“You told them about Billy already?” Harper asks.
“I called my mother to let her know,” Drew says. “Wanda and Mavis were over, helping her end beans, so they overheard. Wanda left right away to start the stew. It’s their automatic response to death—a pot of something warm and comforting so you don’t forget to eat and waste away to skin and bones.”
“They don’t have to go to the trouble,” Harper says. “They don’t even know me.”
“They know I like you,” Drew says. He bends in for another kiss. “That’s all that matters.”
Harper smiles and puts up her window.
At midnight, Harper is mostly asleep in the front seat of her Bronco, five of the beers and two of the nips consumed, plus she stopped at Alley’s General Store for a jar of their bread-and-butter pickles—her dinner. (The aunties are right to be concerned.) There has been no one in the parking lot since nine forty-five, when a bunch of high school kids came off the beach. Harper is relieved: Lucy Vincent is still perfectly safe.
Reed pulls in at twelve o’clock on the dot; he’s nothing if not prompt. Harper brings her seat back up and gets out. He said five minutes, and Harper knows that’s what she’ll get—no more, no less. He shuts off the engine of his Lexus, climbs out, and jogs over to her. He holds out his arms, and she collapses against him.
“He’s gone,” she says. “I’m never going to see him again. That’s the thing, I guess, the inconceivable thing.”
Reed squeezes her tighter. He’s a doctor. Dealing with death is part of his job—not every day, but often enough.
He says, “We’re all going to die, Harper. Billy’s end was peaceful. He had the person he loved most in the world right there with him, reading off Pedroia’s stats. What a way to go.”
Harper raises her face, and their lips meet. Reed’s lips are warm; kissing him lights her on fire all the time, but tonight, because she is ragged from crying, the desire she feels is raw and overpowering. He responds to her, opening his mouth and searching out her tongue, pressing his lower body against hers. He moves his mouth to just under Harper’s ear. His hands are all over her. They’re going to have sex. Harper can’t believe it. He must have had a couple of beers at the family picnic and maybe a Scotch once he got home, since he’s not on call this weekend. He’s looser than normal, nearly reckless. His hands travel inside her blouse; he unhooks the front clasp of her bra. He plays with her nipples, then bends his head down and sucks her left nipple until she groans. She can’t stand it. She strokes the front of his jeans.
He frees a hand to unzip himself, and Harper reaches for the car door.
“No,” he says. “Outside.”
“Outside?” she says. Is this Reed? Reed Zimmer? He doesn’t even bother with protection, something he is fanatical about; he simply thrusts inside her. Harper’s back is pressed up against the door of the Bronco, and it’s at that second that Harper sees headlights. Passing, she thinks. But no: a car is turning into the parking lot. It’s approaching. Harper struggles to disengage, but Reed doesn’t notice the lights or the sound of the engine. He’s too intent on his rhythm, and his eyes are closed. He finishes with a grunt and a shudder, a soft cry uttered against Harper’s neck.
Harper pushes him away, but it’s too late. A car door slams, and a woman is shouting, screaming, shrieking. “Reed! Reed! Reed!”
It’s Sadie.
NANTUCKET: TABITHA
She has been invited to a cocktail party on the Belle, a seventy-seven-foot wooden motor yacht built in 1929 that is now used for entertaining by members of the Westmoor Club. This evening’s soiree is being thrown by people Tabitha barely knows, and it’s still rather chilly to be out on the harbor, but ever since Tabitha broke up with Ramsay, she has been desperate to get out of the house.
Ramsay will be sitting at the bar at the Straight Wharf, waiting for Caylee to finish her shift. Tabitha was the one to break things off, yet Ramsay has rebounded far more quickly—instantly, in fact. For the three years Tabitha and Ramsay dated, Tabitha teased him about wanting someone younger, which he denied. And yet Caylee—a name fit for a chew toy as far as Tabitha is concerned—is only twenty-two.
When Tabitha was twenty-two, she was roundly pregnant. She had never had a chance to spend a summer bartending or get a tattoo; she never had the opportunity to break away from her mother’s fashion empire and pursue her own passions—real estate, architecture, interior design. And then when she was twenty-five, she endured a tragedy from which she still hasn’t recovered. Ramsay knew about Julian, and he knew it was a void that could never be filled—or so Tabitha had thought. But on a frigid night this past February, when they had both been sober—and there wasn’t even alcohol to blame—Ramsay had said, The only way to put your sadness behind you is to start fresh. Let’s have a baby.
There had been no point in responding. He didn’t get it. He would never get it, Tabitha realized. She gave him the “we want different things” talk, and two days later, he moved out.
The party isn’t bad. The host and hostess are from Tallahassee, so by nature they find New England brisk. Hence they’ve provided a pile of cashmere wraps in optimistic summertime hues—cantaloupe, fuchsia, aquamarine—for the female guests on the boat to borrow. There is an endless supply of very cold Laurent-Perrier rosé and a piped-in sound track of Sinatra and Dean Martin that Tabitha just loves. Because she had no youth, she has adopted the tastes of her mother, Eleanor. Eleanor is a woman of refinement by anyone’s standards, but she is seventy-one years old, and at times Tabitha fears that she has not only skipped her own youth but her middle age as well and landed squarely in the era of hip replacements and hearing aids.
While Ramsay was packing up his things to leave, he delivered a speech in which he enumerated every one of Tabitha’s flaws.
She is egregiously snobby. She is uptight. She panders to the whims and wishes of her mother; she has spent her entire adult life in the woman’s shadow. She has been a tireless handmaiden in service to Eleanor Roxie-Frost Designs, LLC, yet the boutique on Nantucket loses money every year! Tabitha has no business sense; she has run the store into the ground. Ramsay himself had lent her forty thousand dollars so that she might expand the store’s inventory beyond the ERF label. “And don’t forget, you still owe me that money,” Ramsay said.
“I know,” Tabitha responded, although she was pretty sure Ramsay understood that with a child to send to college, it would take her a very long time to pay him back.
As his parting shot, Ramsay had said, “It’s a good thing you don’t want any more children,” he said. “You’re a piss-poor mother, Tabitha.”
She knew he was angry and hurt and heartbroken, but the unbuffered cruelty of this statement forced her to respond, “How dare you?”
He said, “Maybe with me gone, you can get your daughter under control.”