Winter in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand (3)

IRENE

What is she doing?

What is she doing?

What is she doing?

She is throwing away the rule book, she thinks. And it feels okay.

For the first fifty-seven years of her life, Irene stayed on script. She was a dutiful daughter, a good student in both high school and college. She got married, had children, took a job that was suited to her.

She had been a good mother, or good enough. The boys were fine.

She had been a good wife.

Hadn’t she?

It’s only at night, after Irene has taken one of the pills that Anna prescribed, that she allows herself to indulge in self-doubt. Where did she go wrong? She feels like she must have done Russ a huge, terrible injustice somewhere along the way for him to engage in a deception so wide and deep.

But she comes up with nothing.

She wasn’t sure what to expect when she arrived here; the villa and the island are as foreign as Neptune. What she finds surprising are the small flashes of her own influence that she stumbles across. All of the beds, she’s noticed, have six pillows, along with one oversized decorative pillow against the headboard, one small square decorative pillow in front, and a cylindrical bolster. This is exactly how Irene dresses the beds at home; she had no idea Russ had ever noticed. Also, the wine Russ keeps on hand—cases of it, on the ground floor—are her two favorites: Cakebread and Simi. It’s almost as if Russ expected her to show up for a drink one day.

She wouldn’t say these details made her feel at home, although they do provide a connection. This was her husband’s house. Her husband’s house. And now her husband is dead. These pieces of news that were, initially, so difficult to conceive, she’s now finally processing.

This is Russ’s house.

Russ is dead.

She’s also becoming acclimatized to life here—the temperature, the surroundings, the particulars of the villa—kind of the way one gets used to the thin air at altitude after a few days. Irene remembers when she and Russ used to visit Cash in Breckenridge; she would suffer from shortness of breath, headaches, strange dreams—and then these symptoms would gradually fade away.

She supposes this goes to show that one can get used to anything.

Seeking out Captain Sam Powers—Huck—had been a bold move, Irene knows. She had desperately wanted to hold someone accountable. She can’t confront Rosie, but why not Rosie’s parents? Huck had been nothing like what Irene had expected. First of all, he was not Rosie’s biological father but her stepfather, married to Rosie’s deceased mother. Secondly, he was kind—gruff, yes, at first, and unenthusiastic about talking to her (can she blame him?), but he seemed to understand that they were in the same boat (so to speak). Irene had stunned herself by asking to go fishing, and Huck had further stunned her (and likely himself) by agreeing. He could easily have told her to go away and leave him alone. He owed her nothing. He had lost a daughter, and Irene could see that his pain equaled her own; he deserved a day out on his boat by himself. That they had enjoyed such a cathartic and successful outing and that this dinner had evolved from that says… what? That misery loves company, she supposes. That they are not enemies but rather casualties of the same sordid circumstances.

Huck likely has as many questions for her as she does for him, but of course, she has no answers.

She’d had such an easy time finding Huck first thing Monday morning that she tries to track down Todd Croft. Cash had checked with Paulette, who had no contact information for Croft. Paulette dealt only with Marilyn Monroe and with pilot Stephen Thompson—an associate, she said, from the British Virgin Islands.

Irene tries Marilyn Monroe’s number again, but it’s still disconnected.

She tries the Ascension webpage, but—just as Baker had claimed—it won’t load. Someone took it down.

Russ’s cell phone isn’t in the house, though Irene has called it several times each day. Every time the phone starts ringing, her heart tenses in anticipation. Will today be the day that Russ answers? Is he alive somewhere? No: after two rings, it clicks over to generic voicemail. Irene doesn’t even have the luxury of hearing Russ’s recorded voice; if she did, she would likely scream at him each time.

She tries to access Russ’s cell phone records. She knows his phone number, of course, but the phone bill was paid by Ascension, and she has no idea which carrier he uses—she tries contacting AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile but gets nowhere. She wonders if he uses a carrier out of the British Virgin Islands, but here she grows frustrated. Even if she figures out the carrier, she doubts they’ll give her access to his call log without a court order.

Russ said that he’d been acquainted with Todd Croft at Northwestern, so Irene calls the Northwestern alumni office to see if they have contact information. They don’t. Irene could potentially ask one of Russ’s other friends from Northwestern—Leo Pelusi or Niles Adrian—but she hasn’t seen either of them since their wedding thirty-five years earlier. She has their mailing addresses—they exchange Christmas cards every year—but not phone numbers or email addresses. Russ doesn’t go to reunions. The last time he went to Northwestern was eight years ago, for Baker’s graduation.

A garden-variety Google of the name Todd Croft, paired with the name Ascension and then separately with Miami, yields nothing fruitful.

Irene grows frustrated. In this day and age, everyone has a digital profile. Someone just told her that, but who? Mavis Key! Mavis Key had explained to Irene and Irene’s boss, Joseph Feeney, that with some new software they could learn a lot more about their subscribers’ purchasing habits.

Irene is just desperate enough to do the unthinkable. She calls Mavis Key.

“Hey, Irene,” Mavis says. She sounds both surprised and concerned. “I heard you had a family emergency. Is everything okay?”

Everything is the opposite of okay, Irene wants to say. My husband is dead and he had a secret life. She should have thought this conversation through before she dialed. She needs to convey that the family emergency is real without disclosing even a hint about what has happened.

“Things are difficult right now,” Irene says. “Very difficult. But I can’t get into it. I called you because I need help finding someone.”

“Finding someone,” Mavis says. “I’m at the Java House getting a chai.” Before Irene can think that of course Mavis Key is downtown on the pedestrian mall, where all the hip university students hang out, ordering a “chai,” whatever that is, Mavis adds, “Let me sit down with my laptop. I love detective work.”

Irene feels herself relax. Mavis sounds self-assured. She’s thirty-one years old, roughly the age of Irene’s children, and she exudes both confidence and competence. Irene cherishes competence in everyone, even Mavis Key.

“The man’s name is Todd Croft,” Irene says. “He’s in his mid- to late fifties. He’s a banker—a businessman—in Florida, I think. Miami. His business is called Ascension. He went to Northwestern.”

Mavis double-checks the spelling of Croft and of Ascension, then Irene can hear her fingertips flying across a keyboard. LinkedIn, Mavis murmurs. Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook. This is a world Irene has actively resisted. People encouraged her to start a Facebook page about her home renovation, but she had been so immersed in the work itself that there had been no time left over to document it.

“I’m not finding him,” Mavis says. “Do you know where he worked before Ascension? Do you know if he has kids, or where they went to school? Do you know where in Miami he lives? Do you know if he owns property?”

“I don’t,” Irene admits. She chastises herself for being so impetuous; it isn’t like her. Now Mavis will go back to the office and tell everyone that Irene is looking for a fifty-something banker from Miami—and what will people think?

Well, whatever they think, it won’t be as awful as the truth.

“Never mind,” Irene says. “I just called on a whim. I need to get a hold of this gentleman because he has some information that will assist with my family issues. But thanks anyway, Mavis.”

“Oh,” Mavis says. “No problem. When do you think you’ll be back? The office isn’t the same without you. We’re kind of like a bunch of crazed teenagers when Mom is away.”

Irene imagines Beyoncé and Drake playing at full blast over the office sound system, microwave popcorn ground into the rug of the common room, long, expensed lunch breaks at Formosa, and the entire staff cutting out early for craft cocktails in the name of “team building.” Everyone at the magazine probably views Irene as a schoolmarm, smacking her yardstick into her palm. Irene offers a paltry laugh. “I’ll be back next week to restore order,” she says. “Thanks, Mavis.” She can’t hang up fast enough.

The boys leave for dinner. Irene asks them to stay out until eleven, a request that is met with blank stares. Neither of them has asked what she’s planning. They’re afraid of her, she realizes. They’re afraid that at any minute she’s going to crack and all of her ugly emotions are going to come flying out. That’s fine—they can think what they want, as long as they give her privacy tonight.

She pulls things out of the fridge that she can serve with grilled mahi. Camembert with crackers to start, pasta salad and the makings of a green salad as sides. There’s a fruit salad she can serve for dessert with packaged cookies. Food is the least of her worries.

She pours herself a glass of wine, the first since she left the Pullman Bar & Diner six days ago. Thinking about the Pullman and Prairie Lights leads Irene to thoughts of Milly. Cash called Milly on Saturday evening and Milly had been unable to come to the phone. What must Milly think? That they’ve abandoned her?

Irene grabs her cell phone and calls Milly while she sets the table for two. She debates setting out candles. They’re more flattering than the outdoor lighting, but will Irene be sending the wrong message? The boys were kind enough not to ask why she was wearing a sundress and earrings (possibly they hadn’t noticed). Irene wants to look nice and normal, though not like she’s trying too hard. She has left her hair hanging down her back, still damp from the shower. No makeup; it’s best if Huck sees her how she really is.

As she decides no to candles and then yes to candles—why deny herself the pleasure of candlelight?—Dot, the head nurse on the medical floor, answers.

“Dot, this is Irene Steele. I know I’ve been lax about calling this week…”

“Oh, Irene,” Dot says. “Cash called and let us know that you all were taking a vacation. Are you back?”

“No,” Irene says. “Not yet.” She stands at the deck railing and looks out at the sky, striped pink as the sun sets out of sight to the left. The water has taken on a purplish hue, and pinpricks of light start to appear on the neighboring islands. This view is probably what someone like Dot thinks of when she thinks vacation. And yet.

“I haven’t called you because I don’t want to rain on your parade,” Dot says. “But Milly is failing, Irene. It’s nothing dramatic, just a steady decline I’ve noticed since the first of the year. She’s not going to die tomorrow—I don’t want you running home—but I figured you ought to know.”

Irene is silent. Milly has been failing since the first of the year. The day that Russ died. Her only child. It’s almost as if she sensed it.

“Is she awake now?” Irene asks. “Can I speak with her?”

“She’s been asleep for hours,” Dot says. “But I’ll tell her you called. Around lunchtime is best, if you want to try again tomorrow.”

Try again tomorrow, Irene thinks. So she can lie to Milly and tell her everything is fine, Cash surprised her with a vacation, the Caribbean is beautiful.

“Okay,” Irene says. “I’ll do that.”

Huck arrives a few minutes after seven. From her second-floor guest-room window, Irene watches his truck snake up the driveway. She checks her hair and hurries down the stairs to meet him at the door.

This is not a date, she tells herself, though her nerves are bright and jangly with anticipation. She will attempt to make Huck her ally. She needs one here on this island.

Irene opens the door. Huck has cleaned up a bit himself—his red-gray hair is combed, his yellow shirt pressed. He’s holding a bag of fish fillets—more than they could possibly eat—in one hand and a bottle of… he immediately hands the bottle over to Irene… Flor de Caña rum, eighteen years old.

“Thought we might need that,” he says.

Irene accepts the bottle gratefully. It solves the problem of how to greet him—air-kiss or handshake. Now neither is necessary.

“Come on in,” she says. “Did you have any problem finding it?”

“You know I’ve lived here twenty years,” Huck says. “And I never knew this road existed. Does it have a name?”

“Lovers Lane,” Irene says.

“Seriously?”

“That’s what the deed says.” This is a development, new as of this afternoon. Paulette Vickers managed to produce the deed. The house, known as Number One Lovers Lane, is owned solely by Russell Steele. This news had come as a solid punch to the gut. Irene had secretly believed that they would discover the property was owned by Todd Croft or Ascension. If that had been the case, Irene could have believed Russ was a pawn, manipulated by his powerful boss. More than once after Russ had accepted the job from Todd, Irene had realized that he’d made a deal with the devil. But had she ever encouraged him to quit? Never. The money had been too seductive.

According to Irene’s lawyer in Iowa City, Ed Sorley, Russ’s will leaves everything to her should she survive him. When had he signed the will? Irene had asked Ed. She worried that another will would materialize, leaving everything to Rosie Small. But Ed said that Russ had come in to sign a new will in September, one that included a new life insurance policy he’d taken out, to the tune of three million dollars.

