath. She worried that Grace would be mad that she had rented the apartment from Rachel McMann, and possibly also that she’d taken the apartment without showing Grace first.

She said, “I rented an apartment in town.”

“What?” Grace yelped.

“It’s not what it sounds like,” Madeline said. “I’m going to use it as a writing studio.”

Grace’s face lit up, and she imitated the patrician accent of her grandmother Sabine. “Splendid, my darling! Where in town?”

“In the blue Victorian on the corner of India and Centre.”

“I’ve always loved that building,” Grace said. She turned down the heat under the onions and peppers and came over to give Madeline a hug. “So you’re a real working girl now, with office space of your own. I’m so jealous! But you deserve it.”

Madeline said, “That’s what everyone keeps saying, but I’m not sure it’s true. It was pretty expensive.”

“How much?” Grace asked.

“Two thousand a month.”

“Eh,” Grace said, shrugging. She returned to the stove and picked up her wine. “That seems reasonable for town in summer.”

Right, Madeline thought. It would seem reasonable to Grace because Grace had never worried about money a day in her life. Grace had been raised in an old Puritan family, the Harpers of Salem, Massachusetts; Grace’s ninth-great grandfather had been the attorney who defended Bridget Bishop, one of the women accused of being a witch. (I am no witch. I am innocent. I know nothing of it. Hanged June 10, 1692.) Grace had three older brothers, the Harper boys, all of them now civil rights attorneys in Boston. Grace and her brothers had been forced to dress for dinner every night growing up in their majestic brick mansion on Essex Street. On the maternal side of the family was Grandmother Sabine, who owned a three-hundred-acre estate in Wayland that Grace used to visit every Sunday. These afternoons included games of croquet in the summer and sleigh rides in the winter. Madeline had always loved hearing details of Grace’s upbringing; she savored them like petit fours. But she couldn’t expect Grace to understand what feeling financially strapped was like.

“And, listen,” Madeline said, wanting to be truthful, because that was her nature. “I heard about the apartment through Rachel McMann.”

“Ugh,” Grace said.

“Eddie is all bent out of shape about it, I think. He stopped by to see the place, and he seemed unhappy I’d gone through Rachel. But it happened by accident. I opened my big mouth, and you know Rachel…”

“Pushy,” Grace said.

“She seized the moment,” Madeline said. “If I’d taken time to collect my wits… if I’d been, you know, hunting for a place, I would have called Eddie. You know I would have.”

Grace waved her hand dismissively. “Eddie will get over it,” she said.

Madeline felt nearly dizzy with relief. She hadn’t expected Grace to take the news on such an even keel. Grace was wound pretty tightly most days, and news like this could catapult her into unreasonable territory. But tonight, Grace was in an exceptional mood. Madeline couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her friend so… playful… so relaxed. She was practically glowing.

“Go outside with the boys,” Grace said. “I’m almost finished up here.”

“Madeline!” Eddie said. He kissed her cheek. “Long time, no see!”

“Eddie,” she said. Air kiss, and the expected waft of Eternity by Calvin Klein, which he had started wearing right out of high school. He smiled at Madeline crookedly, then hovered a hand above the grill to see if it was ready.

Eddie said to Trevor, “So… what do you think about your girl’s new digs?”

“I think it’s great,” Trevor said. He swatted Madeline on the butt. “No more excuses about not getting anything done. Now, she should be writing a book a year, or two books a year, like that other Nantucket novelist.”

“Two books a year!” Eddie said. “Then you could not only invest in my spec houses, you could buy one.”

Madeline tightened her fingers around the delicate stem of the Baccarat wineglass. Hearing Eddie bring up the spec houses made her tense enough to snap it.

Madeline took Trevor’s arm. “Let’s walk to the bridge.”

They strolled across the wide swath of soft, emerald lawn, toward the footbridge that crossed the brook. The sound the water made when it ran over the rocks was musical, like chimes. Madeline closed her eyes briefly and tried to savor the sound. It was the type of rocks Benton Coe had used, or the way he’d positioned them.

“Listen,” she said. “I asked Eddie for our fifty grand back.”

“You did?” Trevor said. “When?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “He stopped by the apartment.”

“He did?” Trevor said. “I don’t know how I feel about you entertaining strange men in that place. After all, I haven’t even seen it yet.” His tone was jokey, but Madeline sensed he was a little miffed.

“He came by to tell me how mad he was that I’d rented from Rachel,” Madeline said.

“Oh,” Trevor said, and she felt him ease up. “That sounds like our friend Fast Eddie.”

“Just tell me it’s going to be okay,” Madeline said. “I’m going to write another book, and we’re going to get our money back.”

Trevor kissed her, then took both of her hands in his. “It’s going to be okay.”

Madeline turned around. Eddie, Hope, and Brick were all unabashedly staring at them. And Grace, too, from inside the kitchen.

Eddie called out, “Whaddya doin’ over there? Proposing marriage?”

They walked back to the patio, where Grace had laid out her standard appetizer spread: smoked bluefish pâté, rosemary flat breads, farmhouse cheddar, fig jam, roasted peppers, Marcona almonds, Armenian string cheese, and a stick of herbed salami with two kinds of mustard. There were Bremner wafers and soft unsalted butter for Eddie, which he ate for his heartburn, and there were Triscuits and Cheez Whiz for Brick, because it was his favorite snack and Grace always kept it on hand for him. Brick didn’t seemed cheered by the fresh can of Cheez Whiz, however.

There was still no sign of Allegra.

Eddie raised his glass of wine. “Here’s to Madeline’s new apartment,” he said. “Congratulations.”

HOPE

Allegra didn’t come down to dinner until the very last minute. Their mother had called up to her three times, and then Eddie called up to her. Eddie was the only person who held sway over Allegra because he was the one who paid her credit card bill.

Allegra came out onto the deck, her eyes glued to her phone, her thumbs flying.

Hope said, “Who are you texting?”

Everyone else grew quiet-not because anyone else (except for Brick) cared whom Allegra was texting, but because Hope rarely spoke, and so when she did, everyone made a point to listen.

“Nobody,” Allegra said. She finished up and slid the phone into the front pocket of her sleek leather jacket. She was wearing her skinny Citizens, black ballet flats, a black lace blouse from Dolce Vita, and the soft caramel leather jacket. She looked like she’d just climbed off the back of some guy’s Ducati on the Italian Riviera.

She beamed at the assembled families, as if shocked and delighted to find them all there, as if she hadn’t heard them from upstairs in her bedroom for the past half hour.

“Hey, everyone!” she said. “Hey, Brick!”

Brick made an eighth of a turn in his chair, then waved in her general direction. “Hey.”

It was strained-but did he know about Ian Coburn? No, Hope didn’t think so. Allegra had managed to keep her mouth shut about Ian. She hadn’t even told her sworn bestie, Hollis. Hollis doesn’t need to know, Allegra had said on one occasion. And then, on a second occasion, she said, If I told Hollis, the entire school would know before we finished saying the Pledge. I love that girl, but she cannot keep a secret. The only person she had told about Ian Coburn was Hope.

Ian Coburn was taking his final exams at BC. He would be back on Nantucket the following week.

“What are you going to do then?” Hope had asked her sister.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” Allegra said.

Hope had no idea. She could see Allegra breaking up with Brick, and she could also see Allegra breaking up with Ian Coburn. And, she could easily see Allegra having the ego to try to juggle both boys over the summer.

Hope had said, “You’re going to play it by ear? Wait and see how it goes?”

“Exactly,” Allegra said.

Of course this was her sister’s answer. Allegra believed in nothing so strongly as her own good fortune, and in things working out in her own best interest.

But she would blow it.

Allegra put a hand on Brick’s shoulder and then bent over and kissed the top of his head like she was his mother. Hope felt a pang for Brick. Was it not totally obvious that Allegra’s reservoir of sexy, romantic feelings for him had run dry and that she was preoccupied by her phone, which they could all hear vibrating away in her jacket pocket?

“Who’s texting you?” Brick asked.

“Texting me?” Allegra said. She smiled innocently, as though she couldn’t feel the persistent vibration of Ian Coburn’s messages against her left breast. She plucked her phone from her pocket and checked the display. “Oh, it’s Hollis. She’s asking about math.”

She was a born liar, Hope thought. It was incredible. She should skip the modeling career and go straight to politics.

“I don’t believe you,” Brick said. “Show me the text!” He reached out to grab Allegra’s phone, but in the process, he hit Madeline’s glass of red wine-which shattered and sent a Malbecian spray all over Allegra’s Italian leather jacket.

Allegra shrieked.

Madeline said, “Oh, Brick, no!”

Trevor said, “Honey, it was an accident.”

Madeline set about picking up pieces of the wineglass while Allegra whipped off her leather jacket, taking her phone out of her pocket first and setting it on the dry part of the table, right where both Hope and Brick could see it, when Ian Coburn texted yet again.

“Ian Coburn?” Brick said. “Since when do you get texts from Ian Coburn?”

“Jesus, Brick!” Allegra said. “This jacket cost me a fortune!”

Eddie cleared his throat. “Me a fortune,” he said. “Is it ruined?”

Allegra wiped at it with napkins, but the wine had left a shower of dark stains that looked like splattered blood.

“It’s an Italian jacket, right?” Hope said. “You’d think they would make them wine resistant.”

“I can’t believe this!” Allegra said.

Grace got a sponge for the wine, and Madeline threw the shards of glass into the trash. Grace said, “Do you want the sponge for your coat, honey?”

“You can’t put water on it, Mother,” Allegra said.

“Tone,” Eddie warned.

Allegra’s phone continued to buzz.

Her family was so predictable, Hope thought. Possibly they believed that she, too, was predictable-but nobody knew that in a month, maybe two, she would be dating Brick.

Brick said, “Ian Coburn sure has a lot to say to you.”

Allegra snatched up her phone. “It’s none of your business who texts me.”

“Really?” he said.

“I’m putting the shrimp on,” Eddie said.

“I think maybe we should go home,” Madeline said.

Grace handed Eddie a large platter of shrimp and jalapeño skewers. When he laid the first one on the hot grill, there was an angry hiss.

Grace said, “You should not go home. It’s just a glass and a little spill. But, Eddie, you need to apologize to Madeline for giving her a hard time about Rachel McMann.”

Rachel McMann, Hope thought. Ew.

Rachel was the mother of Hope’s sworn enemy, Calgary McMann. Hope had dated Calgary for four weeks before she finally allowed him to get to third base, but he broke up with her right after, making Hope feel like there was something wrong with her. When Calgary and his friends saw Hope in the hallway, they made a strange hand motion that Hope didn’t understand, and there was no one she could ask, but she knew it wasn’t good. In response, she flipped them off, which made them laugh. Calgary had left Hope without a date for the Christmas formal; the red velvet cocktail dress that she and Grace had bought at Hepburn went unworn. Calgary had asked Kylie Eckers to the formal, but Kylie got so drunk at the preparty that the principal and superintendent stopped her at the door and called her parents to come pick her up. When Hope heard that news from Allegra the next morning, she felt somewhat vindicated, but now, five months later, her hatred of both Kylie and Calgary had become indelible, like a fossil in rock.

“Rachel McMann wasn’t worthy of your commission,” Eddie said. “That was my only point.”

“I don’t think she took a commission,” Madeline said.

“Oh, believe me, she took a commission,” Eddie said.

Just the name Rachel McMann made Hope feel sick. She couldn’t stand another second of this conversation.

“Mom?” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

“I’m not hungry either,” Brick said. He looked at Madeline. “Can we go home, Mom, please?”

“Yes,” Madeline said. “I think we should.”

That was the last thing Hope heard before she marched upstairs, except for the buzzing of Allegra’s phone.

MADELINE

You can’t go!” Grace said. “We haven’t eaten yet! I made fresh pineapple salsa. I made mango panna cotta.”

“I don’t feel well,” Brick said.

“Can you hang on a little while longer, buddy?” Trevor asked. “We’ll eat and then we’ll go.”

Madeline was all for trying to set things right. She felt awful that Brick had broken another one of the five-hundred-dollar wine goblets, but this led to annoyance that Grace insisted on using such expensive crystal for casual family dinners in the first place. Madeline felt like she should offer to pay for the glass, or for Allegra’s jacket, even though she didn’t have the money. Although clearly she did have the money, because she was blowing two grand a month on the rent for a room of her own!

Madeline collapsed in a rattan chair, defeated. Then she popped back up. She wanted more wine; she would drink it from a juice glass.

Grace followed her into the kitchen. “I don’t want you to leave until you and I have a chance to talk in private. We’ll go upstairs after dinner. This isn’t something I can discuss on the phone.”

“Oh,” Madeline said. “Okay.”

“Dinner’s ready!” Eddie called.

Conversation at dinner was interrupted by the insistent buzzing of Allegra’s phone.

Eddie finally said, “Allegra, turn it off or take it inside.”

“Ian Coburn must really want to talk to you,” Brick said.

Allegra said, “We’re friends, okay? Is that not allowed?”

Trevor said, “The salsa is delicious.”

“Thank you,” Grace said.

Eddie, Madeline noticed, hadn’t touched his food. He was still picking Bremner wafers off the appetizer plate.

