The Hotel Nantucket — Chapter no 20

20. Here Comes Trouble

Edie sends out ten résumés to other hotels, including the Little Nell in Aspen (Edie’s mother, Love, worked there in the nineties) and the Breakers in Palm Beach. Edie has decided to work somewhere else only for the winter season because she wants to come back to the Hotel Nantucket next summer. Lizbet has told her they’re already full for certain weeks in June and July. Zeke said he’s coming back next year as well—he’s going to spend the winter surfing in Costa Rica— and Adam and Raoul are returning.

The only person who hasn’t committed to coming back is Alessandra. Maybe she’ll turn tail and run back to Italy, Edie thinks— although she has to admit, Alessandra has mellowed a bit recently.

Adam told Zeke that Alessandra has been staying in every night, eating dinner in her room with the door closed.

“Something happened with her, I think,” Adam said. “But she won’t tell us what.”

Edie is on the desk one gloriously hot and sunny afternoon by herself. Alessandra is at lunch and everyone else is at the beach or the pool or biking to Sconset for ice cream or hiding from the sun at the Whaling Museum. Edie has a moment to check her phone just to see if all ten of her cover letters and résumés went through on her e-

mail—and that’s when she sees the Venmo request from Graydon for a thousand dollars.

Edie huffs out a short, indignant laugh. The nerve of him. No, really, the nerve! Edie isn’t sure why—maybe because she now has a plan for her future, maybe because working the desk has made her more confident, maybe because she has Lizbet as a role model—but she decides in that moment that she has had it. She will be bullied no longer! She deletes the Venmo request and sends Graydon a text: We’re finished. Leave me alone.

Three dots surface on the text stream immediately and Edie gets a hot, prickly feeling as she imagines Graydon typing.

His response: Pay me or I’ll send the videos to all of your prospective employers.

Edie gasps softly and looks around the lobby. It’s cool and serene; Jack Johnson is singing about turning the whole thing upside down.

Edie hears splashing from the family pool and a moped going by out on Easton Street. She starts to shake. How does Graydon know about her résumés going out?

Well, he must have access to her e-mails and maybe her texts as well, maybe her entire cloud. Did she ever give him the password?

No, but it wouldn’t be difficult to guess: Nantucketgirl127 (her birthday).

She’s tempted to call him but that will end one of two ways: with her screaming or with her crying and begging. He knows she has student-loan payments. He knows Edie and Love’s financial future is uncertain. Love actually asked Lizbet if she could use one more person on the desk (Love did it under the pretense of “offering help,” but she needs the money), and Lizbet snapped her up, so now

Edie’s mother is going to be working one night shift a week to give Richie a break. Graydon also knows that Edie’s shame about what she did, what she agreed to, is deep and painful and that she’ll do anything to conceal it.

Through the blur of tears, Edie takes inventory of the lobby. No one needs her; the phones are quiet. Zeke is stationed by the door in case of emergency.

Edie runs to the break room, and as soon as the door closes

behind her, tears fall.

“Edie?” a voice says. “Are you okay?”

Alessandra is sitting at the counter with…some kind of craft project in front of her. Both this and the unexpected concern in Alessandra’s voice stop Edie from going into a full-blown meltdown.

“Fine,” Edie says, wiping quick fingertips under her eyes. She approaches Alessandra as she would a venomous snake and peers at the project before her. It’s an eighteen-inch frame, the inside of which is spread with some kind of adhesive. Alessandra is pressing in broken pieces of pottery and colored glass. She has only half the square completed, but from where Edie is standing, it looks kind of

like… Alessandra says, “I’m making a mosaic.”

“I didn’t know you were crafty,” Edie says, and this makes Alessandra laugh.

“I’m not, particularly,” Alessandra says. “I just wanted to try my hand at this. It’s harder than it looks. You have to lay down the pieces and hope that when you step back, it makes the whole you’re looking for.”

“It’s a woman’s face,” Edie says. “It looks like you. Is it you?”

Alessandra shrugs. “I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass.

“These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.”

Edie thinks about her own life: growing up the beloved child of two wonderful parents on an island where she felt safe and nurtured and championed, where she was such a success academically that she was accepted to an Ivy League college. Cornell was its own dreamscape. Edie loved the hotel school, her classes, her professors, the guest lecturers from New York City and Zurich and Singapore, and the natural beauty surrounding the campus. There was nowhere prettier than Cascadilla Gorge in the autumn.