“September?” Irene said. This was news to her. She remembered them both signing new wills back when they bought the Church Street property.

“Yes,” Ed says. “Why do you ask? Is everything all right?”

“Never better,” Irene said, and hung up.

“Well,” Huck says now, stepping into the foyer. “This is quite a place.”

Quite a place. Huck follows Irene through the entry hall into the kitchen. She doesn’t feel like giving him a tour—although there is something she wants to show him upstairs, after dinner.

“Let me get you something to drink,” Irene says. “I have wine chilled or…” She looks at the rum; she’s not sure what to do with it. No one has ever brought her a bottle of rum before. “Can I make you a cocktail? We have Coke, I think.”

Huck opens a cabinet and pulls out two highball glasses; he pours some rum in each. “Let’s do a shot,” Huck says. “Then we can be civilized folks and switch to wine.”

Throwing away the rule book. “Deal,” Irene says. She lifts her glass, raises it to Huck, and throws the rum back. It burns, but not as much as she’d expected; it has a certain smoothness, like fiery caramel.

“Well,” she says.

“Good stuff,” Huck pronounces. “Now, if you can find me olive oil, salt, pepper, and a lemon, I’ll marinate our catch.”

Thirty minutes later, Irene is slightly more relaxed, thanks to the rum, a glass of the Cakebread, and a man who is as confident a cook as he is a fisherman. Irene sits at the outdoor table as Huck grills, and when he brings the platter of fish to the table, she finds herself hungry for the first time since the call came.

Huck takes the seat next to Irene and then pauses a minute, looking at the food. It seems like he’s about to speak—make a toast maybe, or say grace. Do they have anything to be grateful for?

Well, they’re still here.

“To us,” she says. “The survivors.”

Huck nods. “Let’s eat.”

AYERS

The restaurant clears out by quarter of ten, as usual, though there are still a couple of people at the bar, including Baker’s brother, Cash. Or maybe Ayers should be thinking of Baker as Cash’s brother. She likes them both. Baker is hotter, but Ayers feels more comfortable around Cash.

She wipes down the tables, clears all the dishes, unties her apron, and throws it in the hamper. The chef hired someone to replace Rosie, an older gentleman named Dominic, which Ayers supposes is for the best. Skip pours Ayers a glass of the Schramsberg to drink as he counts out her tips.

“Ayers!” Cash calls across the bar. “Come sit!” He raises his beer aloft and Ayers drifts over but does not commit to sitting down. Baker had said he’d be back at ten, and Ayers plans on taking him to De’ Coal Pot. She has been dreaming about the oxtail stew all night.

Rosie had loved the oxtail stew at De’ Coal Pot. And the curried goat.

“So how was your dinner?” Ayers asks Cash.

“Wuss good,” Cash says. He’s slurring his words. From the looks of things, he’s even drunker than he was on Treasure Island. Ayers notices the Jeep keys next to his place mat.

“Water here, please,” Ayers says to Skip with a look. She wonders if her date to De’ Coal Pot is in jeopardy. Baker will have to drive Cash home; he can’t drive himself.

Ayers feels a hand on her back and turns, expecting to see Baker but—whoa! surprise!—it’s Mick. He’s wearing a sky-blue Beach Bar t-shirt and his hair is damp behind the ears. He’s working, obviously, but what Ayers doesn’t understand is why, if he’s going to sneak off for a drink, doesn’t he go somewhere else? Why not Joe’s Rum Hut or the Banana Deck? Why does he have to come here?

“Hey,” he says. He waves to Skip, and a cold Island Summer Ale lands in front of him.

“What?” she says.

“I came to see how you’re holding up,” Mick says. “Want to get a drink? I just got off. And actually I’m starving. Want to grab Chinese at 420?”

Chinese at 420: Their old ritual. 420 to Center is a dive bar next to Slim’s parking lot where everyone in the service industry goes after his or her shift. It’s owned by two guys from Boston; “420 to Center” is some reference to Fenway Park. They do whip up remarkably good Chinese food late-night. Time was, not so long ago, that Mick and Ayers were the king and queen of 420 to Center. But that time has passed. Ayers hasn’t been to 420 once this season. She avoided it because she assumed Mick went there with her successor.

Speaking of which.

“Where’s Brigid?” Ayers asks.

Mick shrugs.

“Trouble in paradise?” she says.

“It was never paradise.”

Ayers thinks about this for a moment. Ayers would have called what she and Mick had paradise. Yes, she would have. They were in love in St. John, they had good jobs and the same days off, and they knew everyone; when they went out, it was hard to pay for a drink. They both loved the beach, the sun, sex, hiking, drinking tequila, and Mick’s dog, Gordon. What could Ayers assume when Mick left but that Brigid—young, alluring Brigid—offered something even more sublime. To discover that this maybe wasn’t true, that life with Brigid had somehow not lived up to expectations, is, of course, enormously satisfying. But only for a fleeting moment. Mick is here, she realizes, not to see how Ayers is “holding up.” No, it’s not about Ayers’s emotional state, but rather, about Mick’s. He wants her company or he wants sex—probably the latter—but Ayers doesn’t have time for it.

“Oh, well,” she says, and she turns back to Cash, who has consumed his water and seems reinvigorated, like the herbs in Ayers’s garden after a rain. “You feeling better?”

“Yes,” Cash says. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Nearly ten,” she says. She can feel Mick at her back, watching her, and probably sizing up Cash. When they were a couple, Mick had been fiendishly jealous of every single one of Ayers’s male customers—single or married, in the restaurant or on the boat—and yet, in the end, it was he who had put his head up someone else’s skirt. “Are you calling it a night?”

“I wish,” Cash says. “I can’t go home for another hour. My mother has a guest for dinner and she wants privacy.”

“Your mother,” Ayers says. “Did she meet someone here? Or… do you know people?”

“Met someone,” Cash says. “Apparently.”

“So your parents are divorced?” Ayers asks.

“Divorced?” Cash says. He takes what seems like a long time to consider the question. “No. No.” Another pause, during which Ayers hears Mick and Skip talking about a supposed surfable swell in Reef Bay. It was Ayers’s least favorite thing about Mick: he professed to be a “surfer,” and he used all the lingo, but the one time Ayers had watched him “surf,” he’d fallen off the board and broken his collarbone. He’d blamed his accident on the waves. “My father is dead.”

Because she’s distracted thinking about the five hours she and Mick had spent in the waiting room at Myrah Keating, with Mick moaning and groaning while she smoothed his hair and brought water to his lips like a dutiful girlfriend, it takes her a moment to process this statement.

“Dead?” she says. “I’m sorry. Recently?”

Cash nods. “Really recently. That’s kind of why we’re down here.”

Down here. Family reunion, maybe the first vacation since the father died, which is why the mother came along.

“You’re still here?” a voice says.

Ayers turns around to see Baker standing behind her and also, of course, behind Mick. Baker is as big, tall, and broad as a tree. He’s staring down his brother.

“Mom said stay out until eleven,” Cash says. “Where else was I supposed to go?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Baker says. “But Ayers and I are going out and you’re not invited.” His tone is strong, nearly bullying, and Ayers feels bad for Cash. She understands now that both Cash and Baker are interested in her, and she wished they’d sorted this out at home to save her from being stuck in the middle, although a small part of her is gloating, because what better situation for Mick to witness than two men fighting over her?

“Where are you guys going?” Cash asks.

“None of your business,” Baker says, so harshly that Ayers winces, but then he softens and says, “Listen, just give us an hour, okay, man? I’ll be back to pick you up at eleven. I promise.”

“But where are you going?” Cash asks.

“De’ Coal Pot,” Ayers says. “It’s Caribbean food. You’re welcome to…”

Cash holds up a hand. “You guys go. I ate.”

“De’ Coal Pot?” Mick says. “I could go for some oxtail stew myself.”

Not happening, Ayers thinks. This is not happening. She is smacked by a wave of devastating sorrow. The person she needs by her side right now isn’t Mick or Baker or Cash. It’s Rosie.

Can you see this? Ayers asks Rosie in her mind. Please tell me you are somewhere you can see this.

Baker swings around. “Who are you?” he asks Mick.

Mick, wisely, holds up his hands. “No one,” he says. “I’m no one.”

Baker and Ayers walk down the street toward De’ Coal Pot, although Ayers finds she no longer has any appetite. She needs air, she needs space.

“I’m not hungry anymore,” she says. “Let’s go down to the beach.”

“You lead,” Baker says. “I’ll follow.”

Ayers takes him down past the Beach Bar to the far edge of Frank Bay, where it’s dark and quiet. Out on the water, she sees the ferry making its way toward St. Thomas. On the far horizon, she spies a cruise ship, all lit up like a floating city. Ayers sits in the cool sand and Baker eases down next to her.

“Your brother is pretty drunk,” Ayers says.

“I didn’t realize you knew him so well,” Baker says. “That came as a surprise.”

“He didn’t tell you we bumped into each other on the Reef Bay Trail?” Ayers says. “He saved my life, or at least it felt like it at the time. So, as a thank-you, I invited him to come on Treasure Island yesterday. I didn’t think he’d show up, but he did.”

“Of course he did,” Baker says. “When a gorgeous woman invites you somewhere, you go.”

Ayers smiles. She’s flattered by the compliment—but then she chastises herself. She can’t let herself be won over so easily.

“Your brother is nice,” Ayers says.

“Very nice,” Baker says. “I’m extremely jealous that he got to spend so much time with you. When I met you at the reception… I can’t explain any way to say it except that I was bowled over. Blown away. I looked at you and… well, I’d better not say anything else.”

“You don’t even know me,” Ayers says. “And I hate to tell you this, but I have a rule about dating tourists. I don’t do it.”

“That’s good to know,” Baker says.

“I’m serious,” Ayers says. “Guys like you and your brother come here, you’re on vacation, on the beach all day, hiking, snorkeling, happy hour, out to dinner, and that’s all great. That’s what you’re supposed to do. But then you get back on the ferry to St. Thomas, where you board the plane home to your real life. And I stay here.” She opens her arms wide, aware that the back of her right arm is now touching Baker’s chest. He gently reaches around her and pulls her close. She lets him. She wants physical contact, meaningless though it may be. It’s really not fair that Mick showed up and then admitted that life with Brigid was never paradise. It’s not fair that Rosie is dead because she fell in love with a tourist—or if not a tourist exactly, then a visitor, and if not a visitor, then… Ayers doesn’t quite know how to categorize the Invisible Man, but she does blame him for stealing her friend. And, just say it, for killing her friend. Her best friend.

Baker senses something in her breathing, maybe, or he reads minds, because he touches her chin and says, “Hey, are you okay?” And the next Ayers knows, she’s kissing him. She tells herself to stop, this is irrational, self-destructive behavior; she knows exactly nothing about this guy. But the kissing is electric, just like it was the very first time she kissed Mick, maybe better. Chemistry, she has learned, is either there or it isn’t and wow, yes, it’s there, this guy knows what he’s doing, his tongue, she can’t get enough of it, his arms are so strong, his hands, every cell of her body is suddenly yearning for more. She’s going to sleep with him, maybe right here on the beach—no, that would be bad, what if someone sees, it’ll be all over town by tomorrow, but she doesn’t want to break the spell to go to her truck and drive to her house, it’s too far, she wants this now. Does he want it now? He’s being shy with his hands, one is on the back of her head, one on the side of her neck, she wants him to put his hand up her shirt. She guides his hand, he just barely fingers her nipple, she groans, she reaches over into his lap, he’s hard as a rock, practically busting through his shorts. Oh yes, she thinks, this is happening right now.

He pulls away, out of breath. “We have to stop.”