“It’s allowed,” Brick said. “Of course it’s allowed. As long as you’re only friends. As long as that’s all it is.”

“Of course that’s all it is,” Allegra said. She threw her embroidered napkin on top of her taco mess. Grace, Madeline knew, laundered and ironed each napkin before these dinners. “How dare you suggest otherwise!”

Otherwise, Madeline thought. Something was going on between Allegra and Ian Coburn. She felt a hot, pulsing anger. Then she remembered her vow with Grace. We won’t get involved.

“Allegra-” Brick said.

But Allegra was up and out of her chair, her phone tucked into the pocket of her ruined jacket.

She said, “Save it, Brick.” And disappeared into the kitchen.

Brick looked like he wanted to chase after her, but he stayed put.

Madeline finished her glass of wine. She stood up to refill her glass, but Grace said, “It’s gone. Do you want Eddie to grab another bottle from the cellar?”

No, Madeline thought. They should go. Poor Brick had been humiliated enough for one night. But Grace had something to tell her that couldn’t be discussed over the phone, and Madeline was intrigued.

“Yes,” she said.

Eddie brought up two bottles of Screaming Eagle cabernet, and Madeline blinked. Was she seeing things? He’d always said he was saving those bottles for his deathbed.

Madeline said, “Edward, what are you doing?”

He said, “I want to pour this tonight. I’m not sure why-it’s just a gut feeling.”

“That’s as good a reason as any,” Trevor said. “I can’t wait to taste it.”

Grace went into the kitchen to bring everyone a fresh Baccarat wine goblet.

Brick said, “You’re having more wine? I thought you said we could go. Dad?”

Trevor said, “This is the best wine any of us are likely to taste. Eddie spent… how long on the wait list?”

“Eight years and seven months,” Eddie said proudly.

“I don’t care,” Brick said. “Sorry, Mr. Pancik. I just want to go.”

They should go, Madeline thought. Brick never complained. They should save the Screaming Eagle for a night when there was something to celebrate. Such as the spec houses selling and a major return on her and Trevor’s investment coming in.

But Eddie pulled the cork and started pouring the adults wine. They all touched glasses in a moment of peace.

Allegra poked her head out of her bedroom window and called down to the deck. “Brick, would you come up here, please?”

Madeline watched indecision cross her son’s face.

“Please, Brick?” Allegra said.

Brick stood up and went inside.

“Good,” Grace whispered. “They’ll work things out.”

Ian Coburn, Madeline thought. He was a very good-looking kid who had graduated from Nantucket High School the year before. His father was a private-equity guy who commuted back and forth to New York City. His mother was shrill and oblivious to everything but her son’s charms. Ian Coburn had been one of the kids who had been allowed to have parties and serve alcohol with his parents’ blessing. He was, Madeline thought, bad news.

We won’t get involved.

“Keep the door open!” Eddie called out.

Grace refilled her and Madeline’s glasses while Eddie watched how much of his precious wine left the bottle. Grace said, “I have something I want to show Madeline upstairs. Will you boys be all right out here by yourselves?”

“Cigars,” Eddie said to Trevor.

“I hear ya,” Trevor said.

“Oh, look,” Eddie said. “I have two Cohibas right here in my pocket.”

Madeline followed Grace inside, through the kitchen, and up the grand, sweeping staircase. One could fit three or four of the Llewellyns’ house inside the Pancik house, but Madeline had given up on envy long ago. It was fruitless.

They entered Grace’s study, which was a near-exact replica of her grandmother Sabine’s study at the estate in Wayland. The room was too dark and formal for Madeline’s sunny tastes, although it was elegant. There were hunting prints on the taupe walls, built-in walnut bookshelves, and thick brocade drapes. Grace had inherited the enormous, ornately carved mahogany desk from Sabine, along with the thick Persian rug-hundreds of thousands of silk knots in burgundy and navy and cream. Madeline inhaled. She did love the way the room smelled-like sandalwood and old books. Grace had been a French-literature major at Mount Holyoke, so her shelves were lined with Victor Hugo and Voltaire, Colette and Proust, Émile Zola, Dumas, Camus. She had a collection of twenty-four Ted Muehling candlesticks, which held an assortment of slender white, ivory, and dove-gray candles. She had an antique ink pot and a quill pen that actually worked. A banjo clock ticked on the wall and announced the passing of every fifteen minutes in a brassy tenor.

Grace shut and locked the heavy door and dimmed the lights on the huge pewter chandelier that hung from the ceiling. If Madeline had a study with a door that locked, she thought, then she wouldn’t have needed to spend twelve thousand dollars on the apartment.

But Madeline was too good a friend to begrudge Grace her study. It wasn’t merely an excuse for interior decorating: Grace had gardening issues to take care of, and she ran the business of raising Araucana chickens and selling organic eggs.

Madeline sat in the green leather armchair and draped a thick, cream-colored chenille blanket over her lap. Grace collapsed across the crushed-velvet sofa. She propped her chin up on a golden brocade pillow and stared into her goblet of Screaming Eagle, which she held with both hands.

“Grace,” Madeline said, “what is it?”

“Do you remember when I told you that I had a crush on Benton Coe?” she said.

“Yes,” Madeline said. “Obviously.” It had been at the end of last summer. She and Grace had been plunked at the waterline at Steps Beach, drinking homemade watermelon margaritas that Grace was serving from a thermos. Tequila had long been truth serum for Grace, and so somewhere in the middle of the warm, drowsy afternoon, she’d reached over to touch Madeline’s arm-waking Madeline from a nap-and she’d said, “I have a crush on Benton Coe.”

Madeline had still been half or three-quarters asleep, but she said, “No, Grace, you don’t.”

“Yes,” Grace had said. “Yes, I do. You must know what I mean. You must have had a silly, harmless crush on someone over the course of your marriage.”

Madeline shook her head. “No.”

“Really?” Grace said. “You guys have always been Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore?”

“Always,” Madeline said.

The conversation had ended there, but Madeline hadn’t forgotten it.

Now, Grace said, “Something has started between us.”

Madeline had had so much wine, she couldn’t even form the appropriate expression on her face. And what would the appropriate expression be? Shock? Horror? Disapproval? Madeline had never been one to judge; the spectrum of human experience was simply too vast to believe in absolute right or absolute wrong.

“What kind of something?” Madeline asked.

“He brought me pistachio macarons from the bakery,” Grace said. “And then he kissed me.”

“Kissed you?” Madeline said. “Was it just one time?”

“It was just once at first,” Grace said. “But then it happened again in the garden shed. And it happened a third time while we were putting up the hammock.” She swirled the wine in her goblet with such abandon that Madeline feared she would spill it all over the golden pillow. Grace was pretty drunk. Possibly she was blowing the “kissing” out of proportion.

“Now,” she said, “it happens every day.”

“Every day?” Madeline said. “What kind of kissing is it?”

“The best kind,” Grace said. “The kind of kissing that makes me dizzy. You know what that feels like, right?”

“Right,” Madeline said. Her and Trevor, the summer of 1993.

“Or maybe it’s desire particular to a forty-year-old woman who has been ignored for so long.”

“Does Eddie ignore you in bed?” Madeline asked.

Grace shrugged-meaning what, Madeline wasn’t sure. “It’s been so long since I was his primary focus,” she said. “How long, do you think?”

“A long time,” Madeline admitted. For pretty much as long as Madeline had known Eddie-close to twenty years-he had taken Grace for granted. Grace had complained about it in the past, but she also said she understood that Eddie was busy. Their lifestyle took an enormous amount of money to sustain, and Grace brought in three hundred dollars a week selling eggs, which was just enough to fill her Range Rover with gas and pay the girls’ cell-phone bills. The leather jacket Allegra had been wearing tonight had probably cost more than what Madeline spent on groceries in a month. Eddie had a lot of pressure on his five-foot-eight frame, hence his constant case of heartburn.

“I’m lonely,” Grace said. “I’ve been lonely for years.”

“Are you going to sleep with him?” Madeline asked. She was whispering now. She could not believe Grace was involved with Benton Coe.

“I don’t know,” Grace said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“I would try getting back to just being friends,” Madeline said.

“That’s easier said than done,” Grace said. “I feel like I’m in a race car and there’s no reverse.”

“How do you see this ending?” Madeline asked. “I’ll point out, Grace, because I’m your best friend and it’s my job, that no good can come of this.”

“I know,” Grace said. “Do you remember the séance?”

Rhetorical question.

The séance had been held in Grace and Eddie’s basement on Mischief Night the previous October. Eddie’s sister, Barbie Pancik, was known for having certain prescient powers. When she was in her twenties, she had purchased a crystal ball at a flea market in Brimfield, and it had made its way around the party circuit on Nantucket, back when Barbie used to do the party circuit. Somehow Grace and Eddie had convinced Barbie to bring it over on Mischief Night-the twins and Brick safely ensconced at a party at Hannah Dromanian’s house. Barbie had not only said okay; she had dressed up as a full-on gypsy, in a long black dress, with her frosted hair wrapped up in an Hermès scarf.

She had sat for a long time, staring, so long that Eddie and Grace and Madeline and Trevor began to fidget like schoolchildren, and then, when Barbie took a breath, they all tensed.

She said, in the world’s most uncomfortable voice, making everyone at the table believe that she was absolutely telling the truth: “Two of the women at this table will betray the person on their left.”

Eddie was to Grace’s left, Grace to Madeline’s left, Trevor to Barbie’s left.

Now, Grace said, “Barbie predicted I would betray Eddie.”

“The séance was idiotic,” Madeline said. “You didn’t believe what Barbie said?”

“I think about it,” Grace said.

“If you believe what Barbie said, then that means that either Barbie is going to betray Trevor-which doesn’t seem likely-or I’m going to betray you, which is even less likely, since you’re my best friend.”

“Yes,” Grace said. “Thank you.”

“The séance wasn’t real, Grace.”

Grace set her wine safely on the side table and sat up to face Madeline. “What I can’t get over is how suddenly my life has changed. Everything was normal and boring. And now… now, my life is a novel.”

NANTUCKET

On Saturday night, Damon, the bartender at the Pearl, heard the rumor from the hostess, Phoenix Hernandez, who had been to the dentist earlier in the week.

It was all over town by noon on Sunday. This was partially because Damon’s housemate, Blue Sky, worked as the bartender upstairs at Ventuno, and Blue Sky’s mother, Alice, was the elementary-school secretary, and Blue Sky’s aunt Margaret worked at the Nantucket RMV. Blue Sky, Alice, and Margaret met for breakfast every Sunday morning at the Fog Island Café, where Blue Sky told her aunt and mother the notable stories from her weekend.

Part of the rumor was substantiated when Rachel McMann, an enthusiastic user of social media, posted a picture of the outside of the blue Victorian in a tweet that said, Just rented space to a Nantucket author! #nantucket #bayberryproperties #islandia. This was retweeted by Jacinda Morgan, the office manager at Bayberry Properties, who was required to retweet anything using the hashtag #bayberryproperties to all ten thousand of their followers. It was also retweeted by Madeline’s publisher, Final Word, who was required to retweet anything that used the hashtag of any one of their thirteen hundred titles to their 1.1 million followers.

Did you hear?

EDDIE

Saturday night at eight o’clock, Eddie went to the old Cumberland Farms to buy some cherry Tums. The old Cumberland Farms was run down and catered to a questionable clientele-teenagers on skateboards, heroin addicts, petty criminals, pretty much the bottom of the Nantucket barrel-but it was the only place on the island that sold cherry Tums, and Eddie was in dire need.

At nine thirty, he was due at Low Beach Road to meet with Ronan LNW. And at ten o’clock, the girls would arrive.

Grace normally liked to pin Eddie down to a date night on Saturdays, but this week the topic had-blessedly-not come up, and Eddie hadn’t looked a gift horse in the mouth. Grace had made lobster stew and baked fresh baguettes, and shortly after cleaning up from dinner, just as Eddie was wondering how he was going to break the news that he had to go to work, she retreated to her study, saying she had some garden planning she wanted to do.

Hope was driving Allegra into town, then she was coming home to practice the flute. Allegra hadn’t made the honor roll and hence hadn’t earned the privilege of driving the four-door Jeep Sahara that Eddie had given both twins for their sixteenth birthday. Allegra had said she would get a ride home, and Eddie asked, From whom? And Allegra had said, I don’t know, Daddy, from someone. The girl had five thousand friends, and, although Eddie was pretty sure she drank and probably also smoked, she had never gotten into trouble trouble. Of course, for the past two years, she had spent most of her free time with Brick-but recently, her plans had become vague. Going into town to hang out on the Strip, maybe catch a movie.

Eddie said, Call me if you need a ride. I’ll come get you, no matter what time.

Allegra had hugged him and said, Thank you, Daddy, while Hope looked at him like he was the world’s easiest mark.

To Hope, Eddie said, “I have to go check on a rental. I should be home by ten thirty, eleven at the latest.”

Hope had shrugged.

Now, at the old Cumberland Farms, Eddie picked two bottles of cherry Tums off the shelf and brought them to the counter.

A voice behind him said, “Hey there, Eddie.”

