Chapter 1

June 2023

On the day I leave Wes, I get into my car in a state of shock and drive out of New York without looking back.

It took longer than it should have to move out of our apartment, but it feels like less time than it takes to get to the Hamptons on a Friday in late June.

Though it's been years since I've made this journey, I should've remembered how the snarl of the Long Island Parkway makes my heart race and my palms sweat against the steering wheel. How the unpredictable stops of the other cars mean that I'm constantly slamming on the brakes and skidding to a stop just before I hit their bumper, my eyes racing to the rearview mirror to see if I'm about to get rear-ended.

I should've left earlier, but it didn't work out that way. Instead, I'm caught with all the other hopefuls, stop-starting our way to the first weekend of summer, trying not to cry.

My car is packed to the rafters with my things. I didn't have time to sort/keep/toss; once I'd made the decision to go, I just needed to bounce. So, I threw as many of my belongings as I could into a set of suitcases I'm pretty sure are mine, and a few large black garbage bags, and stuffed them into my car. I don't even know if I have everything I need for the summer, but I'll figure that out when I get there.

Home.

I'm on my way to Southampton to help my father clear out the house my family's owned for generations. I grew up in that house, but as much as I love it, I haven't lived there for more than a summer since I went away to college.

The sale has been a long time coming, my father's money draining away like a leaky boat. He's never been good with money, though it's his "job" to manage the family's generational resources. Until the markets collapsed in 2008, he'd run the enterprise well enough to keep the roof intact and the grounds tended. Since then, there've been more and more financial hiccups, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. One year, the taxes weren't paid. Another, the power got turned off for a week. You get the idea.

When asked what he was doing about it, my father would always stare off into the middle distance, as if he was trying to recall something from long ago, and not the five "Final Notices" from the power company sitting on his desk, unopened. Then he'd change the topic, telling some story about a friend he'd run into in town and how old he looked, how very run down.

But expounding on the neighbors' physical deterioration didn't solve the problem of too much property and too little cash flow. We'd been trying to convince him to sell for years, until the bank took the decision out of his hands. The sale was negotiated swiftly and without any involvement from me at my request, the bare details sent in an email. The closing is at the end of August. My father and all of the family's possessions need to be out of the house by then.

My older sister, Charlotte—who still lives at home, but never made any effort that I'm aware of to stop the financial slide—called two weeks ago, in a panic, to tell me that he hadn't even started packing.

"What am I supposed to do about it?" I asked, holding up a finger to Justine, the student I was working with after school in the music room.

"Come," Charlotte pleaded. "Help."

"Take over, you mean. Get it done."

"Well …"

This is always the role I play in the family, even though I'm the middle child. I'm supposed to be the irresponsible one, but somehow, after our mother died when I was fourteen, it was suddenly my job to make sure the school fees got paid and we all had uniforms that fit when the semester started.

"I'll help," she said, but I doubted it.

"What about Sophie?"

"She's got the kids. She already complains constantly about how they're too much for her."

I couldn't help but nod in agreement while Justine pounded the piano keys in annoyance. She was eight and still thought the world revolved around her. My sister, Sophie, is the baby of the family, and she's clung to that role fiercely, even though she was the first to marry and the only one of us to have kids. The truth is, I'm not close to either of my sisters, but that's as much my fault as theirs.

"I can't just drop my life, Charlotte. My husband. It's going to take months to clean out that house."

She ignored my reference to Wes. "Doesn't the school year end in a couple of days?"

"So?"

"Well …"

I stared at the colorful wall, painted in a mural of dancing instruments. "Can you please say what you mean instead of speaking in ellipses?"

Charlotte sighed. "You know you're the only one Father listens to. And you don't want everything to end up in a dumpster, do you? Not all of Mom's things."

Now I wanted to pound the piano keys. Charlotte can be manipulative when she wants to be, which is more often than she should. "You'd do that?"

"Why should it be my responsibility? Just because I live here? He's your father too."