“We can’t stop,” she says. She strokes his erection through his shorts and he makes a choking sound, then says, “You’re killing me. But I like you, I like you so much, Ayers, and I don’t want it to be like this, here on the beach, over quickly and then I go home and you go home and I’m just the tourist you let through the net because you’re sad about your friend and because I told your ex-boyfriend off.”

She draws back. She only had one sip of Schramsberg after service but she feels lightheaded, not drunk exactly but addled, mixed-up, off-kilter, and yet she knows he’s right. She’s startled, in fact, at just how right he is.

“You knew that was my ex-boyfriend?”

“You pointed him out at the reception,” Baker says. “He was with that unwashed trollop.”

“Yes,” Ayers whispers. “Brigid.”

“Let’s spend the day together tomorrow,” he says. “Can we?”

“We can,” Ayers says. “I have the whole day off tomorrow. Day and night—”

He squeezes her. “Beach during the day…

“Wait,” she says. She’s supposed to take Maia tomorrow after school and overnight. It’s the first time since Rosie died. Ayers can’t cancel. She won’t cancel. “Actually, I’m only free tomorrow until three.”

He stiffens. “Hot date?”

“Something like that,” Ayers says. She doesn’t elaborate; she wants him to be jealous. “But we can still do beach. I’ll meet you around ten, we’ll get sandwiches. I know a place out in Coral Bay that’s always deserted. I swim naked.”

“Yes!” Baker says. “I’m in!” He stands up, offers her a hand, pulls her in close and kisses the tip of her nose. “I don’t want you to think I meant anything by stopping. I just want this to be memorable. I want it to be perfect. You deserve that.”

He’s saying all the right things. But he’s a tourist. A tourist! He lives in… she tries to remember. He has a child somewhere and a wife who left him.

“How much longer do you have here?” Ayers asks. “When are you leaving?”

Baker pauses. “I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?” Ayers says. She suddenly gets the feeling he’s hiding something, and she realizes that she felt that way while talking to Cash as well. As if not everything added up. They’re here for a family reunion, the father is dead, but the mother has a date tonight. They don’t know the address of where they’re staying and Baker seemed pretty dead set against Ayers driving him home that morning. He was lost, he said. “Well, you rented a villa, right? How long is the rental?”

“It’s not a rental,” Baker says. “The villa belongs to my father.”

He and Ayers have made their way back up to the road. At the Beach Bar, a band is playing a Sublime cover. “But isn’t your father dead?” Ayers asks.

Baker stops in the street. “Did Cash tell you that?”

“Yes?” Ayers says. “He said your mother has a date tonight and I asked if your parents were divorced and he said no, your father was dead.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Anything else like what?” Ayers says. It’s now more than a feeling; it’s a certainty. Something is going on with these two guys that they’re not telling her.

“Well, first of all, my mother does not have a date,” Baker says. He takes Ayers’s hand and they head back in the direction of La Tapa. “But we do, tomorrow at ten. Right?”

Ayers takes a deep breath of the sweet evening air. The problem, she realizes, is Mick. Mick has made her mistrustful. He cheated on her with Brigid and now Ayers is destined to think everyone is hiding something.

“Right,” she says.

CASH

At five minutes to eleven, Cash finishes his beer, leaves a tip for Skip, and stumbles out to the front of the restaurant. He has called Baker three times but gotten no answer, which is really making Cash’s blood boil, because while Baker is out putting the moves on Ayers—on Ayers, the first woman Cash has been attracted to in years—Cash has no way to get home.

What is he supposed to do? He has twenty-six dollars left to his name; all the rest of the cash from his now-defunct stores is gone. To live another day, he’s going to have to ask his mother or brother for money. He can maybe pass off his flat-broke state as a logistical situation, claiming his bank card doesn’t work down here, but there are enough cover-ups and lies in this family as it is. He needs to come clean: the stores are gone.

It seems like a minor problem. He tried to be someone he wasn’t, he failed, and now he will go back to being the person he is. A ski instructor. For some reason, the idea doesn’t hold as much appeal as it did before all this happened.

He tries Baker again: voicemail. He feels himself about to snap. But then he hears his brother’s voice and see Baker waving an arm.

“Back in five!” Baker says. He’s with Ayers; they’re holding hands. They walk down the street to a green pickup and then Cash is treated to the sight of them kissing, really kissing. Cash feels sick.

“He’s married!” Cash calls out. But they don’t hear him.

On the way home, Baker is giddy. He sounds like a teenage girl. He kissed Ayers on the beach, he could have done more, way more, but he stopped her. He stopped her. She was totally into it, eager, ready, but with a woman like Ayers, a quick hookup on the beach isn’t good enough. She deserves a bed. A suite at Caneel Bay. He’s going to look into it.

“Look into a suite at Caneel?” Cash says. The words leave his mouth just as they happen to drive past the grand landscaped entrance of the Caneel Bay Resort. None of the resort is visible beyond the gatehouse, but Cash imagines it’s pretty opulent. Like his father’s house, only sexier. “You’re married.”

“I told you, Anna and I separated,” Baker says. “She came home on New Year’s Day, I kid you not, like five minutes before Mom called with the news, and she said she was leaving me. She said she was in love with someone else.”

“Really?” Cash says. He has never thought of Dr. Anna Schaffer as someone who would be “in love” with anyone, Baker included. She had appeared decidedly unenthusiastic at the wedding, but Cash understood that Anna was in thrall to her work. People took a distant second. Irene had long intoned her concern that Anna didn’t even have warm feelings for Floyd. Her own child. “Who is she in love with?”

“Dr. Louisa Rodriguez,” Baker says. “Another cardiothoracic surgeon. Friend and colleague.”

“Luis?” Cash says. He’s confused. “Or Louisa?”

“Louisa,” Baker says. “Woman.”

“Really?” Cash says. “Anna’s a lesbian? I guess I can see that.”

“I’m not sure we need to label her,” Baker says. “It might just be that she has feelings for Louisa in particular.”

“Fair enough,” Cash says. At that moment, his phone starts ringing and he thinks it must be his mother, calling to say the coast is clear and they are free to come home—because who else could it be? When he checks the display, he shakes his head. Anna, it says. Wait. He looks at Baker, then back down at his phone. It’s almost as if she heard them talking about her.

“Hello?” Cash says.

“Cash,” she says. “Hey, it’s Anna. Anna Schaffer. Baker’s wife.”

“Hi,” Cash says. It speaks volumes that she has to explain who she is. Still, he tries to keep his voice neutral. “How are you?”

“Do you know where Baker is?” she asks. “I’ve been calling him all night but he won’t answer.”

Cash nearly says, Yeah, Baker is right here—but something stops him. “Is everything okay?” he asks.

“Everything’s fine,” Anna says. “Would you please let Baker know that Floyd and I are flying down there tomorrow? We land at one fifteen and should be on the two o’clock ferry out of Red Hook that will get us to St. John by three.”

To St. John tomorrow by three.

“Okay,” Cash says. He can’t believe this. Didn’t Baker say he had a date with Ayers tomorrow?

“You really need to remember to tell him,” Anna says. “Baker has no idea we’re coming. It was basically impossible for me to clear it with work until the very last minute.”

“Will do,” Cash says.

“I can count on you?” Anna says.

“Absolutely,” Cash says.

“Okay,” Anna says, and she sounds happier, maybe even a little excited. “See you tomorrow!”

Cash hangs up the phone. He can’t believe this is happening. He can’t believe it.

“Who was that?” Baker asks.

“That?” Cash says. “No one.”

HUCK

This is right up there with the craziest things Huck has ever done. A dozen times on the way over, he thought, For the love of Bob, turn around, go home to your book and your beer. Getting mixed up with this woman, the wife, is going to be nothing but trouble. Rosie is dead and nothing will bring her back. The voice in Huck’s head was one of reason, loud and clear, and yet still he drove to the north shore and found the utility pole with the two yellow stripes. Still he ascended the steep, winding road—there were no other homes, only dummy driveways that led to nowhere, until you reached the gate at the top, which had been left open. Huck wondered if this bastard had enough money to buy up the entire hill, just to make certain he had no neighbors.

Still he knocked on the door.

Irene looks pretty. It’s not a thought he should be having about Russell Steele’s widow, but there it is, plain and simple. Huck is a man, built like other men, and so he appreciates Irene’s chestnut hair hanging loose and damp down her back, and the black sundress that shows off her arms, her neck, and her pretty feet.

She’s nervous, he can tell—her hands are shaking as she accepts the rum. Huck thinks, Better do a shot right away. Why did God provide humans with alcohol if not for situations like this?

They make casual chitchat while Huck prepares the mahi. Irene pours white wine, it’s her favorite, from Napa, she says, and Huck makes a sound of general appreciation, as if he cares where the wine is from. Irene has set out cheese and crackers but she doesn’t touch them, and Huck holds back to be polite. Or maybe it’s rude not to eat? He can’t tell; he should have reviewed his Emily Post before coming up here. Huck asks Irene if she has a job. She says yes, she’s the editor of something called Heartland Home & Style. It’s a glossy magazine, she says, with a hundred seventy-five thousand subscribers and a quarter-million in advertising each month.

“So it’s like Penthouse, then?” Huck says.

This gets a laugh out of her, which must come as a surprise, because she claps a hand over her mouth.

“It’s okay,” Huck says. “You’re allowed.”

This is the exact wrong response, because Irene’s eyes fill with tears, but she takes a breath, recovers, and says, “I’m sorry. It’s kindness that undoes me.”

“Understood,” Huck says. “From here on out, I’ll try to be more of a bastard.”

Irene smiles. “Thank you. Anyway, a day or two before all this… I had something happen at work. They named me ‘executive editor,’ which is technically a rung up the masthead, but for all intents and purposes I was fired. They relieved me of all my important duties, my decision making…”

“Turned you into an editor emeritus,” Huck says.

Irene’s eyes grow wide. “Exactly.”

“They’re giving you an honorary title, hoping you’ll retire,” Huck says.

“They couldn’t fire me because then advertisers would have made noise, so they got sneaky instead.”

“You should quit,” Huck says. “Move down here. I’ll hire you as my first mate. You’re one hell of a good fisherperson.”

Irene laughs again, not happily. “Not a chance,” she says.

He gets back in her good graces once he sets down the grilled mahi. He waits until Irene takes a bite.

“Wow,” she says.

“Really?” he says. “Good?”

She takes another bite and he takes the hint: she’s not there to plump his ego. He tastes the fish: yes, perfect. Huck is something of a fanatic about grilling fish. In his opinion, you have a sixty-second window with fish. You take it off a minute too early, it’s translucent and not quite there. But this is preferable, in his mind, to a minute too late. A minute too late and the fish is dry, overcooked, ruined. Three generations of Small women—LeeAnn, Rosie, and Maia—have been schooled in Huck’s feelings about grilled fish, and they all reached a point where they were as discriminating as he was. Huck’s fish is always on point, because he stands at the grill like the Swiss Guard and doesn’t let anything distract him. He’d worried that tonight would be an exception, because there are a host of distractions here, but, praise be, the fish is correct.

Irene eats only the fish—the pasta salad and greens remain on her plate—then she helps herself to seconds. “I have no appetite,” she says. “Except for this fish.”

“Because you caught it yourself,” Huck says. “Because you pulled it out of blue water.” He catches her eye. “Angler Cupcake.”

She pours more wine. They’re at the end of the first bottle and without hesitating, Irene opens a second. Okay, then, it’s going to be that kind of night. Huck has questions, but he won’t ask them yet.

“Powder room?” he asks, standing up.

Irene says, “Through the living room to the back corner down a short hall.”

Huck takes his time wandering. The house is grand but the furnishings are impersonal. He had hoped to see something of Rosie, some indication that she spent time here. There are no photographs; there’s no art at all, really. It looks like any one of a thousand rentals. On the other hand, Huck is glad about this for Irene’s sake. How unpleasant it would be for her to have to live, even briefly, in the love nest Russell Steele once feathered with his mistress.

Huck isn’t sure when he started taking Irene’s feelings into account. Probably when she took the second helping of fish.