Eddie turned around. It took Eddie a second to recognize the man because he wasn’t in uniform. Ed Kapenash, the chief of police, was wearing a white shirt, jeans, and a blazer.

“Hey, Chief,” Eddie said, and he shook Ed’s hand. Eddie paid for his Tums, took his change, accepted the bag, then turned around to smile at the Chief.

The Chief said, “Wait for me by the door for a second, would you?”

“Sure thing,” Eddie said. His heart felt like it was being fed to a pack of feral dogs. While he waited, he popped open the Tums and chewed up a small handful. What would the Chief want with Eddie? Only the very worst came to mind.

The Chief was buying a gallon of milk. He held it up. “Much cheaper here,” he said.

Eddie smiled. “Don’t I know it.”

“Eggs are cheaper, too-but then, I guess you don’t buy eggs anymore.”

“Grace’s hens have spoiled me rotten,” Eddie said. “I’ll never go back.”

The Chief opened the door and walked with Eddie out to the parking lot. His cruiser was parked next to Eddie’s Cayenne. Thank God Eddie had gotten the thing inspected!

Eddie hesitated before heading to his car. Did the Chief want to talk to him?

The Chief said, “So, how are things with you, Eddie?”

“Oh,” Eddie said, “can’t complain, I guess.”

“You’re building those houses on Eagle Wing Lane?”

“I’m trying,” Eddie said.

“And are you still taking on that high-roller rental on Low Beach Road?” the Chief asked.

Eddie wanted to look the Chief in the eye, but he couldn’t. He stared at the chipped shingles on the side of the building.

“I am,” Eddie said.

“All of those guys are big spenders, huh?” the Chief said. “Fifty grand a week.” He whistled.

Eddie’s heart was in red, raging turmoil. He nodded.

The Chief clapped Eddie on the back. “Well, nobody deserves to rake in the spoils more than you, my friend. You’ve been in the business a long time. You hustle faster than anyone I know.”

These sounded like words of encouragement. But were they?

“What you did when we sold the MacAvoy house was incredibly generous. I’ll never forget it, and neither will Andrea. And neither will Chloe or Finn.”

“Well,” Eddie said, “it was the least I could do.” He held up his bag of Tums in a kind of salute, then headed for his car.

“Have a good night,” the Chief said.

“And you,” Eddie said. “Enjoy that milk.”

Eddie waited in his Cayenne for the Chief to drive away before pulling out his phone.

He wanted to call Ronan LNW and cancel. Running into the chief of police only moments before doing the worst thing he had ever done or hoped to do? It meant there was trouble. The police were watching the house. Possibly Ronan LNW was an informant for the FBI. Possibly, Eddie was being set up by Glenn Daley, who was Rachel McMann’s boss at Bayberry Properties and who would like nothing more than to see Eddie and Barbie go belly up.

But then Eddie calmed himself. Ronan worked at DeepWell in Las Vegas. It was a legitimate company; Eddie had googled it. Prostitution was legal in parts of Nevada, so that was probably what Ronan LNW was used to. To him, it was no big deal.

Okay, man, no problem, no problem. I was only asking.

Cancel? Half of Eddie’s conscience and half of his good sense said yes.

But it was so much money. And he was on the verge of drowning. Chapter 11-or worse.

But… money would do him no good in jail.

He popped three more Tums.

He had two daughters and a very sweet wife at home. If Grace knew he was doing this, she would kill him, then die of shame herself. She would tell Eddie that she was relieved her grandmother Sabine hadn’t lived to meet Eddie, because he would in no way have passed muster. She’d told him this once before in anger, and the hurt had stuck with him. Why wasn’t he good enough? Because he’d grown up in an apartment over Ramos Dry Cleaners on Purchase Street in New Bedford, where both his parents worked sixteen hours a day? Because he’d lost his track scholarship to Plymouth State after failing English senior year and then failing last-chance summer school? Because, instead of going to college, he’d come to Nantucket Island and gotten a job washing dishes at the Straight Wharf, then became a buser, then a waiter, then waited on the right person, a man named Winthrop Bing, now dead, who liked the way Eddie hustled and asked if he wanted a chance to get into real estate?

You hustle faster than anyone I know. That was what the Chief had said.

The Chief liked Eddie because six years earlier, when the Chief’s best friend, Greg MacAvoy, and his wife, Tess, were killed in a sailing accident, the Chief, who was the executor of the will, had to sell the house. Eddie came up with a buyer in three days at full asking price-and he’d waived his commission. It was the one and only time in his career that he’d ever waived a commission. He did it because everyone else in the community was reaching out to help Chloe and Finn, the orphaned twins, so Eddie joined in, forgoing the twenty-one thousand dollars due to him, despite his natural Machiavellian proclivities.

And look! The Chief still remembered his generosity. The Chief thought he was a good guy. Well, he was a good guy. What he was about to do was illegal, yes, but he wasn’t actually hurting anyone.

It was legal in parts of Nevada.

Legal in Amsterdam. Were the Dutch bad people?

Cancel?

The bald truth was, he needed the money. On top of everything else, Madeline wanted her fifty grand back! That had been an uncomfortable conversation.

Eddie decided to call Barbie. He wasn’t sure if she would be at home or if she was away. As close as they were, she rarely shared her weekend plans. On the company calendar, she used the shorthand P, for personal-which meant anything that wasn’t Island Fog Realty business. Her desk was littered with pens and notepads from fancy hotels-the Plaza and Waldorf, the Drake in Chicago, the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara-but if Eddie asked if she had stayed at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara, she would tell him it was “P.” Barbie didn’t believe in social networking or sharing her whereabouts or being part of a community, real or virtual. She existed to please herself.

She answered on the first ring. She was reliable that way.

“Sorry to bother you,” Eddie said.

Silence. She wouldn’t even say if he was bothering her or not.

“What’s up?” she said.

“I’m having second thoughts about sending the girls,” he said. “I just saw the chief of police.”

“At the house?” she said.

“No, at Cumberland Farms. He was buying milk.”

“Do you think he was following you?”

“No,” Eddie said, though the thought had never occurred to him. “Not following me. I’m pretty sure he got there first.”

“I don’t understand,” Barbie said. “What’s the problem, then?”

“It’s illegal.”

“You just figured that out?”

“You don’t have a gut feeling on this, do you?” he asked. Barbie’s instincts were uncanny. She could see certain things before they happened.

“My gut feeling is that it will be just fine,” Barbie said. “Not to mention very lucrative. I suggested it, remember? If it makes you feel better, just tell yourself it was all my idea.”

“All your idea, but it will be me going to jail.”

“That’s not going to happen, Ed.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“What if I get in trouble? Are you even on island?”

Silence. Then, “Yes, actually, I am, if you must know.”

“Okay, good,” Eddie said.

“Text me when you have the cash,” she said.

“Will do,” he said, and he hung up. They were going to do this, then. He and Barbie were going to become de facto pimp and madam of a Russian prostitution ring down on Low Beach Road.

One more phone call, he thought. To the girls, to make sure they knew what they were getting into.

Nadia answered the phone.

Eddie said, “Are you ladies ready?”

“Yes, we ready,” Nadia said. “We all go to salon to get manicure, pedicure, Eddie, with our own money, because there is more, bigger money coming tonight.”

“Nice,” Eddie said. “I’m sure you look very pretty.”

“Who cares about pretty?” Nadia said. “Hands will be ruined tomorrow anyway, with the cleaning.”

“Okay, Cinderella,” Eddie said. “I’ll see you shortly.”

He popped two more Tums. They weren’t working. His heartburn was so bad that he really needed prescription-strength medication, but who had time to go to the doctor?

Eddie pulled up in front of the house and sat in the dark car, waiting for Nadia and the other girls. Then he realized he should go down to the house and meet Ronan LNW and get the money part squared away so that the money and the girls weren’t connected. This was Eddie’s logic, but he wished he had some guidelines. Surely some depraved soul on the Internet had written a manual on how to run a prostitution ring without getting caught?

The front door to the house was standing wide open, and in the background, Eddie could hear Eric Clapton singing “Cocaine.”

“Knock, knock!” Eddie said, stepping into the foyer. “Hello, hello!” He didn’t feel bad about his intrusion. Technically, while the owner was in L.A., this house was Eddie’s responsibility.

He nearly collided with Ronan LNW, who was rushing down the stairs, holding a mirror crisscrossed with lines of cocaine, like a white, powdery tic-tac-toe board. Ronan was in bare feet, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned white shirt.

“Fast Eddie!” he said. His nostrils were pink and twitchy as a rabbit’s, and his pupils had been swallowed up by green iris; Eddie had the unsettling thought that he was dealing with a zombie. And Ronan was sweating profusely. “Are the girls here? You probably want your money. Here, hold this.”

He handed Eddie the mirror, and Eddie gazed down at his reflection, cut through by lines of coke. He was simply not comfortable with any of this.

Ronan appeared with a regular brown paper bag from the Stop & Shop. “Here you go, man. They’ll come every night this week, right? And I’m paying half now and half at the end?”

Eddie nodded, afraid to give verbal confirmation, lest there was a wiretap somewhere in the house. He was anxious to get the drugs out of his hands. Back in the late 1980s, when Eddie arrived on Nantucket, everyone he knew had done drugs. When Eddie worked at the Straight Wharf, cocaine had practically been served at the staff meal. But Eddie had steered clear of the stuff. Back then, he’d still been a runner, and he feared contaminating his body. Besides which, he knew drugs were bad; he’d seen them undo half his high school class in New Bedford.

He handed Ronan back the mirror and accepted the paper bag, then peered inside. Cash. For one glorious moment, Eddie’s heart felt like a helium balloon.

Ronan nodded down at the mirror. “You wanna do a line, man?”

Eddie held up a palm. “No, thanks. Not my scene. I’m a father.”

Ronan stared at him.

Eddie thought, And I’m a pimp.

Ronan said, “You know, I like that hat.” He took Eddie’s Panama hat off his head and placed it on his own.

Eddie wanted to reach out and reclaim it. He was willing to do just about anything to make this transaction go smoothly, but giving up his Panama hat wasn’t one of them. He always kept a stable of three hats, just in case, so he did have two others just like it at home-but each hat cost $375 and took six weeks to replace.

“I get them specially made in Montecristi, Ecuador,” Eddie said.

“Cool,” Ronan LNW said. His eyes were spinning spirals, like in the cartoons. Eddie was afraid to touch him or even ask for the hat back. If Ronan LNW was dealing in prostitutes and drugs, then he probably had a gun, too. Eddie could not believe how nefarious this situation was turning out to be.

Just then, the girls walked in, though Eddie barely recognized them. During the day, when they were cleaning, they wore sweatpants and kept their hair tied up in bandannas. But tonight, they were wearing tight, shiny dresses and high heels, and their hair had been teased and sprayed. They had apparently bought one eye-shadow sampler, and each had chosen a color-Nadia blue, Julia green, Tonya violet, Gabrielle a lurid yellow, and tiny Elise shimmery brown.

“Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!” they cried out. They all stopped to double-cheek kiss him, even though they had never done anything but put their hands out for money before.

Eddie held the wrist of Nadia while the other girls followed Ronan, in Eddie’s Panama hat, and the ersatz tic-tac-toe board up the stairs.

Eddie said, “You’re clear on what’s happening here, right, Nadia? Nobody but us can know. Otherwise, it’ll be back to Russia for the five of you.”

“Kyrgyzstan,” Nadia said.

“Exactly,” Eddie said.

Nadia patted Eddie’s cheek. “Do not worry, Eddie. We understand. It just business.”

Eddie walked back toward his car with the shopping bag, smarting about his lost hat. He told himself that he had two others just like it at home. He told himself to focus on the bigger picture.

After all, Barbie had been right. Things had gone just fine.

HOPE

Allegra texted Hope at ten thirty on Saturday night. Please come pick me up.

Hope was thrown by the word please. Allegra never, ever used please, thank you, or excuse me when communicating with Hope.

Where are you? Hope texted back. She had dropped Allegra in front of the Dreamland Theatre, but she knew Allegra had had no intention of seeing a movie. Now, she worried something was wrong.

At Calgary’s house, Allegra texted. Please come get me.

NFW, Hope texted. Find another ride.

Pls! Allegra texted.

Three uses of the word please. Something definitely wrong. Hope waited.

PLS HOPE!

Hope waited.

PLS PLS PLS PLS!!!! I’ll owe you.

You already owe me already! For covering for you! Hope texted, but she put on her sandals. She had practiced the flute for two hours, until her tongue and lips hurt, then she had looked at her chemistry homework. She was pretty sure Allegra was out with Ian Coburn, which meant Brick might be home and willing to text with her about acids and bases. But if she texted Hot glass looks like cool glass and Brick was out having fun the way teenagers were supposed to on Saturday nights, then Hope would feel like the biggest loser on earth.

When she set her chemistry book down, she was officially out of options for her Saturday night.

She did NOT want to go to Calgary’s house, the same house where she had allowed him to get to third base while lying on his bed last December.

