This morning, when she had woken up, her stomach roiled with regret. What had possessed her? She was the nice wife, the good wife, the altruist. She had made a career of helping people, saving people-but after twenty-four hours in Belinda’s presence, she had become a vengeful bitch, unrecognizable even to herself.

“I did,” Laurel said. “I called him.”

“And what, pray tell, did you have to tell him?” Belinda asked.

Belinda thought she could get away with anything. That’s the problem, Laurel thought. Some people were like that. They thought they couldn’t be touched; they thought the rules didn’t apply to them.

“What do you think I had to tell him?” Laurel asked.

Before Belinda could answer, they both heard the sound of things being thrown out into the hallway above, then Scarlett’s voice. “The master bedroom is mine! This is my house!”

Is this happening? Laurel wondered.

Buck appeared in the living room. “Should I tell her that only a third of the house is hers?”

“Now is not the time,” Belinda said.

“Right,” Laurel said.

At that moment, Angie came flying down the stairs. She grabbed Laurel’s arm. “Talk to you?”

Laurel followed Angie to the kitchen.

“Hayes got mugged?” Angie said.

“Yes,” Laurel said, sighing. “He said he was in a taxi heading to town, and he and the driver had a disagreement about which way to go, so Hayes got out of the cab by the state forest. And then he got beat up and robbed.”

Angie’s eyebrows shot up. “Taxi?” she said. “He probably called the six-sided nut hut who brought us here. The guy was dressed like a pirate. Hayes asked him for his card.”

“Hayes didn’t tell the police anything,” Laurel said. “He just wants to let it go.”

“I asked what would make him feel better, and he said he wanted me to make Dad’s chowder tonight.”

“That’ll be delicious. Thank you, sweetie,” Laurel said. Tears sprang to her eyes, even though the last thing on her mind was what they would eat for dinner. But Deacon had made shellfish chowder at least once during each of those long-ago Nantucket summers.

“And I’ll make an arugula salad with warm goat cheese, and a tri-berry crumble using those strawberries JP dropped off,” Angie said. “And I’ll get freshly baked baguettes from the Sconset Market. They come out of the oven at four o’clock.” Angie grabbed a notepad and started making a list.

Ellery skipped into the kitchen. She studied the hash marks on the door frame and trailed her finger down, looking for her name.

“Do you want me to measure you, sweetheart?” Laurel asked. “I bet you’ve grown a lot since last summer.”

“No,” Ellery said. “I want Miss Kit Kat to measure me.”

“Miss Kit Kat will measure you later,” Scarlett said as she stormed into the kitchen. Belinda and Buck had now vanished, a fact that irked Laurel like an itch she couldn’t reach. Maybe they were upstairs in Buck’s room, consummating their sudden love affair. To Laurel, Scarlett said, “Listen, I’m sorry, but you have to understand, I am Deacon’s wife, and the master bedroom is my bedroom, our bedroom. I didn’t even sleep in the guest room when I came here as the nanny. Back then, I stayed in the room Buck is in.”

Laurel had first met Scarlett on one of the Sunday nights when Deacon brought Hayes back to the apartment. I thought the two of you should meet, Deacon said. Since Scarlett will be the primary caretaker while I’m working and Belinda’s away.

Laurel had been nonplussed; Hayes was then fourteen and could basically care for himself. But she had shaken Scarlett’s hand and noted how beautiful she was. She could remember thinking, I hope Deacon behaves himself.

She had been shocked when, a few months later, Scarlett appeared at Laurel’s office in the Bronx, crying. Scarlett thought she was pregnant, and she was afraid to tell Belinda.

Deacon told me you were a social worker, Scarlett said. And he said you had Hayes at a really young age.

Nineteen, Laurel said. She had given Scarlett literature about some of her options: adoption agencies, clinics where she could terminate the pregnancy. But then, a few days later, Scarlett called to say it had been a false alarm.

Laurel had never asked her who the father of the baby might have been.

Now, Scarlett dissolved into tears. “He left me with nothing!”

Laurel was tempted to say that that was how Deacon left people-with nothing. But then she remembered the birthday card he’d sent: Forever love. He had loved her, he had loved Belinda, he had loved Scarlett.