As Huck washes his hands, he stares at himself in the mirror and asks himself the hardest question.

Did Rosie know the Invisible Man was married? Huck desperately wants to believe the answer is no, but… come on! Russell Steele shows up here a week or two per month; the rest of the time he’s ostensibly “working,” but he’s never here at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Is he “working” on Thanksgiving or Christmas? No! He’s with his family, his other family, his real family.

Rosie was sweet, but she wasn’t naive.

When Huck gets back to the deck, Irene is standing at the railing with her wine, staring at the water.

It’s time now, he supposes. He joins her.

“Tell me about your children,” he says.

She shakes her head. No, she doesn’t want to tell him, or she doesn’t believe he deserves to hear. But then she says, “Baker is thirty. He lives in Houston. He’s married to a heart surgeon and has a four-year-old son named Floyd. He’s a stay-at-home dad, runs the household, does all the things I used to do when the boys were small. He day-trades in tech stocks, too, on the side, but Anna makes most of the money.”

“Do we like Anna?” Huck asks. Something about the way she said the woman’s name makes him curious.

“Oh,” Irene says. “She’s fine.”

“That bad?” he says.

“She’s an excellent surgeon. She makes all the Houston Best-of lists, and her patients love her. But you don’t have that kind of demanding career without some personal sacrifice.”

“The sacrifice in her case…?”

“She’s never home. She isn’t much of a mother to Floyd. She’s a bit dispassionate. It’s hard to pierce her armor, to get any kind of human response out of her at all. Now, in her defense, she deals with life and death all day, every day, so telling her about finger-painting projects or playground squabbles falls on deaf ears.”

“That’s too bad,” Huck says. “I love hearing the day-to-day details about my granddaughter Maia’s life. She and her friend Joanie are starting a bath bomb business. They’re making them in tropical scents to sell to tourists. I had to order citric acid crystals from Amazon—the package will probably take several months to get here. But I treasure all the little stuff. Because then they get older and they stop telling you things.”

“Amen,” Irene says.

“I didn’t mean to hijack the conversation,” Huck says. “Tell me about your other son.”

“Cash,” she says. “Short for Cashman. The boys were given the maiden names of my two grandmothers. Cash owns and operates a couple of outdoor supply stores in Denver. Savage Season Outdoor Supply, they’re called. Russ gave him the seed money. Russ wanted to see Cash do something with his life other than be a ski instructor.”

“Nothing wrong with teaching people to ski,” Huck says. “Honest living.”

If Irene notices the archness in his voice, she doesn’t let on. “So those are the boys. They’re good kids. They don’t know what to make of all this. They know about Rosie, although we haven’t discussed it. I should tell them I know—it would probably be a weight off their minds. They want to protect me from it, I’m sure. I suppose I’ll tell them in the morning.”

“Always best to be open,” Huck says.

“Is it?” Irene asks. “I made them leave the house tonight because you were coming. They don’t know I’ve made contact with you. They don’t know about the fishing.” Irene throws back what’s left of her wine. “It’s like Russ had this giant secret, which, in turn, is causing the three of us to keep our own smaller secrets.” She looks Huck in the eye for the first time, or the first time without her guard way up. Her eyes are steel-blue, the color of a stormy sea. “I can’t believe this happened to me. And I can’t believe I tracked you down, forced you to take me fishing, and then invited you to dinner.”

“If it makes any difference,” Huck says, “I’m glad you did.”

“Are you?” she says.

He wants to kiss her. But he is too old and out of practice to know if she would welcome this or slap him.

Slap him, he thinks. She’s been a widow for less than a week.

“Yes,” he says. “I am.” He rips his eyes away from her and focuses on Jost Van Dyke, twinkling in the distance. The view is quite something from up here.

“Tell me what you know,” Irene says. “Tell me about Rosie.”

“All right,” Huck says.

Should he go all the way back to the beginning?

Huck is new to the island, but not brand-new. He has his boat and he has his best friend, Rupert, out in Coral Bay. Coral Bay is different from town: folks out there keep to themselves, West Indians and whites alike. Honestly, as soon as you came down the other side of Bordeaux Mountain, it was as though you were on a different island. When Huck wanted to see Rupert, he had to drive to Coral Bay; Rupert simply refused to come west. They would drink at Skinny Legs or Shipwreck Landing and then, half in the bag, Huck would drive home.

Stay left, Rupert used to say. And look out for the donkeys.

It was at a full-moon BBQ at a place called Miss Lucy’s that Rupert introduced Huck to LeeAnn. There was a three-piece steel band and she was right in front, dancing in the grass. Love at first sight? Sure, why not.

LeeAnn had a daughter, fifteen years old and beautiful, which meant trouble. Rosie’s father was long gone, but his people were still around, and while LeeAnn was working her long hours as a nurse practitioner, Rosie sometimes visited her Small aunties and cousins out in Coral Bay—or at least that’s what she said she was doing. Part or most of that time, she was, instead, falling in love with a fella named Oscar from St. Thomas who was twenty-four years old and bad news. Oscar worked “security” for Princess cruises—Huck suspected he also supplied the staff and passengers with drugs—and as such, he was flush with cash that he liked to show off. He drove a Ducati motorcycle and came over to St. John every chance he got to take Rosie for a ride.

Rosie sneaked over to St. Thomas to attend the Rolex Regatta. She had begged LeeAnn to be allowed to go and LeeAnn had said no, she was too young, period. But Rosie had gone anyway. When LeeAnn found out, she dispatched Huck to find her and bring her home. Huck and LeeAnn had been together only a few months at that point, and Huck was still completely infatuated. He would do whatever LeeAnn asked without question, even though he knew he held no sway over Rosie.

He had loaded his truck on the car barge and driven to the St. Thomas Yacht Club, where he paid twenty-five dollars to park and another five for a couple of beers to walk around with while he hunted for LeeAnn’s child. Because Huck had been born and raised in the Florida Keys, he was no stranger to regattas. They were only nominally about sailing; really, they were about drinking. Huck took in the well-heeled crowd holding their cocktails aloft as they danced to the band playing vintage Rolling Stones, and the pervasive sense of joy and revelry—because what better way to spend an afternoon than drinking rum and dancing under the Caribbean sun while a bunch of white guys in five-million-dollar boats negotiated wind and water in the name of an overpriced watch?

He was cynical because he was jealous. It looked fun, and he had come to be a buzzkill.

Huck found Rosie sitting on Oscar’s lap at a picnic table crowded with other West Indians, all of them nattily dressed, all of them wearing Rolexes themselves. They were eating chicken roti and conch stew, drinking Caribes. Huck was bigger than Oscar, just barely, but there were some other gentlemen at the table who were bigger than Huck and Oscar combined, with Rosie thrown in.

Huck saw no way to tackle his assignment other than head-on. He approached the table—the men and Rosie were all speaking patois, Huck could barely decipher a word—and said, “Rosie, I’ve come to bring you home.”

Rosie, he remembered, had blinked lazily, unfazed, and had burrowed like a sand crab into Oscar’s arms. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here.”

“No,” Huck said. “You’re not.”

“Hey, man,” Oscar said. “You heard the lady.”

“She’s not a lady,” Huck said. “She’s fifteen years old.”

This caught the attention of the other gentlemen at the table. They started lowing and whoa-ing. Oscar knew how old Rosie was—maybe he thought she was sixteen or seventeen. However, the others likely thought Rosie was nineteen or twenty, maybe even older. She was wearing iridescent-blue eyeshadow and a halter top the size of a handkerchief.

Huck squared his shoulders. “I’m not leaving without her.” He hadn’t been sure how intimidating he seemed, but he had been to Vietnam before any of these guys were born and he would remind them of that if he needed to. “I’m going to have a cigarette while you say your good-byes.”

Oscar had eased Rosie off his lap and then held her face and talked to her gently while she cried. But it was clear Oscar wasn’t going to put up a fight, and Huck felt proud of himself, thinking how relieved LeeAnn would be when both Huck and Rosie pulled in the driveway. As long as he found the girl some other clothes.

Huck was ready for Rosie’s anger. She climbed into Huck’s pickup and slammed the door so hard it nearly fell off. That hadn’t surprised him. When they pulled up to Route 322, the sounds of the reggae band still wafting in through Huck’s open window, Rosie said, “I hate you.” That hadn’t surprised him, either.

“I don’t know who you think you are. Maybe you think you’re some kind of god because you’re white. But no white man tells me what to do.”

Huck said, “There’s a popular phrase that goes, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’ I came at the request of your mother. She had to work, and so she sent me. Frankly, I think you got off easy.”

“I still hate you,” Rosie said.

Huck doesn’t think Irene needs or wants to hear all this, so he just says, “I married LeeAnn when Rosie was a teenager. She was a rebellious child. She dated a West Indian fella, older, from St. Thomas named Oscar. That went on for too long, but it ended when Oscar went to jail.”

“Lovely,” Irene says.

“Tell me about it,” Huck says. “He got drunk and stabbed one of his friends. Though not fatally.”

“Did Rosie go to college?” Irene asks.

“She did, at UVI in St. Thomas. It’s funny, some kids who grow up here can’t wait to get away, and some can’t bear to leave. Rosie was the latter. She loved it here. She and her momma used to fight like half-starved hens over a handful of feed, but there was a deep emotional attachment. So she stayed. For a long time, she waited tables at Caneel Bay. That’s where she met the Pirate.”

“The pirate?” Irene says.

“It was… let’s see… thirteen years ago, Valentine’s weekend. Some guy, rich, white, showed up on a yacht for the weekend and swept Rosie off her feet.”

“What was his name?” Irene asks.

“Never learned it. He came and went. It was just a weekend fling. Rosie called him the Pirate, though, because he stole her heart.”

“So she had a history of this?” Irene says.

“If by ‘this’ you mean poor choices in men, then yes,” Huck says. “I actually suspected the Pirate was a made-up story. I thought Rosie was back with Oscar—this would have been after he was released from jail. But when the baby was born, she was very light-skinned. No doubt the father was white.”

Irene backs away a fraction of an inch. “Baby?”

“Maia,” Huck says. “Rosie’s daughter. My granddaughter. She’s twelve.”

“Oh,” Irene says. “I didn’t put… I didn’t realize…” She tears up, then starts to soundlessly cry. Huck pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket, which is actually just one of the bandanas he likes to tie around his neck when he’s fishing, and hands it to Irene. She shakes it out over the railing like a woman bidding her loved ones good-bye on an ocean liner, then dabs at her eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize Rosie left behind a child.”

“That’s the real tragedy here,” Huck says. “Me, I’m old. I’ve known loss. But Maia…”

“She’s twelve, you say? And never knew her father? So Rosie was all she had?”

“Rosie and me,” Huck says. “Now there’s just me. But people will step up. Maia won’t get lost. I won’t let her get lost. I don’t care if I have to keep myself alive until I’m a hundred years old.”

“When did Russ come into the picture?” Irene asks.

“I couldn’t be sure…”

“But if you had to guess,” Irene says. “The deed says he bought this house three years ago. Had their relationship… been going on for three years?”

Here is where things get thorny, Huck thinks. Here is where he profoundly regrets his decision to let this woman ever set foot on his boat. They have been acting like they’re on the same side. In some sense, they are. They’re the bereaved. The survivors.

But Huck is Rosie’s family and Irene is Russ’s family. Irene wants this whole mess to be Rosie’s fault and Huck wants it to be Russ’s fault. Irene is making it sound like three years would be nearly inconceivable—but Huck knows that their relationship went on longer than three years. Rosie met the Invisible Man right after Rosie died—five years ago.

“I’m really not sure, Irene,” Huck says. “What I know about their relationship I could write on my thumbnail and still have room for the U.S. Constitution. Rosie told me next to nothing. And like I said, I never had the pleasure of meeting…”

“My husband.”

“Mr. Steele.” Huck clears his throat. “Your husband.”

