5. Most Likely to SucceedFifty-One Years Ago

Most Likely to Succeed

After a tense goodbye, Detective O'Brien leaves.

Sam and I walk back toward the house, moving at a steady clip.

"We need to find the jogger," he says.

I scan the police report, searching for any information about him—any information we have about the Coopers.

"We've got the Coopers' contact information on the police report," I say. "I'll start there. See what they can tell me about him."

Sam holds the screen door open. And I step ahead of him, up onto the back porch.

"I'm going to search Dad's office," he says. "I want to push down on why he changed his plans. According to his calendar, the event in New York was for Inez. Dad would have wanted to be there for that."

Inez Reya. She was wife number three (ex-wife number three), and certainly my preferred stepmother for the brief period that she was. She created a holistic skin care line that Noone Properties featured in most of their spas. This was how my father met her. It was his shortest marriage (less than three years) but it became one of his most important friendships. My father stayed incredibly close to Inez and her now wife, Elizabeth. And their daughter, Luna.

If Inez had a launch event, my father would want to show up to support her. Why did he decide he had to be at Windbreak instead?

Sam walks into the house, disappearing down the hall toward our father's office. I walk into the kitchen, the galley kitchen, a blast of light and familiar smells greeting me—the potted sage on the windowsills, coconut soap, sandalwood candles on the island.

I love the feel of the kitchen, which, like the rest of the house, is relaxed, and low-tech: a vintage oven, a farmhouse sink, not even a dishwasher. I lock in on the drying rack next to the sink. It almost does me in, the stupid empty drying rack taking me back to that last visit here. Jack asleep. My father turning the record player on but low, just the two of us, washing and drying that night's dishes together.

I run my finger over the rack and lean against the counter, centering myself. Then I pull out the Coopers' contact number. I call it, but I'm greeted with an out-of-country ringtone. I click off and send an email instead, hoping that a note will find its way to them quicker.

I leave the kitchen and head through the rest of the house. I pass by the two bedrooms (the second of which my father used as his office), the one full bathroom, the tiny powder room. All the walls are painted a soft white, the furnishings spare and thoughtful.

The clean beach air feels like it is running through all of it, especially in the room I enter last. My favorite room, the living room, which is more like a makeshift library, complete with tall white bookshelves surrounding a bay window, the walls adorned with wild bird–splattered wallpaper that doesn't exactly feel like my father, but which I love. And which somehow fits more than anything else here.

For me, a project always starts with a central image. Something that identifies what a space or a property most organically can be. In how I approach my work, this is a fundamental principle: How am I going to take that image and build out from it? Build out from the feeling of it to craft something that isn't only beautiful, but also that utilizes the right materials and design elements to create something healing, something hopeful.

The whole of this house, the loving force that swings out from it, seems to have started with someone imagining what this room could be.

I walk over to the bookshelves, filled with so many gorgeous books stacked in every direction. There are only two shelves not overflowing with books, two shelves that are tightly filled with framed photographs and a variety of other personal items, scrapbooks and a couple of yearbooks, old journals, old playbills.

I lean in and start leafing through some of the playbills. I can't remember ever going to a play with my father, and yet he must have two dozen playbills here that he's chosen to hold on to: The Real Thing, Lost in Yonkers, King Lear.

Then I turn to the photographs. Many of them I recognize—photographs of me and my mother that she had framed at her house too. Several are of Sylvia and my brothers, of Inez and Elizabeth and their little girl, Luna. One is with a past president.

The other shelf has photographs and framed newspaper clippings of my father at work. Some are with my brothers. Some are with Grace and Uncle Joe. There are photographs of the team in the New York office, clippings from hotel openings in Aspen, Whitefish, Cabo San Lucas. My father smiling happily, completely in his element with his sons; and with Grace and Joe, both of whom had remained by his side for decades, from the early days of Noone Properties until Grace passed away earlier this year—a heart attack taking her too young. Which left my father and Joe to run the business together. One trusted advisor left.