“How do you feel?” Laurel asked. “You look exhausted.”

“I haven’t slept in six weeks,” Scarlett said. “How could I? I left Deacon, and I took Ellery away from him. I wanted him to suffer! I wanted him to be miserable without us! I had no idea he was going to die!”

“Of course you didn’t,” Laurel said softly. She cut a quick glance at Angie, who was scribbling down a list of ingredients. “None of us did.”

Buck wandered into the kitchen wearing his board shorts.

“I’m going to the beach,” he announced. “Would anyone like to come with me?”

“Why don’t you ask Belinda?” Laurel said.

“I don’t want to ask Belinda,” Buck said.

“Belinda doesn’t know how to swim, anyway,” Scarlett whispered. “All those years I came here with Deacon, Belinda, and the kids, she never went in the water.”

Angie stood up to her full height, but she still wasn’t quite as tall as Scarlett. “Watch how you talk about my mother,” she said.

“Really?” Scarlett said. “You’re taking Belinda’s side? That’s something new.”

“There aren’t sides anymore, Scarlett,” Angie said. “Deacon is dead. The competition for who he loved best is over. We all lost.”

“I was so angry with him, I wished him dead,” Scarlett said. “But I thought that the way people think it. I didn’t mean it.” Scarlett broke down in tears, collapsing on one of the bar stools.

Buck looked hopelessly to Laurel, while Angie shrugged, grabbed the keys to the Jeep, and left the kitchen, saying, “I’ll be back. Dinner will be ready at seven.”

Laurel reached out to touch Scarlett’s arm. “Would you like to go for a walk? Or for a bike ride? We can go swimming at the pond. It’s so pretty there.”

“Pretty?” Scarlett said. “How can you care about pretty, or expect me to care? My husband is dead!” She screamed this last sentence at the top of her lungs, and Laurel bristled. She understood the bedroom issue-sort of-but she wouldn’t allow Scarlett to throw a tantrum. Scarlett had a child in the house, and she was setting a terrible example. Laurel wasn’t going to indulge Scarlett’s sense of entitlement. Deacon had been Scarlett’s husband, but he had also been Belinda’s husband, and long, long ago he had been Laurel’s husband. And he had left behind three children, not one.

Laurel said, “Well, I’m going to bike to the pond.” She marched out the back door.


Like the rest of the house, the shed was exactly as Laurel remembered it. It held two bikes that Deacon had bought from the classifieds in the Inquirer and Mirror-the royal-blue one had been Deacon’s, the silver one with the wicker basket, Laurel’s. In addition to the two bikes, the shed held a riding mower, some rakes, a snow shovel, half a bag of potting soil, and a hose and sprinkler. Laurel wondered if hooking up the sprinkler would be fun for Ellery, but then she decided that she was finished thinking about other people. Her whole life involved thinking about other people-solving their problems, making their downtrodden lives slightly more bearable-but now, today, she was going to think about herself. She was going to go for a nice, long bike ride in the sun. She would swim in the pond. She would come home, take an outdoor shower, put on a pretty dress, and enjoy Deacon’s chowder.

Make the best of things, she thought. Enjoy Nantucket while she still could.

Laurel took a few deep breaths of the cool air of the shed. It smelled comfortingly of gasoline and cut grass. Then she pulled her bike outside and adjusted the seat. It was like seeing an old friend. She wheeled the bike to the front of the house.

“Laurel!”

Laurel turned around. Scarlett was following her with Deacon’s bike.

“I want to come,” Scarlett said.

Well, now Laurel wasn’t sure she wanted company, especially not the Southern diva variety. But Laurel was too nice a person to tell Scarlett no.

“Okay,” Laurel said. She hopped on her bike and bumbled down the driveway; the wind and the motion were instantly exhilarating. “Let’s go.”


They pedaled out to the end of Hoicks Hollow Road, then took a right onto Polpis. The bike path was a mixture of sun and shade. At first, Laurel rode ahead, but eventually Scarlett caught up and they rode side by side. Scarlett had hitched up the skirt of her dress so that it didn’t get caught in the spokes.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper,” Scarlett said.