Irene steps back to the table, fills her glass with more wine, and regards Huck over the rim, as if trying to gauge whether or not he’s telling the truth.

He is. He knows it sounds unusual. It was unusual. And part of what’s at work in Huck is guilt. He should have nipped the relationship—or at least the secrecy about it—in the bud. But like he said, Rosie met the guy right after LeeAnn died, when Huck was in bad shape. LeeAnn had been sick, sure—her death hadn’t come as a total shock. And yet Huck had been left feeling like his entire right side had been amputated.

He’d been glad that Rosie had found someone to distract her from her grief. By the time he realized how pathological the relationship was, it was too late. Rosie was in love. All the way.

“I should have done more,” he says. “I should have tried to stop it. I should have hired a private investigator.”

Irene sets her wineglass gently down and lets her hands drop to her sides. “You showed up here,” she says. “That’s more than a lot of men would do.”

True, he thinks. But he says nothing.

Irene reaches out… and takes his hand. “Will you come upstairs with me?”

He’s speechless.

“There’s something I need your help with,” she says.

Huck follows Irene up the stairs, his mind racing. Is she making advances? Is the “something” that she wants help with getting out of that black dress? This is all moving a little fast for Huck. But he won’t say no. She’s a grieving widow and he has lost his daughter. Now that he has allowed himself to travel back in time, he realizes that Rosie became his daughter the second he yanked her out of the regatta. Or maybe it was when he paid twenty bucks for a regatta t-shirt to put on over the hankie she was wearing. Or maybe it was when she told him she hated him.

Irene needs physical contact and Huck needs it too, doesn’t he? And she’s a good-looking woman.

They walk down a long white hallway with a vaulted ceiling ribbed with exposed beams. There are rooms off to both sides, bedrooms. Huck peers into each one. They’re similar; it feels like a fancy hotel. At the very end of the hall is a closed door. Irene turns the knob. Locked.

“When we got here on Thursday, the house had been cleaned out,” Irene says. “Every personal item removed. Russ’s clothes, gone. All the papers from his office, gone. Someone came and took it all away, probably his business partner, Todd Croft. Ever heard that name?”

Huck shakes his head. “No.”

“This door is locked. And I was hoping you could force it open for me.”

“Okay.” Huck says. The door is solid wood, the handle is heavy. Nothing about this house is cheap. “Have you asked your sons?”

“I didn’t ask them,” Irene says. “And they obviously haven’t been blessed with any natural curiosity, because neither of them has noticed. I’m afraid of what we’re going to find inside.”

Huck presses against the door. He’s a big guy, but breaking down this door is beyond him; he’ll have to pick the lock. The nice thing about owning a boat for forty years is that he can tinker with the best of ’em. He is a world champion tinkerer.

“Do you have a hairpin?” he asks. “Or bobby pin?”

“I do,” Irene says. “Hold on.”

She’s back in a few seconds with an ancient, sturdy steel bobby pin that looks like it came straight from the head of Eleanor Roosevelt. It takes Huck a few moments of poking and twisting—he doesn’t have his reading glasses, and the wine has gone to his head somewhat—but then, click, he gets it. Lock popped. He hesitates before turning the knob, because he’s also afraid of what they’re going to find inside. More dead bodies? Assault rifles and refrigerators full of money? Who was this guy Russell Steele, and what was he into? Irene clearly doesn’t have the first idea.

Huck opens the door and the first words that come to him are those from “Sugar Magnolia,” Sunshine, daydream. It’s a bedroom with a huge white canopy bed decorated with turquoise and purple pillows. The wallpaper is a swirl of purple, green, and turquoise tie-dye. There’s a white powderpuff beanbag chair, a desk, and a dressing table. Maia would love this room, Huck thinks. Then he sees the letters painted on the length of one wall. M-A-I-A.

“Oh,” he says. “This is Maia’s room.”

Irene slips past Huck into the room and starts poking around. Hairbrush and pick on the dressing table, a bottle of shea butter lotion. A book on the nightstands entitled The Hate U Give. Huck thinks to speak up on behalf of Maia’s privacy; she’s only twelve, but she still deserves respect. Huck understands why the door was locked—it would have been impossible to “undo” this room on short notice.

How must Irene feel, knowing her husband decorated a room like this for his lover’s daughter? Is it salt on the wound? Huck supposes so, although he, for one, is happy to see that Maia had a safe space of her own in this house. He will be Maia’s champion to the end.

“There can’t be anything too important in here,” he says. “She hasn’t mentioned it.”

Irene spins around. “Do you have a picture of her?”

“Of Maia? Yes, of course.” Huck takes his phone out of his pocket. There she is, a close-up of her face, his screen saver.

Irene takes the phone from Huck and studies the photograph. He expects her to comment on how pretty Maia is, exquisite really, and elegant in a way that belies her years.

But when Irene looks up, her steel-blue eyes are spooked.

Like she has seen a ghost.

No, Huck thinks. Please, no.

BAKER

He can’t have Ayers pick him up at the villa—he’s savvy enough to realize at least this much—and so he plans to have her pick him up at the Trunk Bay overlook.

“I don’t get it,” Ayers says. “Why don’t I just come to the house?”

For all he knows, Ayers has been to his father’s villa with Rosie. He isn’t willing to risk it. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Baker says. “But my brother, Cash, also has a crush on you, and I think you coming to the house to pick me up for our romantic beach date would be… uncool and probably also unkind. I’ll be at the Trunk Bay overlook at ten.”

Baker isn’t completely lying: Cash does have a thing for Ayers. When Baker comes down dressed in swim trunks and a polo shirt, holding a couple of towels he lifted from the pool house, Cash shakes his head.

“I can’t believe you.”

“It’s not like we’re eloping. We’re going to the beach.”

“If you were eloping you’d be breaking the law. You’re married, Baker.”

Baker lowers his voice. He’s not sure if Irene is awake yet or not. “I told you, Anna left me. She’s in love with Louisa Rodriguez. Do you not remember having this conversation? Were you too drunk?”

“I remember,” Cash says. “But still.”

Still, Baker thinks. You’re jealous.

“She doesn’t know who you are, does she?” Cash asks. “Who we are?”

“No,” Baker says. “I haven’t told her.”

“If she knew who you were, she wouldn’t go out with you,” Cash says. “But she’s going to find out sooner or later. You should cancel now to save yourself the heartache.”

Baker feels an uncomfortable pinch of conscience. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

“Fine,” Cash says. “What time are you going to be home?”

“She has a previous commitment at three. So I’ll be home around then.”

“Previous commitment meaning another date?” Cash asks.

“She didn’t say.”

Cash takes two bananas from the fruit bowl, pulls them apart, and hands one to Baker. “I have an errand to run around then. Why don’t you have Ayers drop you at the ferry dock at that outdoor bar, High Tide? We can grab a drink and you can tell me about your date.”

Something about this sounds fishy. “What kind of errand?” Baker asks.

“The only kind of errand there is,” Baker says. “A boring one. I have to pick up something coming from the States.”

Money, Baker hopes. Cash was ironically named because he’s the brokest SOB Baker has ever known. However, meeting Cash at the ferry dock saves him from having to give Ayers another excuse about why she can’t come to the house.

“Okay,” Baker says. “I’ll meet you at High Tide at three. And I’ll tell you about my date.”

As Baker hikes up the unreasonably steep hill to the Trunk Bay lookout in the gathering heat of the morning—the trade winds, he’s learned, don’t kick in until the afternoon—he has upsetting thoughts. His father is dead and the list of questions surrounding his death is long, and nearly all of them are unanswered. On the one hand, Baker feels like he’s put in a good-faith effort. He’s made calls, he’s left messages, and he followed up with more messages. Short of hiring a private investigator—which isn’t a step his mother is ready to take—he has done all he can do. On the other hand, his efforts feel meager. He doesn’t deserve a day at the beach. He should be at home to support Irene, whether she wants it or not.

There are the additional issues of Ayers not knowing who Baker is, and—as Cash so emphatically pointed out—of the pesky fact that Baker is still married to Anna and hardly in a position to jump into a new relationship.

To all of this, Baker says: Too damn bad, I’m going anyway. It’s half a day of pleasure. Cash went out on Treasure Island; he has no right to point fingers.

Baker is panting by the time he reaches the lookout. He needs to get in shape! He has time to gaze down over the white crescent of Trunk Bay, backed by an elegant stretch of palm trees. He thinks about snapping a picture and sending it to Anna so she can show Floyd—half the fun of seeing something so breathtaking is letting other people know you’ve seen it—but he doesn’t want Anna to question his real reason for being here on St. John while she’s out saving people’s lives. And there’s no time, anyway, because at that moment, Ayers pulls up in her little green truck.

Baker folds himself into the passenger side. It’s small; he’s chewing his knees, even when he puts the seat all the way back.

“Your first ride in Edie,” Ayers says. “I’m so happy you fit. I was a little worried.”

He doesn’t fit—he has to hunch over and his thighs are cramping—but he’s so happy to be in Ayers’s presence, he doesn’t care. “Edie? That’s the truck’s name?”

“Short for Edith,” Ayers says. “Rosie named her. She had a pet gecko named Edith when she was a kid that was this color.”

“Gotcha,” Baker says. There was no room for his backpack up front, so he put it in the back, and he checks the side view nervously, expecting it to go flying out when Ayers takes the steep, twisting turns at breathtaking speed.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Your bag is fine. I stopped at Sam & Jack’s for sandwiches. I got three because I wasn’t sure what you liked, and I got some of their homemade potato chips and a couple of kosher dills. And I went to Our Market for smoothies!”

Baker looks down in the console to see two frosted plastic cups, one pink, one pale yellow. He was too nervous to eat the banana Cash gave him so he threw it to the iguanas on the way down the hill. But now he’s both starving and dying of thirst.

“Which one is mine?” he asks.

“Take your pick,” Ayers says. “There’s strawberry-papaya and pineapple-mango.” She turns up the music—it’s Jack Johnson singing “Upside Down,” and Baker surprises himself by singing along. Until this very moment, Baker hated Jack Johnson, harbored an almost personal vendetta against him, in fact, because one of Baker’s former girlfriends from Northwestern, Trinity, had loved Jack Johnson so ardently. She would only have sex with Baker if Jack Johnson was playing in the background. Needless to say, this had made Baker jealous, and because of this jealousy, he declared Jack Johnson overrated. Now, however, sitting next to Ayers, who is singing along with gleeful abandon, sometimes in key, sometimes not so much, Baker fully understands the appeal. The music is happy, undemanding, and full of sunshine. It’s going-to-the-beach music, the same way that Billie Holiday is rainy-Sunday-morning music and George Thorogood is drinking-at-a-dive-bar music. Thanks to the many hours Baker spent with Trinity in bed, Baker knows all the words. He chooses the pineapple-mango smoothie, it’s delicious, and he finds a magic arrangement for his legs so that he can relax. He was right to come, he thinks. He’s happy.

They twist and turn and wind around until they’re somehow back on the Centerline Road. To the right is a stunning view of the turquoise water and emerald mountains.

“Coral Bay,” Ayers says. “Fondly known as the Other Side of the World.”

They cruise down hairpin turns until they reach a Stop sign, an intersection, a little town on a harbor filled with boats.

“Skinny Legs is that way,” Ayers says, pointing left. “Legendary. I wish I could say we’ll have time to stop for a drink on the way home but we probably won’t.” She turns right and they meander past colorful clapboard cottages, a convenience store called Love City Mini Mart, a round open-air restaurant called the Aqua Bistro. “Best onion rings on planet Earth,” Ayers says. She hits the gas and they fly up around a curve and nearly collide with three white donkeys standing on the side of the road.

“Donkey!” Ayers cries, and at first Baker thinks she’s as surprised to see them as he is. What are three donkeys doing on the side of the road? Ayers pulls to the shoulder and the donkeys leisurely clomp over to the car. Ayers reaches across Baker, grazing his leg with her arm, which sends an electric current right to his heart, and she pulls a withered apple from the glove box.