But then, in January of her junior year, Edie returned from her facilities-management lecture to find Love and the dean of students sitting together on the bench in front of her dorm. When they saw Edie approaching, they both stood up, and Edie nearly turned and ran. She knew her mother hated to drive on the mainland, especially in winter—Edie’s father was the one who always brought her back and forth; he had dropped her off just a few weeks earlier. Love never would have made the seven-hour trip from Hyannis to Ithaca under anything but urgent circumstances. There was also an unfamiliar expression on Love’s face: a mixture of grief and dread.

Edie dropped her backpack on the path and raced into her mother’s arms, knowing before Love even said the words that her father was dead.

Edie took ten days off from school, and when she returned, she had acquired the questionable mystique and celebrity of someone

who had undergone a tragic loss. Students whom Edie knew only tangentially, including Graydon Spires, the most popular and successful student in the hotel school, offered condolences.

Everyone talked about Graydon’s poise, his charm, his silver tongue, his social savvy. Edie’s best friend, Charisse, once remarked, “It’s almost freakish the way he always says the right thing.” And not only did he say the right thing, Edie learned as she got to know him, he also always struck the right emotional note. He wasn’t a conversational skater, he didn’t speak simply to fill silence, he didn’t do small talk. He listened and responded in a genuine and intelligent way. When he turned his light on Edie—asking her out for a midnight snack of burgers and coffee at Jack’s (“I’m guessing you’re not sleeping much these days”)—she fell in love.

They grew close very quickly. (“Too quickly,” Charisse said. She was offended by Edie’s sudden abandonment—within days of the date at Jack’s, Edie was always with Graydon.) When junior year ended, they both accepted summer jobs at Castle Hill in Newport, Rhode Island. They worked at the hotel’s front desk and found they were dynamic together. The atmosphere in the lobby all summer was electrifying; the air crackled with the barely sublimated sexual and romantic energy between Edie and Graydon. They tried to outdo each other in customer service in a good-natured way, and the guests (and management) ate it up. They scheduled Wednesdays off together, when they did all the Newport-y things: went to Annie’s for lunch, hung out on Thames Street, did the Cliff Walk, sailed on the hotel’s Sunfish, biked around Fort Adams. Edie couldn’t believe how Graydon had appeared just when she needed him most. She imagined the life they would have after they graduated—they would

work together in hotels in Alaska, Australia, the Azores. They would climb their way up the corporate ladder at a major hotel chain—or they would start their own hotel chain. They would get married and have babies.

When they returned to Ithaca for their senior year, Edie was tapped to be the student director of the Statler Hotel—a very, very big deal. When Edie told Graydon, she expected him to pick her up and swing her around like it was the end of the war in a movie; she thought he’d take a selfie with her and post it on his Instagram with the caption #girlboss. But right away, she could see…he was jealous and resentful.

It was right after this that Graydon started asking for things in bed, things Edie wasn’t entirely comfortable with—and eventually was mortified by—but she consented because she felt she had to apologize for her success. Graydon recorded everything they did— he told her that made it “way hotter”—and Edie, who wanted only to please him, did what he wanted and recited her lines.

As Edie stands before Alessandra and her half-finished mosaic, she gets a text from Graydon. It’s a picture of a box of Pocky, the long chocolate-covered cookie sticks from Japan, and Edie feels a wave of nausea roll over her. She rushes into the one-person bathroom and can’t decide whether to cry or throw up. She does a weird hybrid of both, desperately hoping that Alessandra will be gone when she emerges. Please, Edie thinks, pack up your mosaic and leave. The mosaic of Edie’s life would be cute around the edges— bits of rose-colored glass and hand-painted bone china—but in the middle would be a chunk of tarry asphalt, black and oozing.

When Edie steps out, Alessandra hands her a bowl of vanilla soft- serve ice cream topped with M&M’s, which is Edie’s go-to snack.

Edie didn’t realize Alessandra even knew her go-to.

“Sit,” Alessandra says. “Tell me what’s wrong. I want to help.”

For two months, Edie and Alessandra have worked side by side, and Alessandra has only been a hostile nation, the Axis to Edie’s Allies. Alessandra’s unyielding coldness has caused Edie hours of anxiety and, she’s not afraid to say it, a little heartache. It’s not fair for Alessandra to be nice now, when Edie has finally grown immune to her being not nice.