Calgary had asked Hope to the Christmas formal the week before Thanksgiving, and she had said yes, even though she realized she was a date of convenience-Calgary was Brick’s best friend, and Brick was taking Allegra. Right after Hope said yes, Calgary started paying all kinds of boyfriend-like attention to her. He invited her to his basketball games, where a seat was reserved for her in the family section. Hope sat and made awkward conversation with Rachel McMann and Dr. Andy (who had been Hope’s dentist until Rachel got her real-estate license and joined a rival agency, when Eddie moved the whole family to Dr. Torre).

Calgary started walking Hope to class and walking her to the bus. He asked her to the movies one night, and after the movies there was some mad kissing on the front step of Jack Wills, which was shuttered and closed for the season. Then Christmas Stroll weekend arrived, and Calgary and Hope walked around holding hands. They waited for Santa to arrive in his fire engine, they listened to the Victorian carolers, they got chowder and cocoa from the food tent. At one point, Calgary stepped into Stephanie’s, the gift shop, alone, because he said he wanted to get a present for Hope. Hope sat on a bench with her eyes closed until he emerged with a small bag that contained a tiny box. Jewelry. Something special, something binding. This was turning into a relationship.

Hope couldn’t believe it. Calgary was popular and good looking; he was a three-sport athlete and president of the Japanese club, which might have been really dorky except that Calgary was so cool, he made the Japanese club cool, and lots of people joined, most of whom couldn’t speak a word of Japanese. Calgary could speak Japanese fluently; his parents, in a burst of foresight, had hired a Japanese au pair when he was small, and when her visa expired, they paid one of the sushi chefs at Lola to be his tutor. Calgary wanted to go to the University of Pennsylvania, major in Japanese and business, and proceed to become more successful than any man they knew.

The Saturday night of Stroll, Hope let Calgary feel her breasts and put his mouth on them. He called them exquisite, and Hope ran her hands through Calgary’s hair, because this was something she had seen actresses do in the movies. Calgary had nice brown curls that smelled like pinecones. Touching his hair while he kissed her breasts made her fall in love a little, which she suspected was a bad development.

The weekend after Christmas Stroll, Calgary’s parents went off island to a Marriage Encounter weekend in Fall River, and Calgary invited Hope over to hang out. This was a setup, she thought, for them to both lose their virginity, and she deliberated for several hours before accepting. She wasn’t sure she wanted to lose her virginity to Calgary McMann-because, although he was good looking and spoke fluent Japanese and sank 88 percent of his free throws, and although she’d felt something when she touched his hair and he explored her breasts with his mouth, it wasn’t the big, all-consuming fireball of TRUE LOVE she’d been expecting. But, she realized, she might not meet that person for another twenty years, and did she really want to be a virgin when she was thirty-six? Wasn’t it a rite of passage to get it out of the way? Calgary wasn’t a bad choice.

Hope agreed to go.

They went up to Calgary’s bedroom. He had lit candles and had music playing-John Mayer. Hope wondered if Calgary had consulted Brick about these details. Allegra loved John Mayer and had intimated that she and Brick had sex while listening to “Your Body is a Wonderland” all the time. Hope decided that the candles and music were nice, the empty house was nice, and Calgary had made his bed and plumped the pillows.

All systems go, then-kissing, Hope’s shirt off, Calgary’s shirt off, Hope’s bra unhooked, Calgary’s mouth on her breasts, Hope’s hands in his hair. Eventually Calgary began fiddling with the button of her jeans. She helped him unbutton and unzip, then sucked in her breath to create room for him to slip his hands down inside her underwear (lacy thong, borrowed from Allegra, for the occasion).

This was where, somehow, things went wrong. Hope didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe it. Calgary was rough. He poked where he should have rubbed, he stabbed where he should have gently explored. Hope cried out, wriggled in pain, tried to pull her jeans off even farther so he could see what he was doing. He said, “Oh yeah, you like that, you like that, baby,” in some desperate and nearly violent tone she didn’t recognize. She did not like it, not at all, but she was afraid to say so. She was aware that most teenage boys found the female anatomy perplexing, but Calgary was treating her delicate parts like something he needed to tame.

“Stop,” Hope finally said, when his fingernail scraped inside of her. “Be gentle.”

“Gentle?” Calgary said, as if this were the last word that might apply to the sex act. He pulled his finger out and delivered it straight to his mouth, where he sucked it clean. “You taste…,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Hope lay on his bed with her jeans and the lace thong binding her midthigh. “You don’t know what?”

He said something in Japanese; it sounded like he was ordering sushi.

Hope stared at the ceiling. “You don’t know what, Calgary?”

“I think you should leave,” Calgary said.

Embarrassment, humiliation, shame, anger, a sense of gullible stupidity all collided. Hope’s feelings for Calgary had immediately changed from the blandly positive to the blackest negative.

He’d driven Hope home in silence. She tried to turn the radio on, but he snapped it off. As she got out of the car in her driveway, she said, “Is it over, then?”

“Oh yes,” Calgary said. “I’m asking someone else to the Christmas formal.”

“Wow,” Hope said. “Okay.”

“You can think I’m a jerk,” he said. “I don’t care.”

“I don’t think that,” Hope said. She absolutely did think that, but the bigger question was: what had gone wrong back at Calgary’s house? She hadn’t liked the way he was touching her, and maybe he didn’t like what he was touching-or tasting. The mortification was enough to make her want to vaporize.

“Whatever, Hope,” he said. “See you around.”

She was being dismissed. Okay, fine. It happened between teenagers, she supposed, all the time, every day.

Now here she was, retracing her steps of that awful night, to pick up her sister. And why? Allegra was capable of finding a ride home, but she had asked and then begged Hope, and, as perverse as it was, Hope enjoyed being called upon to save the day. Hope herself had very lame social credentials; her only entrée to the cool people was through her sister.

She pulled up in front of the McMann house and honked. There was no way she was going inside.

She waited in the dark car, playing Cage the Elephant at ten thousand decibels. She wanted to seem like she’d arrived here from a different party, a party with college kids, where the music was better and the conversation was elevated.

Nobody appeared.

Hope texted Allegra. I’m out front. Hurry.

Still nothing. Hope laid on the horn.

Finally, the front door opened, and out came-Brick. Hope swallowed. He stumbled down the front steps and over to her car. He opened the passenger door and climbed in.

Hope said, “Where’s Allegra?”

“She’s not coming.”

“She’s not?”

“No,” he said. His head fell forward on his neck like a wilting flower. “I was the one who texted you. I stole her phone.”

“You… okay. Wow,” Hope said.

“Ian Coburn showed up here, and Allegra was so excited to see him that she left her phone on the coffee table. And I texted you.”

That explained use of the word please. Hope focused on backing out of the driveway with caution. Reverse wasn’t her strong suit.

Ian Coburn, she thought. Then she spied the red Camaro parked down the street.

Hope didn’t know what to say. She took one last look at the gray shingles and white trim of Calgary’s house, which was almost as nice as the house Hope and Allegra lived in. Dr. Andy made a lot of money as a dentist. “So, Ian showed up. Who else was there?”

“Calgary, obviously, Bluto was there, Hannah, Hollis, Kylie Eckers…”

“Ew,” Hope said. “How is Allegra getting home?”

Brick shrugged. “I think we both know the answer to that.”

“Maybe you should stay?” Hope suggested.

“I hate Ian Coburn. If Allegra wants to be friends with him, fine. Maybe she thinks he’s cool because he’s older or because he goes to BC or because he buys her beer. Whatever, fine, I’m not going to stop her. I can’t. But I’m not staying. I can’t stand Bluto or Hollis. Hannah is okay because she plays hockey, so at least she has an interest other than Us magazine, movie stars, and what they’re wearing. Kylie Eckers is… geez, I can’t even speak my true feelings about Kylie.”

“No,” Hope said. “Me either.”

“You’re smart to stay away from that scene.”

Well, it wasn’t exactly Hope being smart. She wasn’t welcome with Allegra’s crowd. They tolerated Hope to be polite, and they were nice to her corresponding to when Allegra was nice to her. There were times when Allegra seemed to think it was cool to have a nerdy twin sister, someone who was everything she was not. Allegra had once told Hope that together, they were like one huge, awesome, complete person, and Hope had replied that she, Hope, was a complete person on her own. Hope had her own group of friends, the very smart kids in her honors math class-Evan, Henry, Anya. They rarely ventured out socially, but they were good people to eat lunch with.

“I’ll take you home, then?” Hope said.

“Do you mind? I’m sorry, Hope. My parents promised to buy me a car, but… my mom got that new apartment for writing, so now there isn’t enough money.”

“That sucks,” Hope said. “I’m sorry.” She drove toward the Llewellyns’ house, which was on the other side of the world as far as Nantucket was concerned.

Brick said, “When you texted back saying you’ve been covering for Allegra, what did that mean?”

Hope wasn’t sure what to say. She was a terrible liar. “With my parents.”

“Your parents?” he said. “Does it have anything to do with Ian Coburn? Anything at all?”

“No,” Hope said.

“Have you ever heard Allegra talk about Ian? Does she mention him at home?”

Hope shrugged. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

“A little,” Hope said. “They’re friends, like you said. She’s allowed to have friends, Brick.” Hope wasn’t sure why she was defending Allegra. Allegra had no moral compass. She had lost it in the woods during their first Girl Scout camping trip, when she had decided to sneak out with Hollis Brancato and smoke cigarettes over a pile of dead leaves. At eleven years old, she had nearly set the Hidden Forest on fire.

“Tell me the truth!” Brick shouted. “Is she seeing Ian Coburn?”

Hope was so alarmed by the question-even though she had been anticipating it for weeks-that she temporarily forgot she was operating a motor vehicle and she swerved into the oncoming lane. There was no one coming from either direction, but Hope’s heart jumped into her throat and stayed there. If she crashed the car, her parents would kill her.

“Tell me, Hope!” Brick said. “Is she screwing him?”

“I have no idea!” Hope said. “Ask her!”

Brick made a strange choking noise, and Hope, fearing he was going to puke, pulled over onto the shoulder. Brick slumped against the passenger door. He was drunk. There had been nothing for him to do, she supposed, other than to try to drink away the fact that Allegra didn’t love him anymore.

“Brick,” Hope said.

But she was interrupted by blue and red lights in her rearview mirror and one short burst of police siren, which was enough to cause Hope to cry out.

“Straighten up!” she barked at Brick. “And don’t say anything!”

She turned the car off and pulled out her license and the Jeep’s registration. She put down her window as a flashlight came poking into the interior of the car. Hope looked up. It was either the best- or the worst-case scenario. The police officer was Curren Brancato, older brother of Hollis. Curren Brancato, Hope knew, had just joined the Nantucket police force. He was only six years older than Hope and Brick.

“What have we here?” Curren said. “Allegra?”

“No,” Hope said. “I’m Hope. Allegra’s sister.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “The good twin.” He accepted her license and registration. “I see you at church with your mom.”

Hope exhaled. “Yes.”

“Have you been drinking, Hope?” Curren asked.

“Me?” Hope said. “No. I don’t drink.”

“Do you have a good explanation for why you crossed the centerline and then nearly drove off the road?”

Hope vaguely remembered Curren Brancato when he was in high school. He had been a football star-his nickname was Blue Thunder-but in the final games of his senior year, he had been declared ineligible because he was failing Spanish. Hope had only been in sixth grade-back then, Hope and Allegra had shared all of their friends, including Hollis-but Hope remembered the outrage caused by Curren’s academic ineligibility. The Whalers had had a shot at the Massachusetts Super Bowl, but not without Curren Brancato. Although the Boosters made a fuss, Curren wasn’t allowed to play. Hope had taken the episode as a big fat cautionary tale on squandered talent.

Curren had pulled a phoenix, however, and risen from the ashes. He attended a military college in Vermont, then the Boston Police Academy. Then he returned to Nantucket, where he was hailed as a homegrown hero.

“I know I crossed the centerline,” Hope said. “I’m sorry.”

“But why?” Curren said. “And then you nearly drove into the trees.”

“Um…?” Hope said.

Curren Brancato-Officer Brancato-poked his head into the Jeep and studied Brick. “Is he drunk?”

“Affirmative,” Brick said.

Hope sighed. She had hoped Brick would pretend to be asleep.

“You have a junior license, Hope,” Officer Brancato said. “Which means that you’re breaking curfew right now. And your erratic driving? I could see to it that you don’t drive again until your eighteenth birthday.”

Great, Hope thought. A lot of good going to church had done her.

She said, “My sister needed a ride home from a party. She’s with Hollis.” Hope paused, wondering if mention of Curren’s sister would help her cause. “But then Allegra decided she wanted to stay, and Brick was ready to go, so I’m taking him home. I’m sorry I was all over the road. I was changing the radio station, and I got distracted.”

“Your radio isn’t even on,” Curren said.

“I know,” Hope said. “I turned it off when you pulled me over.”

Curren studied Brick for a second and then Hope for a longer second. Finally, he said, “Hollis is bad news.”

Hope stared at the steering wheel, afraid to agree or disagree.

“Is your sister bad news?” Curren asked. He kind of sounded like he hoped Allegra was bad news. If he had pulled Allegra over and she had been alone, Hope was pretty sure she knew what would have happened.

“Yes,” Brick said.