“Do as I say, not as I do. We’re not supposed to feed them.” Ayers sticks the apple out and the alpha donkey eats it from her outstretched palm. She looks at the other two and sighs. “I wish I had three. Sorry, guys!”

When they pull back onto the road, Baker says, “Whose donkeys are those? Do you know them?”

“There’s a population of wild donkeys across the island,” Ayers says. “I do have one favorite. I call him Van Gogh—he only has one ear, and I keep the apple for him. But I wanted you to see them up close. You haven’t been to St. John until you’ve seen the donkeys!” She throws her hands up. She seems positively radiant, and Baker hopes it’s because of him. She’s wearing a crocheted white cover-up with a white bikini underneath and her blond hair has been wrangled into a messy bun. She is so pretty it hurts, and she keeps an apple in her glove box for a donkey with one ear. Baker can’t imagine anyone being more infatuated than he is with Ayers Wilson right now.

He feels a buzzing against his leg and the sound of bongo drums. It’s his phone. He has to re-contort himself to slide it out of his pocket. He checks the display: Anna. He hurries to silence it, then to turn the phone off completely. He’d like to chuck it out the window. When he got home the night before, he saw he had six missed calls from Anna, but there was not a single voicemail. Anna doesn’t believe in voicemail; it can too easily be ignored.

What’s up? Baker had texted first thing that morning, but he had received no response. That was Anna’s way of punishing him for not answering his phone. But Baker didn’t want to talk to Anna on the phone and now that she had confessed to falling in love with Louisa Rodriguez, Anna no longer got to say when and how they communicated.

“Who was that?” Ayers asks.

“My brother,” Baker says quickly. “He probably wanted to remind me that I’m meeting him at High Tide around three, or whenever we get back. I forgot to ask you, is that okay? Can you drop me at High Tide?”

“Works for me,” Ayers says.

Finally they reach the beach, and, as promised, theirs is the only vehicle around.

“Sometimes there are snorkelers,” Ayers says. “But hopefully not today.”

In the back of her truck, she has two beach chairs, the picnic, and two pool rafts. She and Baker carry everything out onto the “beach,” which is a half-moon of smooth blue cobblestones. Baker has never seen a stone beach like this one before. It’s tricky to walk, but Ayers strides ahead sure-footed and Baker attempts to follow suit. She places the chairs down, hides the picnic in the shade of the chairs, and slips off her cover-up; it’s like a veil falling off a piece of art.

She picks up one of the pool rafts and heads for the water, which is a bowl of crystalline blue.

“Come join me when you’re ready,” she says.

“Oh, I’m ready,” Baker says. He shucks off his polo shirt, takes off his watch, puts his phone and his watch in his backpack, rubs sunscreen on his face, hoping he worked it all in. There is nothing less attractive, Baker’s school wives have informed him, than a lapse of personal grooming in a man—back hair, yellow teeth, unclipped toenails. It has led him to become overly sensitive about how he presents himself. Anna, of course, wouldn’t notice if he had hot dogs growing out of his ears, but now there is someone new to impress.

Baker grabs a float. The water looks inviting, but there’s a slight downward incline and the rocks are difficult to negotiate, and they’re burning hot besides. Baker decides to run for the water, praying he doesn’t break an ankle, and then throw himself and his raft facedown onto the water’s surface. This works, sort of, he’s in the water now, half on the raft, half off. He probably looked like a buffoon. He made a huge splash and now there’s a wake undulating through the water that reaches Ayers. She laughs.

“Come over here,” she says.

He paddles over to her and flips onto his back without too much trouble. Ayers reaches for his hand. They hold hands, drifting across the surface of the bay. From here, Baker can better appreciate the beach. The stones are backed by scrub brush and the occasional palm tree, and on either side of this bay are rocky outcrops. It’s silent and deserted. They might be the last two people on earth.

Baker closes his eyes, feels the sun warm his skin. This is delightful. He doesn’t go to the beach enough. Why is that? Probably because the closest beach to Houston is Galveston, with its sour brown water. Floyd loves it, of course, and clamors to go whenever there’s a break from school. But that’s because he doesn’t know any better. When Baker and Anna were in Anguilla on their honeymoon, she was stung by a jellyfish during their first dip into Meads Bay, so for the rest of the week they hung by the resort’s pool.

When he and Cash were kids, Baker remembers, their family went to Jamaica. Russ had been keen to go, but this was back when he was still a corn syrup salesman, and so they had traveled on a budget; even at ten years old, Baker had realized this. They had stayed at a hotel not far from the airport, and for the first few days, it poured rain. Baker remembers watching television, exactly as he would have done at home. His father walked out onto the balcony every time the rain abated, thinking it would clear, but it never did. Finally, Russ had broken down and given the boys each three dollars for the arcade in the lobby, even though Irene believed video games corrupted children. Baker and Cash had quickly tired of the pinball and Ms. Pac-Man, and they decided to sneak out of the hotel. They darted across a busy road to a real Jamaican village, where people were selling crocheted hacky sacks and bootleg Bob Marley tapes. A goat was being grilled on a half-barrel grill, and a man was playing the guitar and singing in a language Baker and Cash didn’t quite understand. Irene and Russ had shown up a little while later, Irene plainly frantic at first and then relieved and teary, then more furious than Baker could remember ever seeing her. When the sun came out the next day, it didn’t matter: Irene stayed in the room. But Russ, not wanting the vacation to be a complete loss, had rented a car and driven the boys all the way to Dunn’s River Falls; on the way home, they stopped at Laughing Waters beach. Baker remembers racing for the waves, screaming and splashing, with Russ right alongside him, giddy as a little kid. Later, they had dried off with the threadbare towels they’d taken from the hotel and stopped at Scotchie’s for jerk chicken and rice. Baker can practically see Russ, glowing from a day in the sun, throwing back a Red Stripe to cool the spice of the chicken. His father had been happy. His father had loved the tropics.

“My father loved the tropics,” Baker murmurs.

“Oh yeah?” Ayers says. “What did your father do?”

“I’m not really sure,” Russ says. “He was in business.”

Suddenly Baker hears a splash. He opens his eyes. Ayers has flipped off her raft into the water. Before Baker can blink, Ayers’s bikini top lands on the raft and another second later, her bikini bottom.

“Whoa,” Baker says. “Wait a minute.”

She swims away, leaving Baker to grab hold of her raft and glimpse the curves of her naked body beneath the surface. He scans the beach—no one around.

“Come back here!” he says.

She floats on her back so that her breasts break the surface of the water. They’re small and firm, her nipples hard. Baker is so aroused he aches. Her gorgeous wet breasts glisten in the sun; this is happening in real life—he can’t believe it, but he isn’t quite sure what to do. He decides to sacrifice the rafts; he’ll swim after them later. He flips off his raft, takes off his trunks underwater and enjoys the feel of being naked in the Caribbean. It’s liberating. He belongs here. He swims after Ayers. She treads water, waiting.

They kiss in the water for a while and then Ayers reaches down to stroke Baker; the sensation of her warm hand in the cool water is almost too much to bear, he’s about to pop, but no, he doesn’t want it to go this way.

“Let’s swim back to shore,” he says. He heads for the beach, hoping she’s following, but once he clambers out of the water onto the hot stones, he sees this is going to be a logistical nightmare. Why couldn’t she have picked a sandy beach? Probably because sandy beaches are populated, whereas stone beaches—nearly impossible to walk on and impossible to have sex on—are unpopulated.

Baker sits in one of the beach chairs and spins Ayers around to sit on his lap. She slides right down on him and the sensation is too amazing to describe. He has never more fully inhabited his body; every cell swells with desire, every nerve ending is shimmying.

“Don’t move,” he whispers. He reaches forward to gently touch her breasts. He pulls her down onto him and groans. She is a goddess. He wants her to crush him, to subsume him; he wants to become her.

She lifts herself an inch then slides back down, and Baker tries to control himself, to feel the sun on his back and neck, to move his hands down to the curve of her waist.

She is divine.

And then, without warning, the earth shakes, it slams up to meet them and Baker is thrown backward. There is pain, instant and rude.

The chair has broken under their weight. Ayers scrambles away, reaches for towels, tosses one to Baker. NO! he thinks. They can’t just stop. He feels nauseated. Ayers wraps herself up; her head is turned. Sure enough, another car has pulled into the small dirt lot.

“You stay here,” Ayers says. “I’m going to make a dash for it.” She walks to the water’s edge, drops her towel, and executes a shallow dive into the lapping waves. She swims for the rafts, which have drifted to the right side of the beach, out near the rocks.

Meanwhile, Baker secures a towel around his waist and fixes the chair, waving to the approaching couple, who are all decked out for snorkeling. Ayers has reached the floats; Baker watches her put her suit back on.

The couple is approaching him. “Beautiful day,” the man calls out. Baker has never hated anyone more in his life.

“Isn’t it?” he says.

Plan B: Baker and Ayers pack up and drive the short distance to Salt Pond.

“The good news is we can snorkel with the turtles!” Ayers says.

“Great,” Baker says, but he can’t conceal his crushing disappointment. Sex, he wants sex. The thirty or forty seconds inside her weren’t enough. But where can they go? Her truck isn’t an option; it’s way too small. Baker’s spirit sags as Ayers pulls into a different sandy parking lot, this one packed with cars.

“Let’s snorkel first,” Ayers says. “Then we’ll eat.” She seems unfazed by their reversal of fortune, and Baker tries to discern if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe she didn’t like the way it felt, maybe the position was uncomfortable, with her feet resting on burning rocks. Maybe she was so mortified by the collapse of the chair that her way of dealing with it is just to pretend it never happened. Baker is with her on this final option. They should reset, start over. Third time’s a charm. As soon as Baker gets to High Tide, he’s going to call Caneel and book a room.

His mood improves after the short hike to Salt Pond. He has always been a reasonably good sport, able to deal with pitfalls and move on, and today will be no exception. He’s carrying the chairs and his backpack; Ayers has the picnic and the snorkeling gear. She has a mask, snorkel, and fins for Baker, left behind when her ex-boyfriend moved out of her apartment. Baker is such a good sport he’s going to calmly accept the fact that he’s using Mick’s old snorkel equipment. He’s going to relish it, even. After all, it saves him from having to rent, and the fins fit.

Ayers wades into shallow water, secures her mask, and grins at Baker. Then she takes off swimming and Baker follows. He has used a mask before in swimming pools growing up but never in open water. (They were supposed to go snorkeling on a day trip in Anguilla, but Anna had nixed it.) If Cash snorkeled, then Baker can snorkel. Cash is the better skier, but Baker is a far better swimmer. He takes off after Ayers and soon is right by her side.

The water is clear; the bottom is white sand covered by a carpet of sea grass. They swim a little farther and Baker expects the scenery to change. Cash described “cities” of colorful coral and thousands of multicolored fish. Baker sees only sand and sea grass and Ayers’s body, which is sweeter than anything Jacques Cousteau could dream up.

And then he hears Ayers make a sound. She’s gesticulating wildly, pointing—and Baker will be damned: A few yards ahead of them, nibbling on the sea grass, is a turtle! A real turtle, one that looks exactly like Crush from Finding Nemo. That’s backward: Crush is a cartoon and this is nature—this is real! Floyd would… well, his little mind would be blown.

Ayers swims on and Baker follows, waving to Crush, studying the pattern on the back of his shell, watching the way his neck stretches as he feasts on the grass. Ayers finds a second turtle and this one has a baby turtle with him—Crush and Squirt! Floyd would love this! Ayers swims alongside the father-and-son turtles and soon Baker is, too. He is so close he could reach out and touch the back of the father’s shell, but he’s guessing that’s against the rules, like feeding the donkeys. He’s content to just glide along with the turtles and Ayers until the turtles dive to eat again and Ayers takes Baker’s hand. They both surface. Ayers lifts her mask and says, “Cool, huh?”