But Edie wants to tell someone, and who else does she have?

She no longer speaks to Charisse (thanks to Graydon), she can’t tell her mother, she couldn’t possibly confide in Lizbet, and she can’t tell Zeke.

Edie picks up the spoon just so she’ll have something to do with her hands. “My ex-boyfriend is blackmailing me with videos I let him take of us when we were still together,” Edie says. “He sent me a Venmo request for a thousand dollars and told me if I don’t pay him, he’ll send the videos to my prospective employers. Before that, he threatened to send them to my mother.”

Alessandra nods ever so slightly. “Ah.” She doesn’t seem shocked or appalled—but then, she hasn’t seen the videos. She hasn’t heard the things Edie said into the camera; she hasn’t watched the acts.

No one can see those things, Edie thinks. No one! She has to pay him the thousand dollars, even though that’s forty hours of work. “I have to pay him.”

Alessandra scoffs. “You do not have to pay him. You realize that posting revenge porn is a crime, right? A class-four felony? You can

call the police.”

Edie thinks about calling the Nantucket Police and speaking to Chief Kapenash. There is no way. And that’s why women don’t turn in their abusers, she thinks. It’s humiliating—and the possibility of victim-shaming is very real.

“I can’t call the police,” Edie whispers. “He’s out in Arizona.”

“Phoenix?”

“Marana,” Edie says.

Alessandra’s eyebrows shoot up. “He works at Dove Mountain? I know the property. I’m sure the GM there would find his behavior very problematic.”

“I don’t want to…I’m not going to call his GM.”

“He’s threatening to post videos without your consent, is that

right?”

Edie nods.

“And he’s blackmailing you. How much money have you sent him

so far?”

Edie bows her head.

“Edie?”

“Fifteen hundred,” she says.

“What?” Alessandra jumps to her feet. “We’re getting that money back. Just give me his phone number and let me take care of it.”

“I can’t,” Edie says.

“Edie,” Alessandra says. “I’m going to scare the hell out of him.

I’m going to pretend to be someone else. Now, I know I’ve given you no reason to trust me. But surely you have faith that I can be a convincing bitch on the phone and I can get this guy…what’s his name?”

“Graydon Spires.”

“I can get Graydon Spires to do exactly what I say. You believe that, right?”

Edie considers this. Can Alessandra be a total bitch? Yes. Can she get men to do whatever she wants? Also yes. She gives Alessandra the number, then squeezes her eyes shut. She overhears fragments of the conversation: Mr. Spires, this is Alessandra Powell with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department…Report of threats against…class-four felony before you even get to the blackmail…understand you work at Dove…We can either come round you up…Venmo the amount of fifteen hundred dollars back to the victim…internet fraud, identity theft…prosecute to full… There’s a pause. Edie can hear Graydon’s voice on the other end of the line. Does he have just the right words for Alessandra now? Is he hitting the correct emotional note—contrite but charming? He was only kidding…he would never dream of posting… Alessandra says, “I don’t want to hear your bullshit, Mr. Spires.

Venmo Ms. Robbins what you owe her immediately and leave her alone, otherwise we will file an electronic restraining order. If you ever threaten to post those videos again, we’ll arrest you immediately. Am I understood?” The crystal under Alessandra’s right eye seems to wink at Edie. “Am. I. Understood?” She pauses. “Well, I hope so. I won’t trumpet my own accolades, Mr. Spires, but I’ve created quite a reputation wiping the floor with little men like you.”

She ends the call and tells Edie, “If he doesn’t Venmo you what he owes you immediately, I’m going to fly out to Arizona and put his

balls in a vise grip until he turns it over. But you are getting that

money back.”

Edie looks at Alessandra. “Thank you.”

Alessandra smiles—not the cold, plastic smile Edie has grown used to but a warm, genuine one that illuminates her face and makes her look like a completely different person. “You’re welcome, Edie,” she says.

Edie’s phone dings. A Venmo payment has just come in from Graydon Spires for fifteen hundred dollars.

