I stuffed a sweater and towel in a tote with my wallet and sketchbook before setting out for the beach. East Hampton wasn’t my scene, but it was beautiful. The fresh air and inviting houses and shops looked like something out of a postcard.

After I turned onto Ocean Avenue, the water appeared. The breeze filled my pores and the sounds of the gulls swamped my ears. A wave of homesickness grabbed me, and I took the deepest breath I had in weeks.

Moving to New York had thrown me. Nate had been my greatest stress and, somehow, my greatest comfort.

His family was so different from mine. In some ways, they had more. But there was none of the friendly teasing I grew up with at the table. What had they been like before, when Jamie was alive? Did they laugh? Tease?

Pictures in the hallway showed two smiling boys, one dark and one fair. The fair one was Jamie. They both beamed out of the picture like they were glad to be alive. In a more recent picture, what looked like Nate’s college graduation, Nate was grinning his widest smile and his eyes were clear as the cloudless sky. A matching photo from Jamie’s featured different school colors, but the same joy and pride.

Now the Townsends had lost Jamie, and Nate had lost part of himself.

I gazed into the ocean until my fingers itched. I hadn’t touched a pencil in three days and realized I was burning to.

A surge of energy flowed through me as I dug my supplies out of the bag. Sketchpad, pencils, colored pens. My hands chose one and started moving over the page, creating lines and shapes. Occasionally specks of water leapt out of the sea and landed on the page. It didn’t matter.

The phone in my bag buzzed. When I checked it, I was startled to realize it’d been nearly three hours.

Where are you?

A moment later,

You found a Starbucks?

I laughed. Glancing around I identified a few markers to help Nate find me on the beach.

Twenty minutes later I was lost in my designs when I heard grunting. Nate collapsed on the edge of the towel I’d spread out, beads of sweat on his forehead. The casual jeans and navy button-down he was wearing contrasted with the strain on his face.

“I would’ve come back eventually,” I said. But I was secretly glad he’d come. Even the sight of Nate was enough to make me happy.

“I can nearly drive, but our housekeeper insisted on bringing me.”

I glanced toward the road. “You still came a quarter mile from the parking lot on your own. Is that the Townsend tenacity?” I teased.

“More like the Townsend pigheadedness.” There was an undercurrent I couldn’t read as Nate inclined his head toward my sketchpad. “What’s that?”

Showing him my ideas made me nervous. Nate was just twenty-five, but all signs pointed to him being a great attorney. I was barely making a dent in the fashion scene, and part of me was still terrified we wouldn’t string two successful seasons together.

I turned the sketchbook anyway and held my breath.

“Holy shit.” Nate grabbed it from my hand, eyes running over the drawing of the faceless girl in the sleek outfit. He turned the page, and again. “These are amazing. I’ve seen your clothes before, but … You’re really good.”

“Thanks.” I blushed. “There are a lot of talented designers out there.”

Nate set the sketchpad down on the towel, then dragged a finger through the sand next to us. He made a circle, then two lines, four, five. The world’s worst stick figure took form. I burst out laughing.

“It’s harder than it looks,” he murmured, glancing up at me with a boyish half-smile.

“Don’t quit your day job,” I agreed.

Nate looked back to the sketchpad. “I know you didn’t copy anything,” he said abruptly. “I think I knew it for longer than I was willing to admit.”

My heart squeezed. It made all the difference in the world for him to think it, even more to say it. “Thanks, Nate. Could you tell Bryson that?”

The warmth left his eyes. It was the first we’d mentioned the lawsuit since … practically since the deposition. Hearing him say it stirred up feelings I’d nearly left behind in Manhattan. Ones I hadn’t had to worry about until last night.

I hated talking about this on a beautiful sunny day surrounded by sand and wind and salt. But this ugly thing had raised its head and refused to leave us alone.

“Ava. I regret every second that he walked through that door. If I’d known, if I’d had a clue …”

“Isn’t there someone else who can take on the case?” I asked the words that’d run through my mind more than once.

He made a low sound in his throat. “Dammit, I wish there was. But with everything that’s going on with my father …” Nate took my hand, playing with my fingers. We both watched our hands, not each other.

“Lex said something to me yesterday,” I started. “That if anyone found out we’d been together, it could be bad. For Travesty.”

He nodded. “And for me. If anyone found out we were talking like this, without your lawyer? We shouldn’t be here.”

Nate’s hands were so much bigger. I’d felt them on me, holding me, chasing me. Now they were gentle. Stroking. Whispering over mine.

“What happens after we go home?” I asked. “In this little scheme of yours, I mean. You tell your parents we broke up?”