“So cool!” he says. “I can’t believe they’re just… hanging out.”

“This is where they live,” she says. She pulls Baker in to kiss him, which makes Baker very, very happy, and then she says, “I’ll race you back. I’m starving.”

They sit on a towel in the sun and eat their sandwiches—turkey with arugula for Ayers, rare roast beef with BBQ sauce for Baker. When she’s finished, Ayers lies back on her towel and says, “I’m going to take a nap. Then we should probably head out.”

Head out? Baker thinks. But she’s right: It’s quarter of two already. The day flew by and now their date is almost over, so he will have to ask her about Caneel on the way home. Tomorrow night, if she’s free.

Ayers closes her eyes and Baker props himself on his elbow and watches her sleep.

On the way home, Baker feels a leaden sense of melancholy. Despite the mishap with the chair, it was a great date and he doesn’t want it to end.

“Are you sure you can’t go to dinner tonight?” he asks.

“Positive,” she says.

“Because you have another date,” Baker says. “Just tell me one thing, is he bigger than me?”

Ayers’s laugh is musical, like a bell. He loves her laugh. He loves her smooth tan arms. He loves her jangling silver bracelets. There are five, all variations of the St. John hook, including one she had custom-made with an “8” and a hook because every February she runs a race called “8 Tuff Miles”—the length of the satanically hilly Centerline Road from Cruz Bay to Coral Bay. The race ends at Skinny Legs, hence the name of the bar. (Things here are finally starting to click for Baker.) He loves her blond curls, her sense of adventure, her taste in music, and her enthusiasm about the natural world.

“I have another commitment,” she says. “And I’m not telling you what it is, but you don’t have to feel threatened.”

“I do feel threatened,” Baker admits. “I don’t want to share you.”

“Hey now,” she says. “Aren’t things moving a little fast?”

“Sorry,” Baker says. “I just had a really good time today. I enjoy being with you.”

“I had a good time, too,” Ayers says. “But you’re a tourist, so we can’t get too serious. Let’s just have fun while you’re here, okay? Let’s not attach too many feelings to this.”

Baker takes this like a poison dart to the throat. No feelings? He is nothing but feelings.

“Let’s not not attach feelings,” he says. “Besides, I don’t know when I’m leaving. I might be here for a while yet.”

“I guess I don’t understand that,” Ayers says. “Do you not have a return ticket?”

“It’s open-ended,” he says.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Why did you get an open-ended ticket? I mean, I realize you don’t have a traditional job, but you do have a child, right, and a life in… Austin?”

“Houston,” he says.

“We had a wonderful day,” Ayers says. “And it was exactly what I needed. But we barely know each other. And I also don’t understand why you don’t want me to come to your villa. It’s like you’re hiding something.”

“You’re hiding something,” Baker says. “You won’t tell me what you’re doing tonight.”

Ayers takes an audible breath. “My ex-boyfriend, Mick? He cheated on me. He told me he was working late “training” Brigid, and I went down to the Beach Bar at two in the morning and found them together. Very together. So I’m sorry, but I can’t handle a man who isn’t absolutely forthcoming and transparent. If you have secrets, that’s fine, that’s great, good for you, but I’m not interested.” She grins at him. “I’m dead serious. I will never let myself get hurt like that again.”

“I would never,” Baker says. “Will never.” He needs to keep himself in her present, in her future, but her words make him realize that he needs to tell her about his father. It will take just one sentence: My father was Russell Steele. Baker worries she will freak out, maybe even leave him on the side of the road and drive off. The time to have told her was right at the beginning, at the memorial service, when they were sitting on the branch. But the situation had been so raw then; they had been at Rosie’s funeral lunch. He had been right to keep quiet. He could have told her last night on the beach. That was a missed opportunity. He doesn’t want to tell her now because she hasn’t quite fallen for him yet. He’ll take her to Caneel Bay, he decides, he’ll consummate the relationship properly, he’ll make her fall in love with him, and then he’ll tell her. And she’ll have no choice but to process and accept the news. It might not even matter.

All right, he’s not naive, it will matter. But he still thinks it’s best to wait.

“I want to take you to Caneel Bay,” he says. “Take you to dinner, get a room, spend the night. Would you do that with me? When’s the next night you’re free?”

“Caneel?” she says. She drops the tough-girl attitude and lights up. Baker has stumbled across the magic words, apparently. “I’ve never stayed there, though I’ve always wanted to. And ZoZo’s, the restaurant, the osso buco is… wow, are you sure that’s what you want to do? It’s not exactly cheap.”

“Who cares?” Baker says. “It’s a splurge. You’re worth it. I would love to stay a night away from my mother and brother.”

“I would love a night with reliable air-conditioning,” Ayers says. “Can we turn it all the way up?”

“All the way up,” Baker says. “What night are you free?”

“Tomorrow night,” Ayers says. “I work on Treasure Island tomorrow, I’ll be back around four.”

“I’ll make a reservation,” Baker says. “And meet you there around five.”

“I probably shouldn’t go on such an extravagant date with a tourist,” Ayers says. “But it’s too tempting to resist. And I don’t have to be at La Tapa on Friday until four, so maybe we can sleep in, get a late checkout?”

“Anything you want,” Baker says. “Breakfast in bed, midnight swim, a marathon of Adam Sandler movies…”

Ayers grabs his hand. “I can’t believe it. Thank you. I’m…”

“Say no more. It’s happening. Caneel Bay, tomorrow night.”

At three o’clock, the traffic in town is at a standstill. A ferry has just unloaded, and some of the all-day charters have come in, and happy hour at Woody’s is beginning and… yeah. Cruz Bay is a blender.

“Is it okay if I just drop you here?” Ayers asks. They’re in front of a restaurant called the Dog House Pub. “That way I can avoid going all the way around the block. I really have to be somewhere.”

“No problem,” Baker says. “I’ll grab my backpack when I get out, so don’t drive away.” He leans over to kiss her good-bye and the kiss goes on and on until the taxi driver behind them honks his horn. Ayers pushes Baker away. “Go,” she says. “I’ll see you tomorrow at five.”

“Thank you for lunch,” he says. He doesn’t want to get out of the truck.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “Go!”

He hops out of the truck, grabs the backpack, blows Ayers a kiss, then blows a kiss to the disgruntled taxi driver. He is so happy that he floats around the corner and down to the ferry dock. Next to the dock is High Tide.

Caneel, he has to call Caneel. What if they’re fully booked? It’s high season, but at least it’s after the holidays. They’ll have a room. He’ll pay whatever it takes.

Baker strides into High Tide, half hoping that Cash is a little late—that way he can order a drink and regroup, maybe even take care of the hotel reservation right there at the bar. But no such luck, he sees Cash right away—that bushy blond hair is impossible to miss. Baker blinks. Next to Cash is a woman who looks a little like Anna. The woman has long, dark hair like Anna, but it’s loose and she’s wearing a lavender tank top, drinking what looks like a margarita.

Not Anna.

But then Cash waves and the woman turns and a wave of nausea rolls over Baker. Run! he thinks. Hide! He hears a familiar voice and feels a pair of small arms wrap around his legs.

“Daddy Daddy Daddy, we’re here!” the voice says.

Instinctively, Baker bends down to pick up his son.

IRENE

After Huck leaves—the door to Maia’s room closed and locked again for the time being—Irene does the dishes, takes an Ativan, takes a second Ativan, then goes to bed.

She wakes up early, very early; the sky is just beginning to turn pink. She slips from bed and heads down the eighty steps to the beach. She sits on one of the orange-cushioned chaises. Now at least, she understands why there are three chaises—one for Russ, one for Rosie, one for Maia.

Russ’s daughter.

Irene takes off her tank top and sleep shorts. She steps into the water. And then she starts to swim.

She learned to swim in Clark Lake, in Door County, Wisconsin, which is also where she learned to fish. The water of Clark Lake has little in common with the Caribbean, and yet the swimming clears Irene’s mind, just as it used to the summer she was sixteen. That was the summer she witnessed her family falling apart. Her grandmother, Olga, was dying of lung cancer in the gracious old lakefront cottage where Irene had spent every summer of her life. Irene had wanted to go to bonfires with her best summer friend, Caris, and listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd and talk to Davey Longeran, who had just bought his first car, a Pontiac Firebird. She had wanted to ride through the back roads of Door County in Davey’s Firebird more than she wanted the sun to rise in the mornings. But she was stuck in the house with her mother, Mary, and her mother’s sister, Aunt Ruth. Mary and Aunt Ruth fought nonstop about who was doing more for Olga, and who Olga loved better. Irene was assigned the bottom-rung jobs: emptying the bedpans and the bucket Olga coughed into, washing the soiled sheets and hanging them on the line and riding her bike—two point nine miles each way in the hot sun—to the pharmacy, where Mr. Abernathy would occasionally ask Irene to “spin around” so he could see how big she’d gotten.

When Irene’s father showed up on the weekends, they went out on the boat to fish for smallmouth bass and walleye, and he took over Irene’s unpleasant tasks so that she could swim in the lake. She swam the crawl, arms pulling, legs like a propeller, breathing every third stroke, alternating sides.

The movement comes right back to Irene, even though it has been a while since she really swam. She spent nearly a hundred thousand dollars on the pool in her Iowa City backyard, forty feet long, but she only did what Russ called the “French dip”—into the water to her neck and then back out in a matter of seconds. She would hold her braid up so that it didn’t get wet; the chlorine gave her hair a greenish tint. There had been a time—in the mid-nineties, maybe—when she had gone to the community pool on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to do laps—thirty-six laps, half a mile, in the name of physical fitness. But that lasted only a couple of months, the way those things do.

Irene swims out at first, toward Jost Van Dyke. Then she finds a calm swath of water and starts to the east. When she catches sight of the neighboring bay, she turns around and heads back.

There isn’t time to think while she’s swimming except about her heart, her lungs, her eyes, which are stinging, and her arms and legs.

She misses her father. He was a man of few words but he loved her; she is named after his favorite song, “Goodnight, Irene.” Irene even misses her mother, though her mother had turned bitter and hard after Olga left the house on Clark Lake to Aunt Ruth. Irene’s mother had never forgiven Olga or Ruth; her last words to her sister were at Olga’s funeral. Irene has often wondered why Olga made the decision to leave the house to one daughter instead of the other. Did she, in fact, love Ruth more? Or were they simply closer, the way Irene is closer to Cash and Russ was closer to Baker? Or did Olga feel sorry for Ruth because she was single and childless, while Mary had a husband and a daughter? Maybe the house was meant to be an attempt to make up for the bad luck life had dealt Ruth. Irene, of course, will never know, just as she will never know why Russ engaged in such a tremendous deception. It’s newly astonishing to Irene that as much as we know about the world, we still can’t see into another person’s mind or heart.

Irene remembers when she introduced Russ to her parents. His ardor for Irene had been on grand display, and Irene wondered how her emotionally reserved parents would view a man who was so outspoken about his feelings. Mary, Irene recalls, had said, “That young man certainly wears his heart on his sleeve.”

Before the cataclysmic revelations of this past week, Irene had agreed with that statement: Russell Steele was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t his real heart.

Russ loved Rosie. To deny this in the name of self-preservation is folly. Fine, then, Irene thinks. She can accept it but she is allowed to be hurt and angry.

And now, for the next revelation.

Maia is Russ’s daughter.

Irene had looked at the picture on Huck’s phone and she had very nearly fainted. The girl, although only twelve years old and half West Indian, was Russ. She looked exactly like him. She looked more like him than either of the boys did.

That’s Russ’s daughter.

It can’t be, Huck said. It was years before…

Huck had calculated back. Maia was seven when his wife, LeeAnn, died, and the one thing he knew for sure was that Rosie started seeing “the Invisible Man,” Russ, after LeeAnn died. The other fella, Maia’s father, was years before.