Richie and Kimber are having the kind of summer romance that people write songs about—songs like “Summertime,” by Cole Porter, “A Summer Song,” by Chad and Jeremy, “Summer,” by Calvin Harris —and Grace isn’t sure how she feels about it. On the one hand, she can tell it won’t end well—they aren’t being honest with each other!— but on the other hand, they both seem so…happy, and how can that be a bad thing? Now that they’ve—Grace will say it, even though they haven’t—fallen in love, Kimber’s insomnia has disappeared and she lets Richie work the night desk undisturbed. She goes to bed after tucking in the children and doesn’t stir until Richie joins her at two a.m. Then there is some spirited adult time. Kimber and Richie sleep intertwined (always in pajamas because of the children) until seven o’clock, which is when Louie heads out to the lobby to play chess and Wanda asks the hotel guests if they’ve heard the “Mystery of the Haunted Hotel.” (Wanda is Grace’s own little PR person.) Kimber goes down with them and then brings two cups of coffee— light and sweet for her, splash of milk for Richie—back to the suite.

The children eat the complimentary breakfast in the lobby—they’re both partial to the croissants filled with almond marzipan that Beatriz makes—and Richie and Kimber skip breakfast for more alone time.

Then they shower and embark on their day. Kimber seems to have abandoned writing her memoirs for the time being; she hasn’t been on her computer in nearly two weeks.

Richie and Kimber deliver Louie to his chess lesson with Rustam and Wanda to the Atheneum so that she can read quietly for an hour and check out the next Nancy Drew mystery (she’s up to number twenty-six, The Clue of the Leaning Chimney). Then they return to the hotel, put Doug on a leash, and disappear out the side door to go for a walk. The afternoons are adventures, ones Kimber selects from Lizbet’s Blue Book and that Grace gets to live vicariously through the photos on Kimber’s phone. Grace sees pictures of the big-enough- for-two sandwiches they get from Something Natural (turkey, Swiss, and tomato with sprouts and mustard on the famous herb bread) and watches the videos Kimber took of their trip up to Great Point. The long arm of golden sand in the afternoon sun is so appealing that Grace yearns to be able to leave the hotel, if only for the afternoon.

She hasn’t been to Great Point since before her brother died; George used to take her up in his fishing boat. There are pictures of Richie surf-casting with a rod Grace knows he borrowed from Raoul and then some photos of the children frolicking in the water with seals. (Doesn’t Kimber know that seals mean sharks? Doesn’t Richie know? What kind of outdoorsman is he, anyway?) Another day they ride the hotel bikes out to Madaket and have lunch at Millie’s (there’s a picture of a seared-scallop taco with purple cabbage slaw), and over the weekend they head out to Sconset to

do the bluff walk. (Grace remembers that bluff before a single one of those homes was built. She used to pay a nickel to take the train to Sconset!) There’s a sweet photo of Richie and Wanda holding hands while Richie walks Doug and a funny one of Louie appearing to hold the Sankaty Head Lighthouse in the palm of his hand.

The late afternoons are always bittersweet because Richie has to be at work by six. He showers and changes in the suite, kisses Kimber long and deep, then heads down the hall to the front desk.

He still makes phone calls in the middle of the night in Lizbet’s office with the door closed, Grace notes. She finds this disappointing and blows cold air down the neck of Richie’s dress shirt, but that doesn’t stop him.

Then there’s a happy development for Richie and Kimber. Edie’s mother, Love Robbins, is willing to work one night shift per week, giving Richie the night off!

Because of the children, there’s only one place Richie and Kimber can go for dinner alone, and fortunately, it’s the only place either of them wants to go: the Blue Bar.

“I’ll just charge it to my room!” Kimber says, and Grace notes the relief that washes over Richie’s face.

Grace peeks in on the two lovebirds on their date. They order a cocktail called Here Comes Trouble and start feasting on yummy bites and spreads and dips and crunchy snacks; after their second Here Comes Trouble, Kimber orders the decadent caviar sandwiches. Eventually Beatriz, the whipped cream concierge, comes out with shot glasses of chocolate-mint-flavored whipped

cream, and Kimber and Richie feed each other with the tiny spoons, then start kissing, and Grace can sense the bartender, a real pistol named Petey, thinking: Get a room! At exactly nine o’clock, Petey flips a switch under the bar and one of the panels in the coffered ceiling slides open and the copper disco ball drops. “White Wedding” starts playing and Richie takes Kimber’s hand and leads her to the small dance floor in front of the penny-sheathed wall. They dance to “Burning Down the House” and “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” and “You May Be Right” as brilliant copper spots of light spin around them. Kimber throws her head back and windshield-wipers her arms in the air while Richie does moves he calls “the lawn mower” and “the shopping cart.” Kimber is laughing; Richie is hamming it up.