“Yeah.”

I could physically feel my sides ache. His fingers tangled with mine, like it hurt him too. “I was kind of getting used to being your lie girlfriend, Nate Townsend.”

“Me too.” He hesitated, turning something heavy over in his mind. “Would you wait for me?”

“What?” My head jerked up to find him watching me.

“Once the case is over. Do you think we could ever be more than a lie?”

My heart broke again, imagining how hard it was for him to ask that. How much I wanted to say yes.

“Nate,” I started, my eyes searching his. “I have everything to lose. Lawyers lose cases sometimes. I can’t afford to lose this one. And if you’re the one who drives Travesty into the ground …” I shrugged helplessly. “I won’t tell you it wouldn’t shift things between us. Even if I could forgive it, I couldn’t forget it.”

We looked out at the water together for a long minute. I wondered if we were lost in the same thoughts, or different ones.

“Can’t you just try less hard?” I asked finally.

Nate groaned, squeezing my hand. “Don’t you think part of me wants to? I hate fucking thinking it, much less saying it out loud. My obligation is to Bryson. It doesn’t matter who he is and what I think of him. I couldn’t live with myself if I compromised this case. I couldn’t represent other clients.”

His decency was part of what drew me to him. In some ways it made me care more, that he wasn’t willing to sacrifice what he thought was right. Even if I wasn’t so sure.

“I get it, Nate. But if you win, I could lose my life.” I tried to explain what I’d always had trouble putting into words. “As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to make clothes. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. If I woke up tomorrow and couldn’t do this—” I gestured at the pad “—I don’t know what I’d do. And that feeling, of waking up and not having the ideas come, of having to work at something else? It makes me feel like I’d have to become someone else. And that terrifies me.”

Nate watched thoughtfully, no judgment in his clear eyes as the breeze ruffled his hair. “One time when I was eight, I woke up soaking wet and confused on my neighbors’ porch. I banged on the door. Mr. Cartwright answered in his robe, looking at me like I was an alien until he realized who I was. He called my parents while Mrs. Cartwright made me hot chocolate. It turned out I’d sleepwalked two hundred yards down the street in the rain.”

Nate looked out at the water, living it again in his mind.

“That’s what my life feels like some days. Like I woke up in a strange place and don’t know how I got there. I never burned to practice law. I vaguely remember the path. A bunch of tiny decisions, so small they seemed insignificant at the time. Taking a class. Going to a dinner. Playing tennis with the dean at Yale.

“But they must’ve added up because here I am. Now I have to do my best. Be better every single day, even if I’m not quite sure why. If I’m not blowing through cases, clocking the hours, showing up at fundraisers … then I don’t know who I am. Like if I’m not on the porch soaking wet, then I must still be asleep.” He looked back to me, uncertain. A vulnerability undercut the preppy clothes and aristocratic features. “I’ve never said that out loud. It’s kind of fucked up.”

I thought back to the boy letting his brother win. The one speaking passionately at the gala and feeding homeless people, who was grappling with the decision to help me or do what he’d sworn to do, even if I didn’t agree with it.

“I know who you are, Nate Townsend. Even if you don’t. You’re someone who sees something wrong and does everything in his power to make it right.”

He sucked in a breath, then leaned toward me with excruciating slowness and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. His eyes searched mine. “No one sees me like you do. And I don’t know that I deserve it. But I want to. I want to deserve you, looking at me just like that.”

His mouth brushed mine, then stayed, Nate’s lips caressing with hunger and something more that gave me hope.

When he pulled back, I leaned in again but he pressed a finger over my mouth.

“Wait for me,” he murmured.

I sighed, and it took everything in me to sit back on my heels, to push away from him. “I can’t promise, Nate. I can’t promise how I’ll feel in a month, or two, or three.” His eyes closed. “But I’ll think about it. And in the meantime, before we have to go back to the real world, give me one more day of this. No one will see us here. Your father doesn’t know.”

Nate thought for a long minute. “OK. One more day.”

I smiled, because I had to. “What do you want to do?” I almost said with our last day.

“We could go for a walk in town. Take this for a test drive.” He nodded toward his ankle. “Maybe swim.”

“In the ocean? Fish freak me out.”

“I’ll protect you. No seals in these parts.”

In the end we went to the market and bought ice cream. He looked skeptically at my concoction of mango fro-yo topped with pineapple, chocolate syrup, and gummi bears. I made fun of his choice of plain rum raisin ice cream. Then stuck a green gummi bear in the top of his ice cream cone when he wasn’t looking.

