Angie was an idiot; she should have accepted the Vicodin.

“Darling,” Belinda said. She moved swiftly into Angie’s arms. Belinda was so much smaller than Angie that it was as if their roles had reversed and Belinda was the child and Angie the mother. Angie could have picked Belinda right off the ground. Instead, Angie gave her a halfhearted hug. Deacon’s dying hadn’t changed the fact that Belinda was a conniving, vainglorious disaster.

“Vainglorious”: that was a Deacon word. He had loved it-but he’d only ever used it to describe one person.

“When did you get here?” Angie asked.

“This morning,” Belinda said. “I took the red-eye from L.A. But I should have gotten here earlier. Then maybe I would have gotten a decent bedroom.” She cut a glance at Laurel.

“Why, what room are you staying in?” Angie asked.

“Laurel assigned me to Clara’s room.”

Angie couldn’t help herself: she smiled. She tried to picture Belinda Rowe, the most celebrated actress of modern times, sleeping in the narrow convent bed of Clara’s cramped room. Deacon had made up colorful stories about Clara Beck over the years; she had been the nursemaid for the five Innsley children, and for Mr. Innsley himself before that. Deacon had portrayed her as very homely and very strict. As such, Clara’s room had been used as a place of punishment. When Angie, at five or six, had thrown sand at another child on the beach, she had been whisked right up to the house and made to sit on the bed in Clara’s room for twenty minutes. It had seemed an eternity. When Angie was seventeen, she had come home from a bonfire at Gibbs Pond completely smashed and stoned, and Deacon had made her sleep in Clara’s room. The walls had seemed to close in on her as the bed spun. That night, Angie had seen the ghost of Clara Beck. She was dressed in a high-necked ivory gown, and her hair was rolled up in pink, spongy curlers. Angie had been too drunk to be afraid; she had closed her eyes against the apparition, then puked into the wastebasket.

“Yes, I’m sure you find that very amusing,” Belinda said. “But the fact is, this used to be my house. I was married to Deacon longer than either Laurel or Scarlett, and I deserve respect.”

She delivered this last sentence with her usual dramatic flair, as though it were a line she was rehearsing. There were so many things about the woman that bothered Angie. She would have had an easier time listing the things about Belinda that she found inoffensive.

Her mother had nice hair.

She had great taste in clothes.

She had once hosted Saturday Night Live, and she had been much funnier than Angie had expected.

Once upon a time, Belinda had discovered a maternal streak inside her-like a vein of pure silver running through rock-and she had traveled through the dusty, dry forever of the Australian outback, where Angie had been left to be raised in an “orphanage for native peoples.”

But this maternal streak had dried up or disappeared at some point during Angie’s youth, when Belinda had chosen her career over parenthood again and again and again-on location, on location, on location. She had filmed in Vietnam for The Delta for four months! She eventually won the Oscar, but who cared?

“If you’re that unhappy,” Angie said, “why don’t you move to a hotel? Call Cliffside.”

“I want to be here with you, darling,” Belinda said. “And I wanted to say a proper good-bye to your father.”

Hayes, Buck, and Laurel tactfully wandered out to the back deck, leaving Angie and Belinda alone in the kitchen.

“A proper good-bye to your father”? Most likely she had come to make certain that no one was talking about her.

“There’s nothing you can do for me,” Angie said. “I mean, you can’t bring him back.”

Belinda twisted her hair in her hands and held it to the top of her head. This was her nervous gesture; Angie had always thought it revealed the conceited little girl Belinda must have been. “I know exactly how you feel, darling. I lost both of my parents.”

“You don’t know exactly how I feel,” Angie said. “You left your parents right after high school and you never spoke to them again. Your father died in a plane crash, and Dad had to force you to go back for the funeral. You didn’t attend your mother’s funeral because you were on location in Scotland. All you have ever cared about is your career, Mom. You never cared about your parents. You never loved either of them the way I loved Deacon.”

“You and Deacon were very close,” Belinda said, as if she were conceding a point. “But it was a little…”

“A little what?”

“A little unnatural,” Belinda said. “You two were together all the time, night and day, at work, at home, at your Tuesday-night dinners together. You had one night off a week! You should have spent it with friends or a boyfriend. You should have been out dancing or going to the movies, not tending to your father’s emotional crises.”

“I didn’t tend to his emotional crises,” Angie said, though her voice faltered. That had been exactly what she did, week in and week out. They cooked for themselves and drank too much, and when the clock struck eleven or midnight and Angie told Deacon he should go home to Scarlett, he had said, “I can’t go home this drunk. She’ll kill me.” And then he would drink some more.

But her mother’s being right, or partially so, only served to infuriate Angie. “I’m not doing this. I’m not going to have you tell me that you know what I’m feeling because you lost your own parents! You hated your parents, and you hated Deacon, and I’m sure you’re glad he’s dead!” She swallowed. She was cotton mouthed and really needed a glass of water.

“Angie, please,” Belinda said. “Lower your voice.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” Angie said. She couldn’t handle another piece of emotional baggage. She missed Deacon. She needed Joel to call. Angie stormed out of the kitchen. Her roller bag was sitting at the bottom of the stairs. She had packed things for three days, but could she reasonably stay in a house with her mother for three days?