Then “Faithfully” by Journey comes on and they press their sweaty bodies together and shuffle in a tight circle (some dancing lessons should be in their future, Grace thinks), and when the song ends, Richie leads Kimber back to the bar, where she signs the bill, leaving Petey a huge tip.

Kimber throws back what’s left of her Here Comes Trouble and, in the spirit of the greatest decade of the twentieth century, cries out, “Take me to bed or lose me forever!”

It’s five thirty in the afternoon a few days later; Richie is in the bathroom shaving before he has to go to work. Kimber is sitting on the bed, still in her bikini, sandy from the beach, her skin golden from the sun, her hair newly dyed flamingo pink, which is actually quite flattering. Kimber watches Richie swipe clean strokes through the shaving cream with his chin lifted just so and she blurts it out.

“I love you.”

Richie’s head jerks a bit—he’s lucky he doesn’t cut himself—and his eyes meet hers in the mirror. Uh-oh, Grace thinks. Is it too much too soon? Kimber is always pushing the envelope. But then Richie sets down his razor and, with half a face of shaving cream, kisses Kimber. “I’m so in love with you,” he says. “Maybe more in love than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Way to double-down, Richie! Grace thinks.

That night, very late, when Richie comes to bed, Kimber says, “You know what I think we should do tomorrow? Go see your place.

The children have been asking where you live when you’re not here.”

She scratches her fingernails lightly down Richie’s chest. “And I have to admit, I’m curious too.”

Richie seizes up. “My place is really small,” he says. “A dump, actually. I wouldn’t want the kids to see it, because I don’t want them to feel sorry for me.”

Kimber waves a hand. “They won’t care—they’re kids. We’ll just swing by and poke our heads in before we go to Fortieth Pole tomorrow. You said Cliff Road? That’s on our way.”

“Not a good idea,” Richie says. “My landlady, Mrs. Felix, said no visitors.”

“We won’t even set foot inside, and we’ll stay two minutes,”

Kimber says. “The children just want to see—”

“Kimber, no.” Richie’s voice is sharp. Kimber waits a beat, then sits up in bed.

“I just think it’s weird that we’re in love and I’ve never seen where you live. It’s…suspicious. And after what I’ve been through with

Craig, I just have to ask—is there something going on between you

and Mrs. Felix? Or was there?”

“No!” Richie says.

“Then I guess I don’t understand why—”

“Because I don’t have a place to live,” Richie says. “There is no Mrs. Felix. I made her up. I lied to you because I didn’t want you to think I was pathetic and I lied to Lizbet so I could get this job, which I desperately need.”

“What?” Kimber says. “Where were you living, then, before you moved in here?”

“The break room,” Richie says. “And my car.”

“Your car?” Kimber says. The look on her face is one of naked horror and Grace can’t blame her. Who lives in his car? A hobo?

This is it, Grace thinks. This is the end of the cute romance.

“I need to save money,” Richie says. “I’m in so much debt, Kimber.

The divorce carpet-bombed me financially. And I thought if you knew I didn’t have a place to live, you would think I was using you so I could live in the suite.”

Kimber’s eyes shut for a moment, then fly open. “I asked you to stay overnight in the suite and you said no. I practically had to beg you.”

“I would never want you to think I had ulterior motives,” Richie says. “That’s why I was so hesitant to start this relationship. It wasn’t you—you’re beautiful and fun and spontaneous and a terrific mother, bringing your kids here for the summer instead of shipping them off to camp or keeping them holed up in the city. It was that I’m homeless—my ex-wife took the house in Connecticut and I gave up

my apartment when I moved here. You can do so much better than me, Kimber.”

This is probably not untrue, Grace thinks.

“I don’t want to do better,” Kimber says. “I don’t need a rich man. I had one of those and he ditched me for the nanny! I need a man who loves me and who won’t leave me.”

“I won’t leave you,” Richie says. “Someone would have to physically drag me away from you at gunpoint.”

This is probably not untrue either, Grace thinks. Nor unlikely.