This made Curren-Officer Brancato-laugh. He said, “I’m going to let you go with just a verbal warning.”

Hope exhaled. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Curren said. His voice was half-kind and half-congratulatory of his own magnanimity. “Be good, be smart, stay out of trouble, go to college.”

Hope nodded solemnly, as though this were good, original advice.

Curren handed back her license and registration. “Okay, Hope. See you in church.”

Hope drove home at the cautious speed of twenty-five miles per hour, feeling the giddy lightness of someone who has been let off the hook. Brick fell asleep. When Hope pulled up to the Llewellyn house, Hope nudged him, and, like a robot, he climbed out of the car and lurched for the front door. Hope thought to warn him not to tell anyone-especially not his parents, especially not Allegra-that she’d been pulled over. But she doubted he would remember it, anyway.

Allegra shook Hope awake in the middle of the night. It took a minute for Hope to figure out what, exactly, was happening, but then she saw her sister’s face twisted in anger. Allegra’s lip was curled, and her hair tickled Hope’s face, which was effective torture.

Hope pushed Allegra away. “Get off me,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“You and Brick got pulled over,” she said. “Curren texted Hollis right away. He said something was going on between the two of you.”

“What?” Hope said.

“He said you were driving all over the road. Which says to me that the two of you were fooling around.”

“What?” Hope said.

“Don’t play dumb with me, Hope. I don’t believe the naive act. I know you nearly had sex with Calgary. I know you know what you’re doing with boys. You had your hands on Brick tonight, or you let him put his hands on you.”

“I did not,” Hope said. “Now get away from me, please. Get out of my room.”

“You went after my boyfriend,” Allegra said. “I know you like him, Mopey Hopey. I know you want him.”

“Do not call me that,” Hope said. Mopey Hopey: the insidious nickname that Allegra had invented the day they started middle school. “Really, what do you care? You’ve been cheating on Brick left and right with Ian Coburn, including tonight, right in front of his face. I’m sure you’re glad I took Brick home so you didn’t have to deal with him.”

“He stole my phone to text you!” Allegra said. “The two of you have something going on.”

“We do not,” Hope said. “Don’t be a douche waffle.”

From out of the dark air came a hard, stinging slap. Hope gasped. It hurt enough for her to cry, but she wouldn’t give Allegra the satisfaction. Hope pulled her duvet over her head and said, “I’m not going to sink to your level, Allegra. Now, get out of my room.”

“I’m going to tell everyone what a slut you are,” Allegra said. “Stealing your twin sister’s boyfriend.”

“What a slut I am?” Hope said. “That’s rich. I could just as easily call Hollis tomorrow and tell her about you and Ian Coburn. Or I’ll tell Brick. Or I’ll tell them both. Brick has pretty much figured it out, anyway. He was asking me what I knew, and I was so freaked out that I crossed the centerline. Because I was worried you were going to get caught. I was worried for you, Allegra. Now, good night.”

NANTUCKET

Did you hear?

Hope Pancik had slept with Brick Llewellyn. Sergeant Curren Brancato, whom many of us still thought of as Blue Thunder #33, had found them parked on a dirt lane off Shimmo Pond Road, buck naked, Hope’s bare feet pressed up against the steamed window, a pile of clothes strewn across the backseat of the Panciks’ Jeep.

Certain details corroborated this story. Allegra wasn’t walking with Brick between classes anymore. Instead, Allegra walked with Hollis Brancato and Bluto, while Brick hung out with Parker Marz. Parker was the shortest, smallest player on the Whaler varsity baseball team, the weakest link, but he had gumption and spirit, and he had jumped at the chance to be Brick’s sidekick.

Hope and Allegra didn’t speak to each other during the school day, but they had never spoken much before. Hope sat with her smart math friends at lunch in what seemed like a subdued state, and she left lunch early to head to the band room to practice the flute. When she passed through the cafeteria, someone let go a wolf whistle, to which she did not respond.

Allegra Pancik refused to discuss the matter of the betrayal with any of her friends, including Hollis Brancato. This made everyone in the high school believe that Allegra was taking the situation very, very seriously-perhaps more seriously than she had taken anything in her sixteen years.

GRACE

The week started with a beautiful, sunny, and warm day-an expected high of seventy-eight degrees!-and Grace put on a jean skirt she hadn’t worn since before the twins were born.

When Benton arrived, he whistled at her from across the yard. “At last,” he called out, “I get to see those bare legs.”

Grace was standing out by the Adirondack chairs, drinking coffee as she overlooked Polpis Harbor. Finally, there were some boats in the water. Summer was on its way.

She watched Benton stride out to her. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, his Buckeyes hat, and his wraparound Oakley sunglasses with the lenses that reflected the spring sky. She couldn’t get over how much she desired the man. When he reached her, she locked her arms around his neck, and they started kissing. Grace ran her fingers over his face, she tugged on the ginger curls that stuck out beneath his hat. Benton’s hands grabbed her ass in her skirt, which was a new, surprising move for him, and then he lifted her up clear off the ground, and she wrapped her legs around him.

He groaned. She thought, This is it. It’s going to happen. He was so hard that she could feel him poking through his jeans. She tightened her legs.

“Please,” she said.

“I can’t,” he said. He bit her bottom lip and looked her in the eyes. “Damn it. I can’t resist you. I’m going to make love to you right here in the grass, right here in the sun. Are you okay with that?”

She was in such a state of delirium, every inch of her body yearning for him, that she couldn’t even answer. She set her feet back on the ground and was about to lie back when she heard a distinctive squeaking noise. She whipped around to see Hope settling into the hammock with a book.

“Oh no!” Grace whispered. What was Hope doing home? Then Grace remembered that both girls had taken the SAT that morning, and when they were done with the test, they were done for the day.

Benton also turned and saw Hope. He looked at Grace. Shit! he mouthed. Did she see?

“I don’t know,” Grace whispered. “I don’t think so?” The hammock was a hundred yards away, but it faced in the direction of the Adirondack chairs and the harbor, so how could Hope not have seen her mother with her legs wrapped around Benton Coe’s waist, the two of them madly kissing? And yet, Hope hadn’t screamed and fled for the house; nor had she called Grace out and demanded an explanation. She hadn’t so much as cleared her throat. So maybe she hadn’t seen.

“Act normal,” Grace said.

“Normal?” Benton said, as if he didn’t know what the word meant. He was visibly shaken. Grace reached for his hand and gave it a discreet squeeze.

“Come say hi,” she said. “If you scurry off, it will really look suspicious.”

“Let’s talk about gardening,” Benton said.

“The rose bed,” Grace said. “Lecture me.”

Benton raised his voice a little as they walked toward the hammock. “You need to cut them back if you want to force a more lavish bloom,” he said. “I know it sounds counterintuitive. And you should wipe down each leaf with a mixture of two parts water and one part lemon juice.”

Grace nodded, then pretended to notice Hope in the hammock. “Darling!” she said. “You’re home! How was the test?”

Hope gazed at Grace and Benton over the top of her book. Her expression was impossible to gauge. “Fine,” she said.

“Fine,” Grace repeated. “What does that mean, fine?”

“It means the test was fine, Mother,” Hope said. “And Allegra wanted me to tell you she went to the beach.”

“How did Allegra do on the test?” Grace asked.

Hope said, “I have no idea.” She gave Benton a smile that seemed friendly and sincere. “Hey, Benton.”

“Hey, Hope,” Benton said. “It’s good to see you! What are you reading?”

Hope held up her book: Love in the Time of Cholera, by García Márquez. “It’s for honors English,” she said.

“García Márquez is one of my favorite writers,” Benton said. “Are you enjoying it?”

“I haven’t really gotten into it yet,” Hope said.

“Have you ever read Nabokov?” Benton asked. “Lolita? You have to read Lolita. You basically shouldn’t be allowed to claim personhood until you’ve read Lolita.”

Hope shook her head, and Grace gave Benton’s arm a playful swat. “She’s only sixteen,” Grace said. “I’m not sure she’s ready for Lolita.”

“One is never too young for fine literature,” Benton said. “I’m so used to telling my clients which perennials to plant in the shade… but reading is my secret passion. Have you ever heard of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth? That’s my favorite book of all time. You will love it.”

Hope shook her head.

“Any Salinger?”

“Catcher in the Rye,” Hope said. “For English. But I didn’t like it.”

“It’s hard to understand the subtext, I think,” Benton said. “Holden is all messed up because his brother died. You should try Franny and Zooey.”

“Okay,” Hope said.

“Have you read the Cheever stories?” Benton asked.

“I loved the Cheever stories,” Grace said. She gazed up at Benton. “How do you know so much about books?”

“I was a literature major,” Benton said.

“So was I,” Grace said. “French literature.”

Benton turned his attention back to Hope. “Have you read any Hemingway? The Sun Also Rises? Andre Dubus the father? God, now that man was a genius. Have you read any Updike?”

“No,” said Hope.

Benton rubbed his hands together. “I’m being a typical white male and forgetting the women. Have you read Edith Wharton? The Age of Innocence? The House of Mirth?”

“No.”

“I’m actually jealous of you!” Benton said. “I wish I was sixteen again and had the first reading of all those books ahead of me. Have you read John O’Hara’s An Appointment in Samarra? That’s another one of my favorites.”

Hope shook her head. Grace couldn’t believe how amazing it was to listen to Benton talk about books. Eddie had street smarts, but his reading material started and ended with purchase-and-sales agreements and the Nantucket Standard on Thursdays.

“Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Richard Russo? Peter Taylor, The Old Forest? Carson McCullers? What about any of the Russians? Tolstoy? Chekhov? Kafka? Isaac Babel?”

“You have to stop,” Hope said. “I’m one of the smartest kids in my grade, and you’re making me feel totally illiterate.”

Benton laughed. “Listen, I’m going to make you a list of a hundred books. You can probably make it halfway through the list in a year.”

“I would like that,” Hope said. “Really.”

“It’s a deal,” Benton said. He reached down and toggled Hope’s foot in her sneaker. “I’ve got to shove off. Good to see you, Hope.”

“And you,” Hope said.

“I’ll walk you out,” Grace said to Benton.

In the driveway, they stood at the driver’s side of Benton’s truck.

“Bullet dodged,” Grace said. “She didn’t see.”

“Yeah, I know,” Benton said. “But still… that was too close for comfort for me.”

“And me,” Grace said. “We’ll have to be more careful next time.”

“Grace,” Benton said.

She didn’t like the tone of his voice. “What?”

He took a breath. “She’s such a great kid. And I’m sure Allegra is just as wonderful. You have a family, Grace. It doesn’t make me feel good about what we’re doing, and I’m sure it doesn’t make you feel too terrific either.”

“The girls have their own lives,” Grace said. “And Eddie…”

“I think it would be best if I stopped coming for a while,” Benton said.

“What?” Grace said.

“The yard is in good shape,” Benton said. “If you have any questions, you can call me. My phone is always on.”

“Benton?” she said. She swallowed. He was right. What, what, what would Grace have done if Hope had seen them? That would have been a completely different level of awful. “Okay, but you’ll come back, right? I mean, you’re not leaving me forever, are you?”

“No, Grace,” he said. “I’m not leaving you forever.” He touched her cheek, and then he climbed into his truck and drove off.

When Grace went back into the kitchen, Hope was at the counter, making a list on the notepad that Grace used for groceries. Hope said, “What was the book called that Benton said was his favorite?”

Grace looked at Hope. “I don’t know?” she said, and she headed up to her study. She needed to talk to Madeline.

Benton didn’t come the next morning, nor the next. I think it would be best if I stopped coming for a while. How long was a while? A week? Two weeks? A month? If he stayed away for a month, she would perish.

A vicious migraine descended on Wednesday afternoon, only it was a migraine of the heart, not the head. It was the worst emotional pain Grace had sustained since she couldn’t remember when. Nothing mattered. She didn’t care that it was a mild, sunny day filled with possibility. Grace could tend to the hens, collect eggs, spend a couple of good hours in the garden. Cooking usually made her feel better. She could make something complicated for dinner-an asparagus soufflé, a strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Instead, she went overboard with her Fioricet. She took two at four o’clock, when it became clear to her that Benton wasn’t going to stop by that day, and then a third and fourth at six o’clock, when she should have been making dinner. Grace locked herself in her study. Eddie and the girls would have to fend for themselves, if anyone was even home. No one had come up to check on her.

You have a family, Grace.

She couldn’t fault Benton, and she certainly couldn’t hate him. He was right! He had pulled the plug right before they crossed a line. Grace should be grateful. She had stood on the altar at the First Church in Salem and had vowed to love Edward Pancik, forsaking all others-but from the moment Benton Coe had brought her the Moroccan mint tea and shared that first pistachio macaron, Grace had been gobsmacked. And, truthfully, she had fallen for Benton before that. She had fallen for him the first time she ever saw him, the previous spring. He had been standing on the highest mud hill in her then-undeveloped yard. She had, she remembered, turned the enormous diamond of her wedding ring inward, so that it chewed at her palm. She had wished she were single.

He made her so happy. Even before the kissing, back when they were “just friends,” seeing Benton had given her days meaning.