She pushed open the screen door, enjoying the sound of it smacking the frame of the house behind her. She nearly tripped on the rotting board in the floor again and almost went flying down the steps of the porch headfirst, but she managed to steady herself. She ran down the driveway, but at the bottom, she was at a loss, and the sun was hot. She was thirsty. This wasn’t the city-there was no corner deli, no Burmese place, no Starbucks. Down the road a bit was the Sankaty Head Beach Club; it had a vending machine out back that they used to sneak sodas from as kids. Or Angie could go back to the house and take the antique pickup truck that Deacon had bought to replace the Willys jeep. The truck was in the garage, but the keys were hanging on a peg in the kitchen, and Angie didn’t want to go back inside.

She pulled out her phone. She would call Joel. She wanted to hear his voice. She wanted to hear him call her Ange. Was it possible that she had fallen for the man simply because of the way he said her name? Did that happen to other people?

All her life Angie had felt as though her heart was a rock, dense and impenetrable. But with Joel, the rock had broken open and revealed itself to be a geode, lined with glittering crystals.

She dialed Joel’s number. Her call went immediately to voice mail. Angie hung up.

Should she text Hayes and tell him she was going back to the city alone? The thing was, she didn’t want to go back to New York. She loved Nantucket more than anywhere else in the world. They always went in August, but Angie thought it was even more beautiful now, in June. She wanted to be with her brother and Laurel and Buck. She wanted people she could talk to, people who had known Deacon. And they were going to scatter the ashes; Angie couldn’t miss that.

The sun was hot, and Angie could smell and hear the ocean. Living the life on Nantucket: Deacon should be here, fishing and swimming. Tonight, the sun would set off the back deck, and he wouldn’t be here to raise his glass, or to clap as if for God: Another day well done, Sir. Deacon’s days were over.

Angie screamed, as loudly as she could. Aaaaaaaayyyyyaaahhhh! Eeeeyyyyyaaahhh! Eeeeeeeaaaaayyyyyah! She screamed so loudly, her throat hurt. There was no one to stop her. Could they hear her back up at the house? Probably not.

Aaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeeyyahhh!

If she screamed like this in Manhattan, her neighbors would call the police. She would be evicted or arrested. Or committed. One more thing Angie loved about Nantucket: she had the freedom to scream.

Yoooooooohoooeeeeahhh!

A car appeared around the bend, a silver Jeep Wrangler with the top down. The driver was a big, bearded bear of a man wearing Blues Brothers sunglasses. Instantly, Angie heard Deacon’s voice in her head: “It’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” To which Angie had been trained to respond: “Hit it.” But instead, Angie clamped her mouth shut and stared down at the road, willing the person to pass so that she could go back to losing her mind. Much to her enormous consternation, the Jeep stopped in front of her.

“Hey,” the guy said. “Are you okay?”

Angie nodded at him mutely, thinking that if she pretended she didn’t speak English, he might drive away. Then she noticed what looked like a mason jar of iced tea in his console. Or maybe it was whiskey over ice. Either way, she needed it. She was so thirsty.

“Could I possibly have a sip of that?” she said. “I’m parched.”

Parched? she thought. What on God’s green earth had made her say that? Customers ponied up to the bar at the Board Room all the time and announced to Dr. Disibio that they were “parched,” and they all sounded like douche bags. Because of this, Deacon had put “parched” at number eight on the Stupid Word List.

The guy handed her the jar. “This? It’s sun tea, unsweetened, with mint and lemon. I brewed it myself.”

“That sounds really good,” Angie said. “Do you mind?” She took the jar from him, and before she knew what was happening, she had downed the entire thing. Angie was so thirsty and the tea was so light and lemony that it was like drinking the nectar of the gods.

“Wow,” the guy said. He grinned and held out his hand. “My name is JP Clarke. Are you lost? Do you need a ride somewhere? This is a pretty uptight neighborhood-actually, it’s a private way, so… I wouldn’t want you to take flak from any of the residents for wandering around.”

“You’re JP?” Angie said. She couldn’t believe it. Deacon had talked about “JP this” and “JP that” all the time in recent years, but Angie had never met him, despite Deacon incessantly promising Angie that she would love him. Great guy, real local, lives off the land, fishes, hunts, knows all the best spots. You two would really get along. Deacon had met JP surf casting out at Great Point, and from there, the friendship had grown. JP had sent Deacon Nantucket bay scallops the past few Octobers, and Angie and Deacon always ate part of the shipment raw, with a squeeze of lime juice and a sprinkle of salt. Hobo seviche, Deacon called it. JP also sent backstraps of venison from the one buck he shot each November, and Deacon would marinate it for three days, then grill it to rosy, juicy perfection and serve it at staff meal.

Angie had thought JP would be older. She had imagined someone her father’s age, but JP barely looked thirty.

“I am JP,” he said. “Who might you be?”

“Angie,” she said. “Angie Thorpe.”

“Angie Thorpe,” he said. He moved his sunglasses to the top of his head, as if he wanted to get a better look at her. “Oh my darling. Your father…”-here he trailed off and squinted out the windshield at the lighthouse beyond-“was a fine human being. Just… I don’t know? An original. I can’t seem to use my words here. He was super cool in his every aspect. I feel blessed to have known him.”

“He felt the same way about you,” Angie said. “He talked about you all the time. Okay… that jam you sent him? The Concord grape? He took one jar home to eat on toast, and the other jar he reduced into a sauce that he served with a pheasant special we ran-and it was the night Pete Wells came in to review for the New York Times. And what was the first dish Wells raved about? The crispy pheasant with the Concord grape sauce.” Angie felt a flush thinking about that night. Joel was the one who had suspected the diner registered as Albert Emerald was actually Mr. Wells. He had come back to the kitchen immediately to tell Angie and Deacon, and Deacon had sent out the pheasant dish.