August 15, 2022

From: Xavier Darling ([email protected])

To: Employees of the Hotel Nantucket

Good morning, team— I’m pleased to be spreading the wealth again this week and awarding the thousand-dollar bonus to Adam Wasserman- Ramirez. A guest of the hotel sang (wink-wink) Adam’s praises for his showmanship at the piano during the wine-and-cheese hour.

He indulged the guest’s wishes with a rendition of “Let It Go” that the guest said “gave me goose bumps.”

Well done, Adam! Here’s hoping you don’t leave us for the Great White Way!

XD

Adam deserves the bonus, Lizbet thinks. He plays the piano for the guests after his shift is over, purely for the joy of it. But the thing is, every member of her staff deserves the bonus. Every week. She hopes Xavier will see that once he comes to visit.

Her phone dings with a text and she has the same Pavlovian response to the sound that she’s had for weeks: Mario?

But the text isn’t from Mario. It’s from JJ. I’m taking tomorrow night off. Can we talk?

Lizbet inhales, exhales, takes a sip of her coffee.

Fine, she says. I’ll meet you at the spot at 8.

Lizbet and JJ’s spot is the Proprietors on India Street. On Saturday nights in the off-season, the bartender, Tenacious Leigh, would save them the two stools at the end of the bar. Lizbet hasn’t set foot in Proprietors in months, and although she’s ambivalent about meeting JJ (it’s a meeting, not a date, she tells herself), she feels only joy when she strolls down the brick sidewalk to the white clapboard house, built in 1800, and opens the lipstick-red door.

Hello, old friend, she thinks. The restaurant’s interior is one of her very favorites. There are refurbished wide-plank floors, exposed brick, Edison pendant lights, and a long, white-oak bar with a pressed-tin front. On the walls hang displays of mismatched china and a collection of antique door escutcheons; on the tables are mason jars filled with Nantucket wildflowers and flour-sack napkins with sage-green stripes. Lizbet almost left the Proprietors out of the Blue Book because she never wants the bar to become a place that’s three-deep with tourists ordering Cape Codders. In the end,

she tucked it into the fine-dining section, calling it “eclectic,” a place for people who want a “thoughtful dining experience and the most creative cocktails on the island.”

Lizbet has arrived before JJ on purpose. She waves at Leigh, embraces her across the bar, then orders her usual, a cocktail called Celery, Man, which is made with mescal joven (Lizbet has, quite intentionally, not touched tequila in months either) and celery syrup with a white-peppercorn rim. It’s a savory cocktail, which she prefers to sweet (sorry, Heartbreaker). Lizbet relishes the first ice-cold sip.

She has missed this place.

“Are you waiting for someone?” Leigh asks.

Lizbet shrugs. “Maybe.”

Leigh cocks an eyebrow—and the very next second she breaks into a smile. “Look what the cat dragged in! It’s just like old times.

Can I get you the usual, Chef?”

“Please,” JJ says.

Lizbet stands and greets him with a hug as though he’s an old friend from high school. He takes the opportunity to squeeze Lizbet tight and she inhales his scent—boy fresh from the shower, Ivory soap, wintergreen aftershave, a lingering hint of the cigarette he smoked on his way here.

When she pulls away, he says, “You look gorgeous, Libby. I don’t think I’ve seen that dress before.”

“You haven’t.” Lizbet is wearing a red crinkled-cotton sundress— short, to show off her legs—and her nude wedges.

They take their stools, the same ones they’ve sat on a hundred times before. When JJ’s drink arrives, they touch glasses. Lizbet has unwittingly slipped right back into her former life. This is a meeting,

she reminds herself. Not a date. She knows Leigh is not only tenacious but discreet; anyone else would be sending an all-caps text around the island: LIZBET AND JJ REUNITING AT PROPS BAR!!!!

Lizbet isn’t sure what to say to the person she knows better than anyone on earth. Should she ask him about Christina? (No.) Should she launch into the story about the impostor Shelly Carpenter? (No, he won’t get it.) He seems nervous. His hand shakes as he holds up the dinner menu.

To put him at ease (she can’t believe she’s falling into the same old habit of worrying about his comfort), she asks about the

restaurant.

“Worst summer ever,” he says.

“We said that every August.”

“I’m serious, Libby. Everything sucks. The place has no soul. My cooking is technically sound and the staff know what they’re doing

but there’s no love, no magic.”

Well, Lizbet thinks.