She took two more pills. The sixth pill sent Grace into a kaleidoscopic stratosphere-an Alice in Wonderland tea party in a field of poppies with Toto and Timothy Leary.

She pulled the shades down in her study and lay on the crushed-velvet sofa, marveling at how comfortable it was. She wondered that she had never thought to sleep there before.

In the morning, Grace awoke with a sensation of having been buried alive. She was parched, her eyes burned, her nostrils stung. She experienced a moment of profound befuddlement. Where was she? Who was she?

Grace Harper Pancik, she thought. In the study of her house on the Wauwinet Road. And there was someone knocking on her front door.

Grace staggered through the house, trying to bring herself back to reality; she might have been Rip Van Winkle, asleep for twenty years. She might have been just back from a journey on a time machine. It was Thursday. The clock said ten minutes after ten. Eddie would be at work, the girls at school.

On the kitchen counter sat an open pizza box, displaying one cold, congealed piece of mushroom-and-green-pepper pizza from Sophie T’s. That explained what her family had eaten for dinner. There were dishes in the sink, and there was one of the Baccarat wineglasses holding the residue of red wine. Next to it, an empty bottle of the Screaming Eagle.

Eddie had clearly thought nothing of drinking his precious, prized wine without her. He hadn’t managed to get the dishes into the dishwasher, nor the pizza box into the recycling bin. He had decided to wait for Grace to wake up and do it.

Still, the knocking.

Who would it be? Grace wondered. UPS and FedEx knew to just drop off.

Then, Grace thought: Benton? She hurried for the door. Normally, he just walked around the side of the house, into the yard, but he might not feel comfortable doing that under present circumstances.

But when Grace opened their massive front door-it was made of oak and was heavy enough to withstand a battering ram-the person she found standing before her was Madeline.

“Thank God you’re alive,” Madeline said. “Eddie called me. He said you’d locked yourself in your study and spent the night there?”

Grace opened the door so that Madeline could enter. She was getting a rebound headache, which was nearly as bad as a migraine and would require Excedrin and strong coffee to combat.

“I’m alive,” Grace said. “But barely.”

“It’s a beautiful day,” Madeline said. “I think we should go to lunch, sit outside, share a bottle of wine.”

Grace peered out at the bright, warm day. It hurt her eyes to look at the sun.

“Don’t you have to write in your apartment today?” When Grace had talked to Madeline on Monday, Madeline said something about a deadline she had to meet for the new book.

“I’m taking today off,” Madeline said. “I’m devoting myself to you.”

Grace felt stupidly grateful. She would take a shower, put on a dress, and go to lunch with Madeline.

She didn’t know how any woman anywhere conducted an affair without having the ear of a best friend.

They went to the Great Harbor Yacht Club for lunch, since it had just opened for the season. The summer people had yet to arrive, so they would have the place virtually to themselves for confidential conversation. It was a stunner of a day, the kind of day that promised more days exactly like it, for months to come. The hostess led Grace and Madeline across the grass to the premium outdoor table for two, with an uninterrupted view of the harbor and the huge summer homes in Monomoy. The waitress handed them menus, and Grace said, “We’ll have a very cold bottle of Sancerre, if you have it.”

Madeline regarded her menu. “Definitely worth giving up work for,” she said. “I love it here. You are so lucky.”

Grace knew she was lucky. She and Eddie had languished on the wait list at the Nantucket Yacht Club for years before Grace realized that they would never get in. She supposed Eddie had pissed too many people off, or possibly the old Nantucket families who belonged there didn’t want a man nicknamed Fast Eddie to join their ranks. But then the Great Harbor Yacht Club opened, and Eddie jumped at the opportunity; he was one of the first people to write a check for the six-figure initiation fee.

Grace studied the menu-oysters on the half shell, grilled Caesar salad with creamy Roquefort dressing, lobster club sandwich with shoestring fries-and tried to make herself feel hungry.

The waitress came with the wine, which Grace tasted and approved. The waitress poured two glasses, then set the bottle in a bucket of ice. Grace and Madeline touched glasses, and Grace said, “Thank you for making me do this.”

Madeline said, “Thank you for buying lunch.”

They laughed, but a short moment later, the waitress came back with an uneasy expression on her face. She leaned over to Grace and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt your drinks, but I just found out from our general manager that Accounting hasn’t received your check for this year’s dues? So, technically, I’m not allowed to serve you?”

“What?” Grace said. She reached for her phone to text Eddie. He handled all their bills. But cell phones were verboten at Great Harbor. She smiled at the waitress. “I have two ideas. One is, I could just pay you cash for lunch, and then we can clear up the missing dues check later? I’m sure my husband sent it, or he meant to send it. But he’s got a lot going on at the moment with his business.” Grace wondered if the invoice for the yacht club had gotten mixed up with some of the bills for the spec houses. Or, possibly, he had left the bill for Eloise to pay, and she had forgotten. She was getting older and tended to let things slip. Grace had encouraged him to replace her, but, as Eddie pointed out, she was related to half the island. He couldn’t just fire her.

“I’m sorry,” the waitress said. “I can’t accept any cash.”

“Okay,” Grace said. “How about if I write you the check for the dues right now, and then, if you find my husband’s check, or if it comes in the mail, you can tear it up.”

“I’ll ask the manager about that?” the waitress said.

She left to do so, and Grace pulled her checkbook out. She rolled her eyes at Madeline. “I can’t believe Eddie,” she said. “I’m totally mortified.”

“Please,” Madeline said. “I’m your best friend. I wish I could help.”

The waitress reappeared. “Our manager said that would be fine.”

“Okay,” Grace said. “Good. How much is it?”

“Fifteen thousand dollars,” the waitress said.

Grace wrote the check out, feeling Madeline’s eyes on her. Fifteen thousand dollars. Back when Grace and Eddie had just met Madeline and Trevor, they would go for dinner on Saturday nights and split the bill. Madeline later admitted to Grace that the cost of the meal weighed on her mind every second, to the point where she almost couldn’t enjoy her food. What had they ordered? How much had the wine cost? (Eddie always chose it.) Did they have enough cash, or would they have to pile it onto their credit cards, which were already sagging like a rained-on roof?

Oh! Grace had said. She’d had no idea Madeline felt that way. If she’d known, she would have encouraged Eddie to pay each and every time. But Eddie wouldn’t have liked that. He was a naturally frugal person, a result of having grown up dirt poor, living over a dry cleaner’s in downtown New Bedford.

If he paid every time, he might argue, what would happen to the Llewellyns’ pride?

Now Grace wondered what Madeline was thinking. Thankfully, the waitress vanished with the check, and the issue was over.

Madeline said, “What’s going on with Benton?”

Grace didn’t have anything to describe except her longing. No, Grace, I’m not leaving you forever. But what if he was? What if he got back in touch with McGuvvy, called her up in San Diego and convinced her somehow to come back to Nantucket? Grace had stood at her window and waited for Benton’s truck to appear in her driveway every morning. She took care of the chickens because they would starve without her, but the rest of the garden she’d ignored, because she just couldn’t make herself cut back the roses or wipe their leaves with lemon water. She couldn’t deadhead the perennial bed. She couldn’t even mow the lawn, and that was her favorite task.

She said, “The morning it happened, he started talking to Hope about the books he’d read that he thought she would enjoy. And it killed me. He became this other person. There I was, standing in front of my daughter-and with every book he mentioned, I fell more and more in love.”

“Grace,” Madeline said. “You are not in love. I know you think you are. But you’re in love with Eddie and your girls.”

Grace sipped her wine and looked out over the flat, blue surface of Nantucket Sound. “You’re right,” she said.

But Madeline wasn’t right.

Three glasses of wine had turned Grace’s attitude around. When she and Madeline parted ways in the parking lot, Grace said, “Thank you for listening.”

Madeline said, “That’s what I’m here for.”

Madeline pulled out of the parking lot toward home, toward her perfect marriage to Trevor and their shared adoration of Brick. Grace decided to call Eddie and let him know about the yacht-club dues, but she was shuttled right to his voice mail, and when Grace called the office-which she was loath to do, because she really didn’t want to talk to Eloise or Barbie, and those two screened Eddie’s calls like he was the CEO of Microsoft-she got the recording.

She stared at her phone. The wine was coursing through her veins. She imagined it taking her good sense with it. My phone is always on.

As she texted Benton, the tops of her ears started to buzz. Will you come tomorrow and have lunch? Just friends, promise. Noon?

She decided she would not move from the yacht-club parking lot until he texted back. If she was there at midnight, so be it. But he texted back right away.

I’ll be there.

She was in the gardening shed, scrubbing the copper farmer’s sink, when Benton came strolling around the house.

“Hey!” she called out. “I’m in here.”

Benton stepped through door and said, “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Grace laughed. “It’s only been four days.”

He walked over to her, and his hands went immediately on her hips. Because it was so hot, she was wearing only a bikini top and a pair of shorts.

“Are the girls at school?” he asked.

She grinned. “Safely at school.”

“And Eddie?”

“Work,” she said.

His mouth met her mouth, his tongue met her tongue, which made Grace feel as if she were going to faint, or die. The kissing was sweet at first and then incendiary. The gardening shed was hot hot hot to begin with, but once she was kissing Benton, they were both sweating and pulsing with insane desire. He closed and locked the door and then lifted Grace up onto the lip of the sink. With a couple of deft movements, he untied her bikini top and pulled off her shorts, and then he knelt before her.

Later, they ate lunch.

Grace served a cold roast chicken, a fresh head of butter lettuce, a crock of herbed farmer’s cheese, and fat, rosy radishes pulled from the garden. She cut thick slices of bread from a seeded multigrain loaf with a nice chewy crust, then she went back into the fridge and pulled out sweet butter, a jar of baby gherkins, a stick of summer sausage, and some whole-grain mustard.

“A ploughman’s lunch!” Benton said. “Like the ones I used to have in Surrey.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Grace said.

“I like everything about you,” he said.

You are not in love.

Benton helped Grace carry everything to the teak table outside, and they sat down with their feast, within full sight of the garden.

Together, they dug in, piecing together bites for each other: radish, sweet butter, and mustard. A slice of bread spread thick with farmer’s cheese and topped with sausage.

Grace’s hands were shaking as she fed him. He nibbled at the tips of her fingers.

He said, “Do you know the song ‘Loving Cup’ by the Rolling Stones?” He started to sing. “I’m the ploughman in the valley with a face full of mud.”

Did she? She said, “I think so?”

“Here,” he said. “I’ll play it.” He plugged his phone into the outdoor speaker, and music filled the backyard.

Benton took Grace’s hand and pulled her to her feet. They started to slow dance to the song right there on the deck, Benton’s arms around Grace, Grace’s face resting on Benton’s chest. She hadn’t even known such happiness existed. What a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz.

When Benton left, Grace ran up to her study.

She needed to call Madeline.

MADELINE

The apartment, which had seemed so freeing to Madeline initially, now felt like a jail cell. Madeline had to drag herself there, and when she walked in, she experienced something like panic. She had paid twelve thousand dollars for the place, and now she needed to make it earn its keep.

Pressure.

She couldn’t write a word under such pressure.

She had no ideas for another novel. Not one.

She was plagued with all kinds of upsetting thoughts. They were running out of money, she had promised more than she could deliver, they should never have invested the fifty thousand with Eddie. Trevor would have to ask for it back, since Madeline’s plea had done no good.

She was past her deadline, the deadline Redd Dreyfus had extended for her. Redd had called her cell phone and left two exasperated messages, and both Angie and Angie’s assistant, Marlo, e-mailed and then called. They needed the copy; otherwise she would be bumped from the list and there would be “financial repercussions.”

Madeline capitulated. She had no choice. She would write a sequel to Islandia.

But when Madeline sat down with her legal pad and began an outline, the book she described wasn’t a sequel to Islandia. The book she described was a hot, steamy love affair between a stay-at-home mother of two and her contractor.

I am not writing this, Madeline thought. I am not writing this. But she was writing it. The words were flowing out of her like something she spilled on the page.

Grace had said it herself: Everything was normal and boring. And now… now, my life is a novel.

Madeline didn’t even commit to giving her two lovers names. She called them B and G.

The male protagonist, “B,” is the project manager of the female protagonist’s home renovation. The female protagonist, “G,” is a stay-at-home mother of two girls-Irish twins, born eleven months apart. B and G start conferring every day on the renovation. Did G want an undermounted porcelain sink in the kitchen or a double stainless steel? What kind of countertops-granite, limestone, Corian? Backsplash of decorative tile or plain drywall? What kind of hardwood flooring-maple, cherry, antique knotty pine? What style for the cabinets? What kind of cabinet pulls?

B and G end up kissing for the first time in the first-floor powder room, during a discussion of fixtures for the sink. The quarters are tight-and dark, as the electrician has yet to come hang the lights. G is in the powder room when B walks in, and they accidentally bump hips. The next thing either of them knows, they are passionately kissing.

B starts bringing G Moroccan mint tea every day, as well as a box of four pistachio macarons from the local bakery, which they would share.

Madeline didn’t even bother changing the kind of cookie. She supposed she could have made them white-chocolate melt-aways or peanut-butter truffles. She could have changed the Moroccan mint tea to an iced vanilla latte.