Then we swam in the ocean, sticking close in case his ankle was a problem. When we made it back to shore, some kids were playing ball with their dog. We watched for a while, then I joined in when Nate insisted he didn’t mind guarding my bag. I ran back to him, laughing, and collapsed in the sand.

“I’m pretty sure I have sand in places it’s going to take a week to get it out of,” I told him as we walked back toward his parents’ house.

Nate shot me a heated look that had me thinking of way dirtier things than just sand.

“I don’t know if that’s allowed as part of our day,” I told him.

“It had better be.”

I was suddenly reminded of last night. Desperate to feel him on me, over me, under me again.

“Wait,” he said as we reached the top step of the front porch.

I paused and Nate pulled me close, pressing his mouth to mine like he couldn’t stay away another second. My lips parted and he ran a thumb possessively up my side underneath my shirt, grazing the bottom of my breast in a way that made my breath hitch.

“Nate,” I murmured, “can we—?”

He nodded, as amped as I was.

But when we opened the front door, tripping in our hurry to sneak upstairs, unfamiliar voices floated through the house.

“Dinner. Fuck, I forgot.” Nate pulled up and checked his watch. “It’s almost seven. We’d better change. The rest will have to wait,” he said regretfully.

“Dammit.”

His eyes told me he wanted this every bit as much as I did. That knowledge would have to tide me over.

Down, girl, I thought as I followed him up the stairs.

* * *

Getting ready in fifteen minutes meant I definitely wasn’t going to wow anyone, but it seemed the lesser evil than being late.

We finally walked downstairs, clean and dressed, Nate handsome in a pale blue shirt and midnight tie and me in a flowing purple sundress I’d found in the closet. “Don’t say anything about my dad’s heart attack,” he murmured on the way in. I didn’t have time to ask about it.

It took me about five minutes to realize “small dinner” at the Townsends was unlike any family affair I’d ever witnessed. I had two brothers and a sister, plus Lex and my cousins who occasionally come for holidays. I knew loud. I knew family. I didn’t know … whatever this was.

There were ten guests at the table on the patio when we arrived. The first face my eyes fell on was Abby’s. Apparently her parents had a house down the street.

Nate ended up sitting next to her when she insisted she needed his ideas on a fundraiser. I ended up on his other side next to Toby, Nate’s cousin’s-sister’s-uncle or something.

Every time I glanced to my right—which happened a lot since my conversation partner only seemed interested in talking about himself—Abby was talking animatedly, smiling up at Nate, or touching his arm.

I’d felt badly for her when she came over and was surprised to see me and Nate, but that feeling started to slide seeing her this close to him again. Something suspiciously like jealousy rose in its place.

“Are you all right, dear?”

“Yeah, Toby. I’m fine.” I pulled my knife out from where it had delivered a death blow to my dinner roll.

Nate had seemed tense when we arrived, but after an hour he was telling stories and inside jokes with everyone else. When they started talking about the thirtieth person everyone but me seemed to know, I excused myself.

In the bathroom down the hall I whipped out my phone.

“Lex! I know you think me being here is the worst idea since the Trojans being all ‘Look, a horse!’ but I really need my best friend right now.”

“Wow.” I could hear the wheels in her head turning. “I have no idea what you’re saying, but go ahead.”

“Thank you. It’s my last night here, but I swear these people are going to kill me. Or I might kill them first. It’s like they’re speaking some weird language.”

“Hamptonese?” Lex suggested.

“They know all these people I’ve never heard of. Nate’s mom is stunning and cold as an Alaskan hooker. And Nate’s childhood friend is a Grace Kelly look-alike who happens to be in love with him and is waiting for the right time to eviscerate me with her dessert spoon.

“Nate’s dad is probably the future president of the United States, and though he seems nice enough, I can never tell what he’s actually thinking. Then there’s Abby’s sister, Ruth, Uncle-Cousin-Whatever Toby, and Nate’s cousin Charlie, who’s seventeen and looks like he wants to hump my leg. Plus a couple of neighbors who look like they wish the North had never won the Civil War. Basically, everyone hates me because they think I’m some gold digger trying to land their perfect Nathan. And I don’t even know that I am. Trying to land him, I mean. But I think I might be, and I need to decide that too.

“To top it off, they’re having oysters for dinner. You know oysters activate my gag reflex. So I’m basically just sitting there sipping soda water waiting to tackle the first person who walks by with a hot dog because I’m so damn hungry.”

The weirdest thing happened. Lex burst out laughing.

“It’s not funny!” I insisted.