“My TravelTattler reviews are atrocious. Everyone calls the dining ‘disappointing.’ It’s like we’re being punished for being great in the past. Any idea how frustrating that is? People hear, ‘Oh, the Deck is the best,’ and they come in with unreasonable expectations. We’re human beings running a restaurant. Things happen.”

“They certainly do.”

“I need you to come back, Libby.”

Lizbet scream-laughs and Leigh glances over. Lizbet flags her.

“We’re ready to order.”

There’s no conflict or confusion where the menu is concerned because Lizbet and JJ always get the same thing. They start with one order of fried green tomatoes with pimiento cheese and black- pepper honey and one order of the bone marrow. Then Lizbet gets the chicken-fried trout and JJ the Korean short ribs with kimchi grits.

“Would you like another drink?” Leigh asks Lizbet.

“I’m going to stick with one,” Lizbet says. “I have an early day tomorrow.” She has an early day every day now and can’t afford to stumble out of here the way she used to.

When Leigh leaves, Lizbet says, “I’m not coming back, JJ. You blew it.”

He swivels toward her so that his knees are kissing her leg. He puts his hand on the back of her barstool, leans in, and speaks very softly. Lizbet can’t make out everything he says, but she gets the gist of it: I was such an idiot, a fool, a creep, I hate myself for what I did, I would do anything to go back to how it was, I was so unhappy with Christina, she’s shallow and mean-spirited and insecure and so jealous of you, she almost ruined the restaurant, the staff hated her, she let some underage kids in on a Sunday and sold them the wineglasses even though a blind man could have seen their IDs were fake, I would do anything to get you back, if you don’t come back, I’m not sure what I’ll do.

“You’ll do what we all do, JJ,” she says. “You’ll keep on keepin’ on.”

“I’ll sell the restaurant to Goose,” he says. “Walk away.”

“You would never.”

“Watch me.”

“It sounds like you’re trying to threaten me,” Lizbet says. “But I don’t care if you sell the Deck. Why would I care? It’s yours.”

“So you’re telling me you don’t care about the Deck?”

Lizbet reaches for what’s left of her Celery, Man and finishes it. “I cared so much. That restaurant was my…our…home. The staff was our family. But I wasn’t the one who torched it, JJ. This is your arson, not mine.”

Leigh arrives with their appetizers. “Here we go, guys, one fried green tomatoes, one marrow. Anything else I can bring you?”

Earplugs, Lizbet thinks. A Valium. A graceful exit.

She puts a tomato on a side plate for JJ, just like she always has.

He spreads the luscious marrow on a thick golden slice of grilled bread for her.

“Bon appétit,” they say together. Lizbet can’t get the first bite of tomato to her mouth fast enough. This is Nantucket in a nutshell.

She’s in emotional hell but at least the surroundings are charming, the service impeccable, and the food maddeningly delicious.

Between the appetizer and the entrée, Lizbet goes to the bathroom, where the walls are papered with pages from a vintage copy of June Platt’s Party Cookbook, which provides menus for each day of the calendar year. March 24: pea soup, dressed crab, bishop’s pudding. The wallpaper improves Lizbet’s mood—imagine, every day a party!—and when she gets back to the table, she decides to tell JJ the Heidi Bick/Lyric Layton drama. He becomes engrossed in the story—holy shit, he can’t believe it; no, he hasn’t heard about any of this, though, come to think of it, he hasn’t seen the Bicks all summer and he’s seen the Laytons only once.

“Yes, that was the night I was there,” Lizbet says. “I saw Lyric at table three. She was crying.”

JJ clears his throat. “Speaking of that night, what’s up with you and Mario?”

Lizbet would love to say that things with her and Mario are hot and steamy but she just shrugs. “I ended it.”

JJ fiddles with the strap of Lizbet’s sundress, and she falls prey to memories of JJ zipping her dresses, clasping the hooks and eyes, fastening her necklaces. He could look at any outfit and tell her where they went the last time she wore it, what they ate, what they talked about, who they saw. His memory is his superpower, and it always made Lizbet feel like he was paying attention. He had loved her, that was the thing. She knew he loved her. So how the hell did

Christina get to him?

“What happened?” JJ says.