I am not writing this. I am not writing this. She couldn’t turn this in. Grace would sue her. Or kill her. Or both.

But it was good. Madeline could see that it was good. It was spare and compelling. Grace’s affair with Benton Coe did contain all the elements of good fiction: loneliness, desire, sex, betrayal.

B and G fall deeper and deeper in love as work on the house progresses. G’s husband, a real-estate attorney named Ren, short for Renfrew, pays all the bills, including the astronomical bill for B’s services, without complaint. He tells people he’s happy that his wife is happy.

Madeline wrote one sample scene, and that was the scene of the two lovers eating a ploughman’s lunch on the sunny deck. They feed each other; B nibbles on G’s fingertips. And then they slow dance to “Loving Cup” by the Rolling Stones. Madeline couldn’t even bring herself to change the song-“Loving Cup” was too perfect.

She could not write this novel. But she had nothing else, and so she typed up the outline and added the sample scene and e-mailed them to Redd Dreyfus with the subject line I TRIED.

EDDIE

He had a love-hate relationship with Memorial Day weekend. On the one hand, he couldn’t wait for it to arrive, announcing, as it did, the start of summer.

Eddie loved the summer as much as anyone on Nantucket. He loved it not because the shops and restaurants opened, not because the lifeguards in their red tank suits and trunks patrolled the beaches, not because the lilacs were blooming and the weather was finally warm enough for barbecues and Wiffle ball games and outdoor showers. No… Eddie loved summer because summer meant the steamship was low in the water, the martini-and-oyster-seeking crowds milled outside of Cru, a line formed at the Chicken Box to hear the band Maxxtone, the parking lot of the Stop & Shop was filled to capacity, with people illegally parked in the handicapped spots, and the traffic on Orange Street made the year-rounders shout profanities at their dashboards.

Summer on Nantucket meant people. And people meant money-the buying and selling of houses, the renting of vacation weeks.

However, Memorial Day on Nantucket also meant Figawi, a Nantucket tradition that only grew bigger and more obnoxious every year. It was, ostensibly, a sailing race from Hyannis to Nantucket and back again. The genesis of the name was everyone’s favorite fact about the weekend. One year, while sailing in dense fog, some old salt called out, “Hey, where the figawi?” And in this way, the race was named. Because, really-who doesn’t love sanctioned profanity?

Figawi Weekend had morphed in recent years from a sailing race to a drinking race. It was a contest of who could drink the most, who could drink the fastest, who could stay up drinking the latest, who could get up the earliest and start drinking, who could act like the biggest jerk (this was the nicest term Eddie could come up with, although he had dozens at his disposal) while drinking. Figawi was popular with the postcollegiate crowd-kids who had just graduated from Hamilton or Bowdoin or Middlebury or, Eddie’s least favorite, Boston College. (“How do you know if somebody went to BC?” he liked to quip. “They’ll tell you.”) These kids now had jobs in Manhattan or Boston as editorial assistants or Wall Street grunts or preschool teachers, or they were in law school at NYU or medical school at Harvard. They lived in apartments in the West Village or the Back Bay that their parents still paid for, but in general, they were trying to be adults. They met for drinks after work on Newbury Street or in Soho, they skipped church on Sundays and brunched instead, and on summer weekends they “went away.”

Figawi Weekend on Nantucket was made for them. The men wore their faded red shorts from Murray’s; they tied cable-knit sweaters around their necks, they wore sunglasses inside because they were so dreadfully hungover. The girls-or, rather, women-paraded around in patio dresses without underwear. They all thought they were Diane von Furstenberg by the Beverly Hills Hotel pool in 1973. And they all carried handbags that seemed to contain as much crap as a thirty-gallon Hefty bag. Eddie wanted to tell them that they could go on Let’s Make a Deal with all the stuff they had in their purses-but they would have had no idea what he was talking about! Certain women, however, wore outfits that looked like they’d been stolen from the trailer-park clothesline-cutoff jean shorts and tight T-shirts that said SORRY FOR PARTYING.

The women irked Eddie more than the men, probably because he had daughters.

If the weather was sunny, the Figawians-truly their own nation-funneled down Hummock Pond Road in their rental Jeeps with cases of Bud Light in the back. The beaches were patrolled by rent-a-cops on ATVs who had a field day issuing tickets for public consumption and littering. The red-suited lifeguards pulled people out of the ocean left and right because the riptide was notoriously bad in May, and no matter how educated these young bucks were (bucks substituted for dozens of other terms Eddie had at his disposal), they didn’t seem to know that the way to get out of the rip was to swim parallel to shore until the grip of the waves let them go.

But this year, there was rain.

Rain on Figawi weekend was a thousand times worse than sun on Figawi because the activities of beaching and drinking were replaced by drinking and drinking. The epicenter of Figawi drinking was always the Straight Wharf-specifically, the Tavern, the Gazebo, the eponymous Straight Wharf Restaurant, and Cru. These restaurants were bursting at their seersucker and madras seams with screaming, laughing, swearing, hiccupping, posturing nouveau adults who were only just learning how to appreciate a good Bloody Mary and suck down an oyster without dripping onto their Brooks Brothers.

Eddie wasn’t sure what made him decide to head down to Cru at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon; he realized it was going to be a blender (this was the nicest word he could come up with, though he had dozens of others at his disposal). Barbie refused to leave her house during Figawi Weekend. She never told Eddie exactly what she did at home, but if he had to guess, he would say that when it was sunny, she sat on her back deck and drank prickly-pear margaritas. And if it rained, she indulged her lifelong crush on James Garner and watched old episodes of The Rockford Files.

Eddie supposed if he had to name what truly motivated him, he would say he wanted to be where the action was. Some day, these Figawians would grow up to be attorneys and surgeons, college presidents, NFL coaches, and, of course, hedge-fund managers. In five years, many of these Figawians would be married with a toddler on the ground and a baby on the way, and looking for a rental-one week, then two weeks, then the month of July, then the summer. In ten years, these Figawians would be ready to buy.

So basically, Eddie thought, the drink he was about to have was an investment in his pre-retirement years.

He bypassed the Gazebo, even though a rumor was circulating that two defensemen from the Boston Bruins were snuggled up against the bar in the midst of that dense black hole of humanity.

How do people breathe in there? he wondered. How did they find room to bring their drinks to their mouths without elbowing someone in the jaw?

He bypassed the Straight Wharf Restaurant, although he liked it there. They served excellent bluefish pâté, and the restaurant attached to the bar was some of the finest dining on Nantucket. But Eddie wouldn’t touch it with a ten-thousand-foot pole this weekend. Even as he passed, he saw two young bucks holding a girl in a white strapless sundress by her ankles over the side of the balcony.

She was screaming, “Put me down! Damn it it, Leo, put me down! I’m going to puke! I’m going to… puke!”

Eddie slowed down to see if the young lady would, in fact, puke, or, better still, if her breasts would pop out of her dress, or if the young bucks would lose their grip on her ankles and drop her headfirst into the bushes.

“I see London, I see France,” one of the bucks said, looking down the girl’s skirt.

“I’m going to puke, Leo!” she screamed. And a split second later, she did, and Eddie checked his watch. Five minutes after two, and the puking had begun.

Eddie headed down to Cru. Cru was upscale; the crowd was marginally older and more monied. Three years earlier, Eddie had happened across the owner of 10 Low Beach Road at the back bar at Cru, and that was where the deal for Eddie to rent the house had been struck.

Do you think you can get fifty K? the owner had asked.

I don’t think I can, Eddie had said. I know I can.

I like the confidence of that statement, the owner had said.

In the back of his mind, Eddie was hoping for similar luck from this outing. He needed something big. Something legal. Financially, he didn’t feel that much different from the girl hanging upside down-desperate, about to lose every shred of dignity.

The deal with DeepWell had gone so smoothly that Barbie had volunteered to call certain other groups renting Low Beach Road and offer the same scenario-five beautiful Russian women, ten thousand per night. Eddie couldn’t believe how ballsy his sister was-he would be terrified to propose the idea to anyone-but he realized that the arrangement sounded better coming from a woman. Eddie had overheard Barbie in action on the phone. She was equal parts Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie-granting these men their wildest wishes-and Israeli special-ops soldier, a person not to be messed with. To Eddie, she said, “If they turn me down, they turn me down. I pretend I never mentioned it.”

But, so far, nobody had turned her down. Every corporate group wanted in. That very evening, a mining concern from West Virginia was checking in, and they were gung-ho for the girls.

And the girls-well, the girls were ecstatic.

Eddie was grateful for the cash, but there was a trade-off. He had chronic heartburn, and it was difficult to sleep at night. He constantly worried that someone was watching him.

But he needed the money. Grace had written a fifteen-thousand-dollar check to the Great Harbor Yacht Club, which had bounced.

“Bounced?” Grace had said when he told her. “What is going on, Eddie? I thought maybe it was Eloise’s fault. I thought it was an administrative glitch.”

He said, “The spec houses are taking all my spare funds, Grace. We might have to take a hiatus year from the yacht club, until I sell them.”

Grace gave him an incredulous look. “You’re telling me we don’t have fifteen grand for the yacht club?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But when you say the check bounced, it makes it sound like we don’t even have fifteen thousand in our account.”

Eddie cleared his throat. He was not enjoying this conversation one bit. “We do not, presently, have fifteen thousand dollars in our account.”

“How is that possible?” Grace said.

“The spec houses are eating me alive,” Eddie said.

“Can’t you just sell one unfinished?” Grace asked.

“That’s a possibility,” Eddie said. “Or we can be patient and wait until I sell a house.”

“Do you have any irons in the fire?” Grace asked.

He smiled. “Always.”

“Okay,” Grace said. She took a deep breath. “I can survive the summer without the yacht club.”

Eddie was relieved. Occasionally, in anger, he accused Grace of being spoiled because she had grown up with so much money. But the truth was, Grace was as levelheaded a woman as he had ever met. “Thank you for being understanding.”

Grace said, “You still have money to pay Benton, though, right? And Hester Phan?”

“Right,” Eddie said, uncertainly. Hester was the publicist who was supposed to get their garden into a magazine. The only reason Eddie had agreed to sponsor that effort was because he thought the potential article might reflect well on him as a real-estate agent.

The spec houses were in danger. Eddie had taken his cash from DeepWell and paid his plumber and Gerry for half the foundation of number 13.

As for Madeline and Trevor’s money-well, he didn’t know how to handle that situation.

He needed to sell a house.

The beautiful brunette owner of Cru was standing at the podium when Eddie walked in. Eddie had known her since she landed on the island, straight out of the University of Richmond. She greeted him with a nice hug and said, “You’re not going to believe this, Eddie, but I have one stool available at the back bar. Are you alone?”

“I’m alone,” he said, then wondered if he should feel embarrassed by this. Nobody celebrated Figawi alone; it went against the very nature of Figawi, which was all about getting shit-faced en masse and living out stories that no one could ever quite remember but that could be fudged and embellished for years to come. To venture out on Figawi weekend alone screamed loserdom, or so Eddie worried.

The bartender, a young woman who used to babysit for Eddie’s twins, said, “Hey, Eddie, what can I get you?”

He couldn’t remember his former babysitter’s name. It was in the Elisa/Alyssa/Alicia vein, but he wasn’t sure exactly which. Grace would know-Grace would also probably know the girl’s middle name-but if Eddie texted her to ask, he would receive a response sometime next month, because Grace never checked her cell phone. He was disappointed in himself. He was a real-estate agent; it was his business to remember names.

“I’ll have a…” He wasn’t sure what he wanted. Around him, the drink of choice seemed to be the Bloody Mary. But drinking a Bloody would immediately give Eddie heartburn; he was getting heartburn just looking at the Bloody belonging to the man next to him. “I’ll have a Triple Eight martini, straight up with a twist, please.”

“You know who invented the twist, right?” asked the man next to him. “It was John D. Rockefeller. He was a germophobe, and citrus was a natural disinfectant, so Rockefeller always asked his bartenders to run a lemon peel around the rim of his glass.”

Eddie turned to the man. “I did not know that,” he said, but such nuggets of trivia were always of great use to him. He would use that tidbit the next time he took a client out for drinks. As soon as that thought formed, Eddie realized that the man next to him was not just a man-it was Ed Kapenash, the chief of police. “Whoa! Chief!”

“How you doing, Eddie?” the Chief said with a smile. He and Eddie shook hands, and when Elisa/Alyssa/Alicia set down Eddie’s martini, they touched glasses with great camaraderie. The Chief was here at Cru! Eddie could not have been more surprised if he’d bumped into the Chief in some foreign location-a bar in Hong Kong or a café in Amsterdam. He wondered if the Chief was following him. But again, the Chief had been here first. This was merely a coincidence.

“What are you doing here?” Eddie asked. The Chief was deeply incognito. He was wearing a navy polo shirt, a pair of khaki shorts, and the red Mount Gay Rum Figawi baseball hat that announced one’s participation in the festivities. Eddie lowered his voice. “Are you undercover?”

The Chief threw his head back and laughed, which, in turn, made Eddie laugh. The Chief sucked down what was left of his Bloody Mary and ordered another from their bartender, whom he called Eliza.