It makes me wonder how that shifted the dynamic between my uncle Joe and my father. Though, in fairness, I didn't really keep up with how the dynamics had worked before. My mother rarely talked about my father's company, and I followed her lead. You only need to remember two things about Noone Properties , she'd said. It happened after me. And it has nothing to do with you.

Of course, that is revisionist history. My parents may not have been together by the time my father had turned Noone into the empire that it now is, but they were still married when he took over at Hayes. They were married for the early part of that empire-building, for those early years of his meteoric rise. They had actually met during his second year working there, my father still fairly fresh out of business school.

My mother was a music teacher and a session musician at that point. On occasion, though, like the night they met, she would sing with her friend's wedding band at the Hayes Hotel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

My father was spending several months on property, overseeing a renovation there. She saw him sitting at the hotel bar during her dinner break, my mother feeling fierce in her gold jumpsuit. She was the one who approached him. She took the barstool beside him and asked him if he wanted to buy her a drink.

My mother said he intrigued her: this too-serious young guy with his mop of blond hair who seemed out of place in a family-focused hotel. My father felt like she didn't belong there, either. She belonged on a movie set. She belonged on a world stage. He said one of the things he liked most about my mother was that she was so comfortable in her own skin that people just wanted to be around her—wherever she was.

He was correct about that. My mother was confident in a way you could only be when you really knew yourself. When you really knew what you wanted. And, at least then, she wanted to get to know him. She also didn't want to change her life. She loved her old farmhouse in Croton. She loved walking to work at the high school and only going into the city for studio sessions, or the occasional night out.

So my father sublet his West Village apartment and moved in with her. He started doing the hour-plus commute to Midtown Manhattan each morning and back every night, not begrudging her that it added two hours to his day.

And my mother didn't begrudge him when their marriage started to show strain and he started coming home less, staying at his West Village apartment again.

She didn't begrudge him when shortly after Walter Hayes died and left him the company, my father started spending longer days at the office in Manhattan, which led to even more nights spent in that West Village apartment, and (eventually, as they grew further apart) to a new friend, the travel expert on a popular morning show. The new friend named Sylvia.

I spent almost no time at my father and Sylvia's place while I was growing up. Sylvia had little interest in having a stepdaughter around—a point she made clear by purchasing a penthouse apartment for her and my father's growing family and conveniently not designating a bedroom for me. One of the few times I visited them, I overheard my father insisting that I have my own space to decorate in a way that made me feel comfortable, to which Sylvia replied, without a hint of irony: There are Frette sheets in the guest room. If those aren't comfortable, I can't help her.

Even if Sylvia had been welcoming, my father would have siloed his different families anyway. He was more comfortable focusing on each of us separately rather than figuring out the implications inherent in merging all of us. He liked to come up to visit me in Croton most Friday evenings, so the three of us could have dinner together.

He often came up for dinner, even when I was older and I chose to spend most free nights with my friends instead of with him.

He and my mother would take walks by the river or drive to Cold Spring to get an early supper, just the two of them. Sometimes, they'd just sit on the porch and catch up.

It wasn't romantic between them. My mother started dating another musician, Julian, shortly after she and my father separated. From day one, she was completely devoted to him. They were devoted to each other. She'd often say to me, I was meant to meet your father so we could have you. I was meant to meet Julian for me . As for my father, he was the one who left their marriage in the first place.

I pick up a photograph of the three of us at my college graduation—my mother in the middle of my father and me—our arms wrapped around each other, all of us laughing. I zero in on their faces, easy with each other, relaxed. They'd been divorced for over a decade at that point, but you wouldn't know it from looking at them. You would only see how close they seemed.

So how do you explain it? My father's desire to keep my mother close, long after it was about me. How could I begin to understand his need to start new lives but never to walk away from the old ones?

Oh, for Pete's sake, my love, my mother used to say when I'd ask. It's like you don't know your father at all.