“It’s fine,” Laurel said. “Everyone’s emotions are running high.”

“Belinda makes me uncomfortable,” Scarlett said. “She always has.”

“You were her nanny,” Laurel said. “She trusted you with Angie for years, and then when you ended up with Deacon, I’m sure she felt betrayed.”

“I didn’t start dating Deacon until after they were divorced,” Scarlett said. “But Belinda has never believed that. When they had that big fight after Deacon went on Letterman? Deacon got arrested for drunk and disorderly, and then he flew down to the Virgin Islands for a week. Belinda was waiting for him when he got back and, I guess, knew he’d been with a woman, and she thought it was me. But it wasn’t me; it was someone else. And then, about six months later, I bumped into Deacon at a club downtown. It was very late, I was with a group of my photography-school friends, and Deacon was too drunk to stand, but he took my number and called the next day. Belinda never believed that story; she thought we were fooling around the entire time they were married.”

“Remember when you came to my office right after you started working for them?” Laurel asked.

Scarlett’s gaze followed a butterfly flitting around the rugosa roses.

“Scarlett? Do you remember that? You thought you were pregnant. I’ve always wondered… if you had been pregnant, would the baby have been Deacon’s?”

“No!” Scarlett said. “I see you don’t believe me, either.”

“I could never understand why you came to me,” Laurel said. “You said you were afraid to tell Belinda, and I thought that meant…”

“I was afraid to tell Belinda because I worshipped Belinda. I mean, she was a movie star. So beautiful, so famous, so talented…”

Laurel couldn’t help but chime in. “So dishonest,” she said. “So completely unscrupulous.”

“I didn’t see any of that until later,” Scarlett said. “At first, she was larger than life, and of all the girls she interviewed, she gave me the job. I didn’t have any college, no early-education classes, I didn’t know CPR, I wasn’t qualified at all, but she chose me anyway. She chose me. She said she had a gut feeling that I was supposed to be part of their lives.”

“Well,” Laurel said, “you certainly ended up that way.”

“I couldn’t tell her I’d accidentally gotten pregnant,” Scarlett said. “She would have been so disappointed in me. So that’s why I came to you.”

“Who was the guy?” Laurel asked. “You can tell me.”

“It was my old boyfriend from home, Bo Tanner,” Scarlett said. “He was engaged to my best friend, Anne Carter. If I had ended up being pregnant, I think he would have broken up with her and married me. My life would have been totally different.”

Laurel turned right onto Quidnet Road. Scarlett pedaled faster to catch up. When she was back alongside Laurel, Laurel took a deep breath. There was no point in being anything but honest now. Deacon was dead.

“So… the woman Deacon took to the Virgin Islands? It was me.”

Scarlett gasped. “It was not!”

“It was,” Laurel said. She didn’t like Scarlett’s tone, conveying as it did that it couldn’t have been Laurel because Laurel was the discarded first wife and therefore undesirable. “I realize I’m not as glamorous as Belinda or as young and sweet and pretty as you-believe me, I’ve spent way too many hours bemoaning that. But you don’t have to sound so surprised.”

“It’s not that,” Scarlett said quickly. “It’s that you’re so… good.”

Laurel shrugged. The obsidian marble had escaped; Laurel imagined it rolling ahead of them. “I didn’t have any qualms about Belinda,” she said. “She stole Deacon right out from under me. But it wasn’t like I’d been lying in wait all those years to seek revenge. When Deacon left me for Belinda, a part of me understood. I mean, here was this kid, abandoned by his parents, shipped up to his aunt in a strange town, a total outcast at school, who ends up finding his calling, becoming a chef, and then… then… he meets someone as famous as Belinda Rowe, and she falls for him. I saw how that would have been impossible for Deacon to resist. He thought she could help his career, and she did. He got the job with Raindance, and then the new show. He traveled all over the country; he cooked for the president and the prime minister. All of that was good for Deacon.” Laurel shook her head, letting her hair fly out behind her. She couldn’t believe how freeing it was to finally tell someone this story. “When Deacon got arrested that time after going on Letterman? He called me. I went downtown and bailed him out.”