"I know."

"I'm not going to be the only one to take care of him."

"I didn't ask you to."

"You kind of did, though, Olivia, when you moved away and never came back."

I wanted to contradict her, but she was right. As much as I loved it, Southampton was a crucible of bad memories, and I'd insulated myself from them as much as I could, returning rarely—and lately, not at all.

I agreed to think about it and hung up. Then I spent the next twenty minutes calming Justine down, who'd felt ignored and was going to tell her mummy that I wasn't giving her the right amount of attention. I knew better than to try to reason her out of her tantrum. Her mother paid extra for her lessons, and the income I made teaching kids like her to play mediocre piano after school was an important supplement to my inadequate teacher's salary.

Despite the guilt Charlotte laid at my door, I'd decided I wasn't going to go. But then it turned out that I could just drop my life and my husband; that I had to because I couldn't breathe in New York anymore, and so here I was.

Another car stops suddenly in front of me, and I apply the brakes as my heart skips a beat, praying they don't give out. My car is ten years old and hasn't had a tune-up in years. I never remember to do stuff like that, but Wes is always telling me he worries whenever I drive it. Not enough to take it in himself, though, and over time, the tone of the concern has shifted from fretting about my safety to saying things like, "If you end up killing someone with that thing, don't blame me."

When your husband switches from caring for your well-being to worrying about the safety of others, well, let's just say it's a warning sign—and in my case, one of the many reasons my things are stuffed into this death trap.

My car stops right before the black bumper in front of me, and I breathe a sigh of relief, my heart racing like I've been sprinting through the rain. There's a sticker on it that reads: "If you can read this, you're too close." I let it get a car's length ahead of me and check the upcoming sign. It's my exit. I just have to navigate across three lanes of traffic, and I can be free of this particular hell.

I get off the highway and drive through town, passing familiar restaurants and new logos in old places. I cut away before the main street, not wanting to get caught in the stop-and-go traffic as the tourists pop in and out of the cute candy-colored stores. I turn onto First Neck and aim for the beach, turning right when it morphs into Meadow. I pass the Crowder's massive turreted home with its thatched roof, then a new build I don't recognize that looks like it belongs in Malibu, not Cryder Beach.

And then I'm at Taylor House, its weathered shingled sides rising from the long pale grasses that grow out of the sandy dunes that surround it, its lighthouse windows glinting in the sun.

The house is a pile, built at the beginning of the last century, when the family was still accumulating money rather than watching it dwindle. We'd never been able to settle on how many rooms it had—twenty-six or twenty-seven, depending on who you asked and whether the secret room behind the library shelves counted. (Obviously, yes.) Either way, it was more rooms than anyone needed, and more rooms than this family could afford.

As I bring my car to a stop, I stare up at it, feeling nostalgic. Memories click through my brain with a swiftness that leaves me breathless, and I'm relieved that soon I won't have this place to remind me anymore. Another family will build a life here, for good or bad, and it won't mean anything to me.

I wonder for the first time who bought it and whether they're planning to tear it down and build some post-modernist collection of boxes like so many others have done. I promise myself that I won't be around to find out, that this is the last summer I'll spend here. Once the past is tucked away, and Charlotte and my father are settled somewhere reasonable, I'll lock up my memories and throw away the key.

Charlotte comes out of the front door, summoned by the sound of my tires on the gravel drive. She's wearing an off-white linen jumpsuit, tied at the waist with a tight cinch. A pair of oversized black sunglasses hide her dark eyes.

When I get out of the car, I can't help but notice the weeds poking through the stones, and the overgrown flower border; how much slumpier the place looks in general from the last time I was here.

Charlotte, though, is the same—thin and waspish, her long, dark brown hair still glossy and blunt at her shoulders, her clothes hanging off her because she doesn't eat, she never has. At thirty-seven, she could still pass for twenty-five. She has one of those faces, both thin and plump enough that it doesn't seem to age, especially since she's always been careful about the sun.