“Ava. This situation is either ridiculously messed up or it’s funny. If you don’t want it to be the first, you have one other option.”

She had a point.

When I returned to the table, people were just finishing dinner.

“You OK?” Nate asked, pulling back my chair so I could sit. It was the first time I’d had his attention all dinner.

I smiled at him. “Never better.” He seemed dazzled, his eyes moving over my face.

“Ava, would you like to help me with dessert?” Celeste asked.

Dammit. Frying pan, fire.

Celeste couldn’t touch me, I reminded myself as I followed her back to the kitchen.

“Let me be direct, Ava,” she said, turning and resting a hand delicately on the granite counter. “I don’t believe what everyone else does.”

I swallowed.

“At first I’d agreed that you were in it for the name. But I see the way you look at Nathan. I know you care. So I’m going to be honest. Alistair and I gave that boy everything. Good schools, a good family. The right friends.” Her face tightened. “Then he found that girl. Brought her into our home, where she corrupted Jamie with her habit.”

Celeste noticed the look on my face.

“I take it he didn’t tell you she drove the car my son died in into a telephone pole because she was high as a kite? My son didn’t use drugs. He was brilliant, and an athlete. Still, Nathan couldn’t stop being infatuated long enough to notice her poison.”

I was still soaking in the news about Hannah, but Celeste’s words couldn’t go unanswered. I needed to defend Nate. To defend us. “Mrs. Townsend, I can’t imagine what you’ve all been through. But Nate’s not a child. You raised a capable son you can trust.”

“Ava. Three generations of Townsends have sat in that office. It’s not just about the law, the power. It’s about pride and service. Nathan may be the best of them yet. He has a quality his father doesn’t have, a genuineness, and it draws people to him.”

I knew it. It was one of my favorite things.

“What do you see when you look at her?” Celeste nodded toward the porch.

If I tilted my head I could just see our side of the table, where Nate’s head was angled toward Abby. Her face was smiling up at him.

“Blond hair. Pearls. Veneers.”

“That’s on the surface. What’s underneath is someone who can support Nathan. Who’ll put herself second to him, to what he can do. He’ll never tell you he wants that, but it’s what he needs. Abigail knows that and is ready to sign on. That is the only way to cope with this lifestyle. You? You have a career. Dreams that aren’t his.”

Anger was starting to boil up. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s the twenty-first century, Mrs. T.”

She smiled faintly. “It is. But making great men still requires sacrifices by great women. Don’t think I don’t like you. I like you very well. When I see you, I see someone who wants to be great in her own way.”

I had no response.

“If I’m right and you care about him the way I think you do, then you’ll let him go. Because your dreams and his future can’t coexist. Losing Jamie and Hannah was a lesson. A dearly expensive lesson. One that can’t go to waste.”

“How can I help with dessert?” I asked tightly.

“I think we’re fine here,” she said. “Thank you, Ava.”

I was reeling as I wandered back out to the patio and took my seat beside Nate. If Celeste was telling the truth, I had some answers but even more questions.

I didn’t try to follow the conversation after that, through the cake that was served and the after-dinner drinks. By eleven I excused myself to go to bed.

“I’ll come. It’s getting late,” Nate said.

“No, it’s OK. Stay,” I insisted. The truth was I didn’t want to face him alone right now. He’d sense something was wrong and want to help. But he couldn’t help. Because tomorrow we’d go home to the real world, leaving behind this bubble, for better or worse.

I took a shower, letting the hot water scorch my skin and wash away what I was thinking and feeling. Then I padded back to the unused bed in my room.

A few hours before, I’d wanted nothing more than to get Nate alone. To explore this unlikely reality that he had feelings for me, knowing I did for him. To let myself think, Could I wait for him? Could I see myself with him after all this time on opposite sides?

But now …

I thought about Celeste’s words. I wouldn’t be reckless like Hannah, but that didn’t mean I was right for their world. Even if Nate was willing to take that risk, I didn’t want to bring him more hurt. Especially if it meant sacrificing who he was, who he could be, for me.

I was still awake when I heard a noise at the door. A few moments later, the bed dented beside me.

“I’m sorry if dinner made you uncomfortable. Mom shouldn’t have invited Abby.” Nate’s voice was low.

“It’s OK, Nate. It’s not like we’re really dating.”

He was quiet a long time. “No. But don’t pretend we’re nothing.”

I heard the door close, thinking he’d gone to bed.

Seconds later I felt his hand brush mine. Then he wove my fingers through his and my heart cracked.

When I fell asleep, Nate was in my bed. His chest was pressed to my back and his knees were tucked behind mine.