“I wasn’t ready.” She waves at Leigh and points to her glass. (She’s like a woman in the throes of childbirth: I will take the epidural after all!) But this thought leads her exactly where she doesn’t want to go: her brief pregnancy, the unprecedented joy, the intimacy she felt with JJ when the (three!) of them were nestled in bed. She acknowledges that she wasn’t the same after she miscarried. She stopped having sex with JJ; she kept him at arm’s length, pushed him away. She’d felt so confused—she was mourning something she hadn’t realized she’d even wanted.

The drink arrives, delivering icy numbness. After a sip, she says, “I couldn’t let myself trust anyone again.”

JJ takes her face in his large, warm hands, pulls her in close like he’s going to kiss her, and starts talking, his voice nearly a chant, the

words coming out in an almost unintelligible rush: I made a huge mistake, I messed up, it won’t happen again, I swear to God, Libby, I love you and only you and I always have and I always will. We both love a good comeback story, right, and I want to be the best comeback of all, I will do anything on earth if you just please, please marry me, be my wife, we will try again for children or we will adopt or we’ll do both, life is a crazy adventure, it’s a road trip, I don’t want any other woman in the passenger seat or in my bed but you, Lizbet Keaton. Please. Please listen to me. I love you.

The words road trip remind Lizbet of how, when they were driving to upstate New York to see JJ’s parents or halfway across the country to Minnetonka to see hers and JJ was at the wheel, he would turn the radio down so Lizbet could sleep (she, meanwhile, always kept the radio blaring while she was driving). She hears the words in my bed and thinks about how JJ liked to leave a bed unmade—the pillows askew, the comforter spiraled into a double helix—but Lizbet couldn’t stand it and so, for fifteen years, JJ made the bed properly, covers drawn tight, pillows stacked.

He loved her. Where is she ever going to find someone who loves her like that again?

She draws the breath of surrender, ready to say, Okay, fine, I give up, you win, I’ll come back. But then, over JJ’s shoulder, she sees the front door to the restaurant open and a woman walk in. Lizbet blinks. It’s Yolanda. Lizbet won’t be able to handle it if Mario follows Yolanda in. But the person who comes in behind Yolanda is another

woman. It’s Beatriz.

Huh, Lizbet thinks.

They’re at the lectern, talking with Orla, the proprietor of Proprietors. They’re all laughing. Beatriz puts an arm around Yolanda and kisses her cheek. Orla plucks two menus off the lectern and leads Yolanda and Beatriz upstairs to the second-floor dining room, and as they ascend the stairs, Yolanda and Beatriz are

holding hands.

Holding hands? And then it clicks.

You know why Yolanda is always in the kitchen, right? Zeke said.

And why she was always with the Blue Bar staff on Tuesdays and why she asked for Tuesdays off in the first place and why Mario was so openly affectionate with Yolanda. It occurs to Lizbet that maybe the “thing” Yolanda needed Mario’s help with was the surprise the kitchen staff arranged for Beatriz’s birthday: they all chipped in and flew Beatriz’s mother from Mexico City to Nantucket.

“Are you okay?” JJ asks, following Lizbet’s gaze over his shoulder.

The reason Yolanda is always hanging out in the kitchen isn’t Mario; it’s Beatriz. “Take my trout home,” she says. “I have to go.”

She hurries down the brick sidewalks of India to Water Street, moving as fast as she can in her wedges, thinking, It’s Tuesday, his day off, he’ll be out somewhere or entertaining another woman; he’s Mario freaking Subiaco, for God’s sake. But Lizbet keeps going. She takes a left down the white-shell path behind Old North Wharf and

sees Mario’s silver truck.

He’s home.

This nearly propels Lizbet back to Proprietors, back to JJ and safety. (It’s ludicrous that she considers JJ safe after what he did to

her; familiar might be a better word.) But every inspirational meme that Lizbet has stuffed inside her hollow places like a girl desperately padding her bra tells her to move forward.

Not on fighting the old.

But on building the new.

She strides out the long dock without wobbling or faltering and when she reaches the door, she takes a breath and acknowledges that this could be a very awkward moment.

But she knocks anyway.

There are footsteps, then a pause, and then Mario opens the door. He’s wearing gym shorts, a gray T-shirt, his White Sox cap on backward. He’s so handsome that Lizbet steadies herself against the shingled wall of the cottage. She peers over his shoulder. There’s a beer on the table, an open pizza box, one plate.

Does he seem surprised to see her? Not really. He leans into the door frame and gives her his slow half-smile.

“Hey, Heartbreaker,” he says.

“Hey,” she whispers.