"Olivia!" She tips her sunglasses down to peer at me. Her skin is almost the same color as her outfit. "What are you wearing?"

I check myself, unable to recall what I threw on before I tossed the last bag into the car. I see a pair of black leggings that are a size too small and a T-shirt for a Bon Jovi concert I forgot I even attended. I haven't had a haircut in months, and the lack of sun and general malaise I've been feeling for too long has turned my hair mousy. Add in the fact that I spent too much time in the sun with too little sunscreen for years, and I doubt anyone would guess I'm one minute younger than the thirty-five I am.

"My white jumpsuit is at the cleaners."

Charlotte isn't sure how to take this, so she air-kisses me instead, one kiss near, but not quite on, each cheek, an affectation she picked up during a summer in Montreal to learn French. Her vocabulary never made it past ordering off the menu in a pretentious way in French restaurants, but Charlotte isn't the sort of person who accepts personal limitations.

"Well, you look dreadful. Thank gawd the garden party is tomorrow."

"Garden party?"

"Didn't I tell you? We're kicking off the summer with a hurrah in the garden. Don't worry, I've arranged everything."

"Smoked salmon sandwiches and gin?"

"Precisely. You'll be there?"

It's the last thing I want to do, but that's what this whole summer's going to be like. I might as well accept it now. "Yes."

"I assume you have something else to wear?"

I point my thumb at the car. "Somewhere in there, I'm sure."

"I've put you in your old room—hope you don't mind. It'll be hot as blazes most nights. The air is on the fritz, and we aren't going to be fixing it before we leave."

"William must be complaining about that."

"We've put window units in his room and mine. They do all right. He spends most of the day at the club, so it's not too bad, really." Charlotte smiles, proud that she's managed our father's whims to a degree that kept his complaining to a minimum. William doesn't suffer, well, anything, and has always been vociferous in his complaints at the least hint of discomfort.

"Is there a window unit for me?"

Charlotte raises a bony shoulder. "I didn't know you'd be coming when I bought them."

"Fair enough."

Most days, the breeze from the ocean keeps the house tolerable for sleeping, but on a still night it can be murder on the third floor. When we were kids, we used to sleep in the summer house, but I'm not sure it's hospitable now.

"You want to get your things?" Charlotte says. "It's hot out here."

I walk to the back of my car, not waiting for Charlotte to help, based on experience, but she surprises me by coming up to my shoulder and peering into the cargo area. "Is that all of it?"

"Everything but the furniture."

"He'll take that, I suppose?"

"I don't care where it goes."

I reach in and grab one of the suitcases and a large satchel that has my toiletries and overnight things. I decide to move the rest of it later. It's coming up on five, and if there's one thing I know without having to ask, it's that cocktails will appear shortly, on the veranda. I need a gin and tonic (or ten) to wash the taste of today out of my mouth.

"Is Aunt Tracy here?" Every summer since my mother died, her best friend has been making us delicious meals. Cooking is her passion.

"She arrived a couple of weeks ago."

"How's she taking the sale?"

Charlotte shrugs, then tilts her head back and looks at the house. You need to do that to get it all in one view. "It's funny to think of not living here. Sometimes I'm quite sad about it."

She sounds sincere, but it's often hard to know with Charlotte. It's hard to know Charlotte. She's always been a self-contained unit, even before our mother died. Afterward, she grew a shell around her that was hard to penetrate. Eventually, I stopped trying.

"Where will you go?"

"Not sure yet. But that man paid enough to settle all the debts and keep Father until the end of his days and then some. We'll each get our share, so I'll buy something, I think."

All of this is new information to me, and my head's playing catch-up. I latch onto the least confusing part of what she just said. "Who ended up buying it? No one told me."

Charlotte turns toward me, her eyes as dark as beads. "You haven't heard?"

"No. Who is it?"

"I can hardly believe it myself, and where he got the money, I don't know, but it was Fred."