Eliza!

“I came down to check on the guys, see how they’re doing, even though I’m off duty today,” the Chief said. “Everyone assumes I hate this weekend, but everyone is wrong. I’m a sailor myself. I enjoy the energy.”

Eddie nodded and laid into his drink, which had been perfectly made by his former babysitter Eliza.

Immediately, his mood improved.

“I don’t mind it either,” Eddie said. “And I enjoyed that story about Rockefeller. History always was my best subject.”

“Oh yeah?” the Chief said. “Mine, too. I’ve done a bunch of reading about Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Mellon-all the big industrialists.”

Eddie said, “I wonder what future generations will say about us. I’m pretty sure they’ll call us the Cell Phone Era.” At that very moment, Eddie’s cell phone rang-his ring tone was “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, which made the Chief chuckle.

“That right there is the first and only song I ever learned to play on the guitar,” he said.

Eddie checked his display: it was Nadia calling, probably to find out what time the girls should be at the house tonight. Eddie’s skin grew hot and prickly. He silenced his phone, slipped it into his pocket, and took another swill of his drink.

“I forgot you were a sailor,” Eddie said. He would call Nadia on his way back to the office. He obviously couldn’t say one word to her while he was sitting next to the chief of police.

“I haven’t sailed in six years,” the Chief said. “Since Greg and Tess MacAvoy…”

“Oh God,” Eddie said. “Right. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking…”

The Chief picked up his Bloody and rattled the ice, then added a shot of Tabasco, squeezed the lemon wedge, and stirred it up with his celery stick. “It’s okay,” the Chief said. “Greg and I used to sail Figawi every year. It was a tradition for us. I guess the real reason I come down here is to honor those memories. We always came here for a drink when we were done, back when it was the Rope Walk. Bloody Marys and a dozen littlenecks apiece.”

Eddie finished off his drink and signaled Eliza for another. Eddie wasn’t sure how they had landed on such a maudlin topic, but he felt it was his fault, and he wanted to make it right. When Eliza delivered his second martini, he held it up. “To Greg MacAvoy,” he said.

The Chief nodded solemnly as he and Eddie clinked glasses again, but the Chief seemed too overcome for words. The Chief, Eddie realized in that moment, was just a human being, like the rest of them. He wasn’t here to sting Eddie; he was a guy who had lost his best friend and was still mourning. “Greg had his flaws,” the Chief finally said. “But I loved him like a brother. It’s six years later, and I still can’t believe he’s gone. Sometimes, when it’s just me in the cruiser and I’m out late either on rounds or headed for home, I can hear him laughing.”

“I’m going to tell you something pathetic,” Eddie said. “I’ve never had a friend like that.”

“You’re friends with Trevor Llewellyn,” the Chief said. “Right? You guys do stuff together all the time.”

“That’s not really the same thing,” Eddie said. And it wasn’t. Eddie and Trevor got along great, they had fun together, they occasionally had what Eddie thought of as “real” conversations, but almost always these conversations concerned their wives or children. There was no lasting bond between Eddie and Trevor. Eddie hadn’t seen Trevor since dinner a couple of weeks earlier, and it was no big deal to Eddie, just as Eddie was sure it was no big deal to Trevor. Trevor was flying his planes, going about his daily business, just as Eddie was. “Trevor and I hang out, drink, smoke cigars. But honestly, that friendship is primarily powered by our wives. I would say the friendship you had with Greg was probably pretty rare.”

“I’ll agree with that,” the Chief said. “Where did you grow up, Eddie?”

“New Bedford,” Eddie said. “Downtown.”

“Mean streets,” the Chief said. “At least, as I understand it.”

“I guess so,” Eddie said. “My parents did the best they could, then my old man died of emphysema when I was fourteen, then my mother three years later, of lung cancer. They both smoked like chimneys, and Barbie, too. I never touched cigarettes because I ran track.”

“That’s right,” the Chief said.

“Running kept me out of trouble,” Eddie said. “I still hold the Commonwealth record for the four hundred.”

“You don’t say!” The Chief ordered another drink, and Eddie felt pleased by this. It was as if the three hundred other people in the bar had ceased to exist. He was hanging out and drinking and engaging in meaningful conversation with the chief of police. Maybe because Eddie had grown up in New Bedford, or maybe because Eddie’s business had, for so many years, seemed so easy as to be illegal, or maybe because Eddie’s conscience was aching, or maybe because he, Eddie, just like everyone else in the world, needed authentic human connection, his present circumstances seemed monumental.

“Would you like to order a couple dozen littlenecks?” Eddie asked. “I know I’m not Greg MacAvoy, but I’m happy to help you eat them.”

“Yes,” the chief said. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”

Eddie flagged Eliza and ordered up the clams.

“Thank you,” the Chief said. “You’re a good guy, Eddie. A really good guy.”

At five o’clock, Eddie walked out of Cru feeling like a changed man-upright, clean, worthy, respectable. The Chief had left fifteen minutes earlier to get home to his wife and the MacAvoy twins, Chloe and Finn, whom he was now raising. The Chief had actually hugged Eddie good-bye and pounded him on the back, and they had exchanged cell-phone numbers, the Chief giving Eddie his supersecret number, which he was sure to answer any time of the day or night.

“If you ever need a hand or want to grab a drink,” the Chief said, “just call me.”

“I’ll do that,” Eddie said, and then he laughed. Too loudly? Too eagerly? The four vodka martinis had him by the shoulders; the Chief had had just as many drinks as Eddie, if not more, but he was a man who was unaffected by alcohol.

“I’ll call you sometime to go fishing,” the Chief said. “I bought a boat last year, a twenty-six-foot Whaler with a brand new two-fifty. Do you like to fish?”

“I love to fish,” Eddie said, although this was a lie. He hated to fish. It was too much sit-around-and-wait for Eddie; he would rather be in the office making money. But if the Chief wanted to go fishing, Eddie would go fishing. Trevor loved to fish and had belonged to the Anglers’ Club since he was eighteen. It occurred to Eddie that Trevor might be a better choice as a friend for the Chief-but now Eddie was starting to sound like Grace.

“Great,” the Chief said. “Take care, and enjoy the rest of your weekend.”

“Okay, Chief,” he said. He felt sorrowful at the Chief’s departure. “I would definitely like to go fishing. Call me.”

The Chief pointed at Eddie in a way that could have meant anything, and then he sliced his way through the intoxicated crowd, who all stepped aside for him because, even if they didn’t know he was the police chief, they sensed his authority.

Now, out on the Straight Wharf by himself, Eddie saw Figawians stumbling and swaying, he saw potential fistfights brewing, he saw women losing their shoes and their hair ties and control of their bra straps. Walking back past the Straight Wharf Restaurant, Eddie spied the girl in the white strapless sundress sitting on the railing, drinking a Corona. She had puked and rallied. Good for her.

She saw him staring and waved at him. He walked quickly away. He was not going to lose this glow of virtue by flirting with someone half his age.

But he was going to lose the glow of virtue-yes, he was. He thought of the paper bag full of cash. He thought about how everyone on the staff at the Great Harbor Yacht Club now knew Eddie was in financial trouble. Soon, other members would hear the rumor, and then there would be blood in the water. Glenn Daley, Eddie’s archenemy, belonged to Great Harbor.

He needed to sell a house.

But until then, he had the girls.

MADELINE

Angie called, screaming. At first, Madeline thought it was angry screaming, but then she realized it was happy, joyful, excited screaming.

“I love it!” she said. “I absolutely fucking love it!”

Madeline was confused. “You love what?”

“Your new book!” Angie said.

“Wait a minute,” Madeline said. “How did you get it?”

“Redd sent it to me,” Angie said. “I read the sample scene. There is something in the writing that is so immediate, so electrifying, it nearly burned my fingers as I turned the page. Your characters have such hot chemistry. We’re going to market it as ‘the Playboy Channel meets HGTV.’ After all, what woman doesn’t want to sleep with her contractor?”

Madeline was stunned silent. She had sent the outline and sample scene to Redd because she’d wanted him to know that he hadn’t cashed in his diamond-quality favor for her in vain. She had made a good-faith effort to come up with something else. She hadn’t expected Redd to forward it to Angie, and she certainly hadn’t anticipated this kind of enthusiasm.

The Playboy Channel meets HGTV?

“I want you to start writing as fast as you can,” Angie said. “I want to bump this up to the winter list, and I think we can sell first serial to Redbook. The morning shows are going to love it! Gayle King is going to go nuts! She and Norah will fight over it.”

Madeline swallowed. She tried to imagine herself going on CBS This Morning with Gayle King, Norah O’Donnell, and Charlie Rose to discuss a novel she had written… about Grace and Benton Coe.

“The thing is?” Madeline said. “There would be a lot I’d have to change, because the stuff I have in there now hits a little close to home.”

“Do you know someone who has gone through this?” Angie asked. She gasped. “You?”

“No, not me!” Madeline said. Although if it had been her going through it, she surely wouldn’t want her best friend writing a novel about it.

“It’s okay if it is you,” Angie said. “Did I ever tell you about the guy who tiled my master bathroom? He was edible. I wanted to eat him.”

Madeline closed her eyes. She could not believe she had started this ball rolling. All across America, women would be admitting to having impure thoughts about their electricians and their plaster guys.

“I definitely have to change the mint tea,” Madeline said. “And the pistachio macarons. And the ploughman’s lunch and them dancing to the song ‘Loving Cup.’”

“Normally, I would say go right ahead, replace those details with equally vivid details-but in this case, Madeline, you really nailed it. Those details belong in there. You can’t take out the mint tea! You can’t take out the ploughman’s lunch, the way you describe the radishes and him feeding her-it’s all too good to cut. It would be like Hemingway without the bullfights or Cheever without the six twenty-four to New Canaan.”

“Yes, but…,” Madeline said.

“Just keep it as it is,” Angie said. “If we absolutely, positively have to change stuff later, we will.”

“Okay,” Madeline said uneasily.

“And have you thought of an ending?” Angie asked.

“An ending?”

“I know you have issues with resolution,” Angie said. “But what I’d really like to see happen here is for… B and G to end up together.” Madeline heard Angie slam a pen down on her desk. “I’m sick of women at the end of these novels doing the right thing, sticking with their husbands, pandering to ‘family values.’ Even Fifty Shades of Grey played it safe.” She huffed. “I want an ending where the woman is happy instead of good.”

“Okay,” Madeline said. “I can do that.” She was marginally more comfortable now that they were talking about the ending. Grace and Benton were still carrying on, so anything Madeline wrote would be wholly fictional.

“Great,” Angie said. “This book is going to be a huge hit. I can feel it in my tooth fillings.”

“Thanks?” Madeline said.

“We need to come up with a title,” Angie said. “You don’t have any ideas, do you?”

“I… I really haven’t gotten that far,” Madeline said. “I kind of wrote it as a lark? Or maybe more like a practice exercise?”

“A practice exercise? That’s classic, it really is. This practice exercise is going right to the top of the New York Times bestseller list!” Angie said. “Don’t worry about the title. I have people in house for that. We’ll brainstorm.”

“Okay?” Madeline said.

“I’ll keep you in the loop,” Angie said. “We won’t give your book a title without running it past you.”

“Right,” Madeline said.

“What are you doing on the phone with me?” Angie said. “Get writing!”

Madeline hung up.

What had she done?

It was fiction, she reminded herself. Deep breath in, deep breath out.

It.

Was.

Fiction.

Brick wanted a car, there were bills to pay; she had rented this stupid apartment for twelve grand. College was on the horizon. Trevor was two thousand feet in the air. He was, technically, not even on the planet with her. She couldn’t discuss any of this with Trevor anyway-unless she told him Grace’s secret.

Two of the women at this table will betray the person on their left.

Eddie had been to Grace’s left. Grace had been to Madeline’s left. So here it was, then… her betrayal of Grace.

No, Madeline wouldn’t do it.

But if Madeline pissed off Angie, Angie might nail her on breach of contract. Madeline might be forced by law to return the advance, most of which she’d already spent.

As Madeline saw it, she had two options. She could write the novel about Grace and Benton. Or she could default on her contract and return her advance money-and write another novel down the road, when she was ready.

The morning shows were tempting… but no.

She called Eddie again, to ask for her fifty thousand dollars back.

NANTUCKET

Thornton Bayle, the paving king of Nantucket, who was resurfacing the parking lot of the Nantucket Yacht Club, overheard Eddie Pancik on his cell phone. The Nantucket Yacht Club was right across the street from the office of Island Fog Realty, and pretty much everyone in town knew that when Eddie was having a conversation he didn’t want anyone else to hear, he headed across the street to the yacht-club parking lot.

What Thornton Bayle overheard, late in the afternoon of Memorial Day, went something like this: Madeline, yes, I understand your dilemma. I understand, Madeline! I told you June, and if not June then August. Madeline, if I could I would, but I just can’t right now. You have to be patient. I need you to hang in there. I need you to believe in me. There were two parties involved from the get-go… you knew there was risk. Yes, you did. Madeline, please, I need you to cut me some slack. I will make everything right, but I can’t do it today. You have to give me time, Madeline. Please, just give me time.

Well, he thought. That’s interesting.