That’s Russ’s daughter, Irene insisted. She showed Huck the photograph she’d found wedged under the mattress in the master bedroom, but in that photo, Russ was wearing sunglasses, and so Irene had pulled up a picture from off her phone. She had to scroll all the way back to the summer before, a picture of Russ and Irene at the magazine’s annual cookout. Before handing the phone over, Irene marveled at how normal they looked—Russ with his silvering hair and his dad shorts, Irene with her braid, wearing the very same dress she had on right then. Did she remember anything peculiar about that cookout? Not one thing. The cookout was always potluck. Irene brought her corn salad with dill, toasted pine nuts, and Parmesan, and people raved over it; she told them the secret was just-picked corn. Go to the stand just off I-80, she said. It’s so much better than the Hy-Vee! She drank the fruity sangria that Mavis Key brought in an elaborate glass thermos with a nickel-plated spout and a cast-iron stand. Irene had gotten a little tipsy. She and Russ had danced to the bluegrass band; Irene fell asleep on the way home. It was one night of a thousand nights where she was just a regular married woman, maybe one with a grudge against the shiny, newfangled ways of Mavis Key.

When Huck looked at that picture, he pressed his lips into a straight line.

Irene swims until it feels like her arms might break and then she heads for shore. She staggers out of the water, wraps herself in a towel, and bends over, staring at her feet.

Maia is twelve, born in November. The story that Rosie told Huck is that the Pirate came in on a “big yacht” over Valentine’s weekend and stayed for four nights. Rosie was working as a cocktail waitress at Caneel Bay. She served the Pirate and his “friends,” the Pirate took a liking to her, things went from there. The Pirate left on Tuesday morning, never to be heard from again, according to Rosie. A month or two later, when Rosie discovered she was pregnant, this was the story she told. She had never given the man’s name. Huck said that, on the birth certificate, the father’s name was left blank. I was at the hospital when Maia was born, he said. I was there.

Thirteen years ago next month. February. Irene squeezes her eyes shut and tries to concentrate.

When had Russ taken the job with Todd Croft? Thirteen years ago? Irene and Russ had bumped into Todd in the lobby of the Drake Hotel in Chicago. They had been in the city for the Christmas party given by Russ’s biggest corn syrup client. So that would have been December… and Todd had called Russ up a few weeks later.

Yes. Irene raises her head. Russ flew down for an interview in February. The meeting was at Todd’s office, which Irene understood to be in southeastern Florida somewhere—Miami, Boca, Palm Beach. It had been over Valentine’s Day, which also fell during President’s weekend; they had planned to drive up to St. Joseph, Michigan, to ski. Irene had ended up taking the boys alone. Baker met a girl and vanished, Cash took half a dozen runs with Irene the first morning, and then he went off to snowboard. Irene had headed back to the hotel, wishing she were in Vail or Aspen and that she were returning to a lodge with a roaring fireplace instead of the Hampton Inn. She had wished she could get a hot stone massage instead of taking a lukewarm bath in a cramped, fiberglass insert tub. She had indulged these longings because Russ was away, interviewing for a new job, a whole new career. Irene had prayed he would get an offer. She had prayed so hard.

The following Tuesday or Wednesday, Russ had come home, with the first of many suntans, triumphant.

They’re going to give me a bonus just for signing the contract, he said. Fifty thousand dollars.

Irene had let out an uncharacteristic whoop. Her entire view of Russ had changed in that moment, because of the money. Their struggle was over. Irene could throw away the envelope stuffed with grocery store coupons in the junk drawer; she didn’t have to steel herself for Russ’s reaction when the Visa bill came and he saw that Irene had bought Cash a new pair of ski goggles for fifty-five dollars.

That was what she had been thinking of thirteen years earlier—her liberation from coupon clipping, the dread she felt every time she handed her credit card to a merchant. She hadn’t asked Russ how his weekend was, where he went, what he did. She didn’t ask if he’d sailed to the Virgin Islands on a yacht, met a cocktail waitress, and impregnated her.

But that, apparently, is what happened.

What Irene does not want is to become a slave to her rage and her jealousy. She does not want to become her mother.

I will forgive them, Irene thinks once again. If it’s the last thing I do. And it might be the last thing. Because the burden keeps getting heavier.

A daughter. A twelve-year-old daughter, Maia Rose Small. In sixth grade here on St. John at the Gifft Hill School. A good student, Huck said, and an entrepreneur. She’s starting a bath bomb business. She’s making them in tropical scents to sell to tourists.

Russ had never wanted a daughter. He had been hoping for a boy both times Irene was pregnant, and both times he got his wish. The person who had wanted a daughter was… Irene. Irene had wanted a daughter.

She climbs back up the eighty steps, wrapped in just a towel; her legs are so fatigued they’re shaking. Both the boys are in the kitchen, but Irene walks right past them, up to her room.

She had told Huck she wanted to meet the girl, Maia. Please, she’d said.

He told Irene he would think about it. Give me a couple days, he said. Which Irene knows was the right answer.

AYERS

She pulls up in front of the Gifft Hill School just as Maia is emerging. Maia sees her and breaks into a shy smile. Ayers lets go of the breath she has been holding since she pulled out of town onto the Centerline Road. She thought she was going to be late, late for her first sleepover with Maia, late because of some incredibly handsome, charming, and sexy tourist.

But no. She is here as she said she would be. She is a reliable, steady force during this tumultuous time for Maia.

Another mother—Swan Seely is her name; Ayers has served her at the restaurant—comes over to Ayers’s open window and squeezes her forearm. “You’re here to pick up Maia? You are. Such. A. Good. Person.” Swan’s eyes shine. “I asked Beau just last night: Who is going to be the female influence in Maia’s life? She needs one, you know—every girl needs a positive role model. Especially. These. Days. I’m so glad it’s you, Ayers. Rosie was lucky to have a friend like you. This community is lucky to have you.”

Ayers blinks back her emotion. Secretly, Rosie found the other mothers at Gifft Hill a little too touchy-feely for her taste, although it was unfair to criticize them because they were all. Just. So. Nice. They wore no makeup, bought organic produce, dressed in natural fabrics in neutral colors, volunteered at the animal shelter, lobbied for more efficient recycling, and were generally tolerant and thoughtful. Every so often, one of these mothers would show up at La Tapa and have a couple of glasses of wine and loosen up, and that was when Rosie liked them best. Swan Seeley, Ayers happens to know, even enjoys the occasional Marlboro.

“Thank you. There was no question. Maia is”—Ayers grabs Maia’s ponytail because now she has climbed into Edith beside her—“my best girl.”

“Well,” Swan says. She’s clearly overcome, and her son, Colton, is tugging on her arm. But Swan seems hesitant to end the conversation, and Ayers fears the question that might be coming. Have they figured out what happened? Ayers refuses to address that topic in front of Maia, or at all, and so she just gives Swan a wave and backs Edie out into the street.

“Thank you for saving me,” Maia says. She pulls out her phone. “I’m tired of people asking me how I’m doing.”

Ayers is astonished by, and maybe even a bit uneasy about, how well-adjusted Maia seems. Ayers was expecting a sadder girl, possibly even a broken girl. She hopes Maia isn’t burying her feelings, which will then fester and come spewing forth later in some toxic way, like lava out of a volcano. Ayers wants to ask Maia how she’s doing, but then it will seem like Ayers isn’t listening. Maia is sick of that question. She probably doesn’t want to be seen as a twelve-year-old girl whose mother just tragically died; she wants to be seen as a twelve-year-old girl.

“Mrs. Seeley was lending her support,” Ayers says. “She thinks I’m a positive role model in your life. Ha! That shows how little she knows!” There’s no response. Maia is down the rabbit hole. Ayers grabs Maia’s phone away without taking her eyes off the road and says, “Hey, where to? Happy hour at Woody’s?”

“Pizzabar in Paradise,” Maia says. “Then Scoops.”

“Pizza and ice cream on opposite sides of the island,” Ayers says. “I feel like you’re taking advantage of me because you know I would do absolutely anything in the world for you. What did Huck pack you for lunch?”

“What do you think?” Maia says.

“A leftover fish sandwich on buttered Wonder bread?” Ayers says.

Maia pulls a greasy paper bag from her backpack and Ayers can smell the fish. “First order of business, throwing that away.”

“Facts,” Maia says. She reclaims her phone, and Ayers understands what it’s like to be the parent of a teenager.

They pull into Pizzabar in Paradise at three thirty, which is a time that nobody other than a sixth grader with a stinky lunch wants to eat, and so they have the place to themselves. Maia orders the margarita pizza. “Why mess with perfection,” she says.

Ayers nearly orders the bianco, which was Rosie’s favorite. She thinks it might be a tribute of sorts, but she doesn’t want to seem like she’s trying to be Rosie, and besides, she isn’t hungry at all. She had a turkey sandwich on the beach with the tourist.

She says, “Will you think I’m a bad influence if I order a glass of wine?”

“You’re my surrogate mom now, right?” Maia says. “Moms have wine.”

“Perk of the job, I guess,” Ayers says, trying to keep things light. She waves to the owner, Colleen, and orders a glass of the house white with a side of ice to water it down. She’s keyed up and she needs to relax. She should ask Maia about school, about things at home, about her feelings, but Maia is into her phone, which gives Ayers a few minutes of freedom to think about the tourist.

Baker.

She rummages through the factoids: Houston, son Floyd, wife left him, brother Cash, mother here at the mysterious villa, father dead, father loved the tropics. Ayers realizes she doesn’t know Baker’s last name. She remembers that at the reception, he signed only “Baker” in the guest book. Ayers had made a joke about it. Madonna. Cher.

Had Cash mentioned their last name? Ayers doesn’t think so. But they’ll have it in the files at the Treasure Island office. Ayers will have to remember to check tomorrow.

She sips her wine, watches Maia scroll through other adolescent girls performing lip-sync on musical.ly, and tries to talk herself out of her feelings for the tourist. Yes, he’s tall and super-hot; yes, he’s charming and a really, really good sport. The circus act of trying to have sex on Grootpan Beach, the slapstick of the chair collapsing—that might have sapped anyone’s confidence. But Baker had rebounded like a champ.

And now they have a date at Caneel Bay. Ayers is embarrassed about how excited she is, and she issues herself a stern warning: she is not to fall in love with the tourist! And yet, an overnight date at a five-star resort like Caneel, with a candlelit dinner at ZoZo’s first and a midnight swim and uninhibited, unimpeded hotel sex and a breakfast in bed of percolated coffee and banana French toast might tempt her down that forbidden path. Ayers’s life is so devoid of luxury and, even some days, comfort, that the allure of a splurge is strong. Baker wants to treat her like a queen, and that is a powerful aphrodisiac.

That, Ayers thinks, is how the Pirate stole Rosie’s heart. And later, the Invisible Man. It’s not necessarily the creature comforts themselves, it’s that someone thinks you deserve them.

Maia’s pizza arrives, fresh and hot.

“Want a slice?” Maia asks.

“Duh,” Ayers says, because who can resist a piping hot pizza?

Ayers lifts a slice, and strings of cheese stretch all the way to her paper plate. Then she feels something warm and hairy crawling around her ankles and she shrieks and looks down. It’s Gordon, Mick’s dog. Ayers watches Maia’s eyes widen. She fully expects to find Mick and Brigid behind her. A split second later, the stool next to Ayers’s is yanked out and Mick sits down. He helps himself to a slice of pizza.

“Hey!” Quick surveillance tells Ayers there’s no Brigid. “That’s Maia’s.”

“It’s okay,” Maia says to Mick. “You can have some.”

“It’s okay,” Mick says to Ayers. “I can have some.” He chucks Maia on the arm. “How you holding up, bae?”

Maia turns pink and Ayers remembers that Maia has always been smitten with Mick. He’s nowhere near as good-looking as Baker, but Mick has that something, a magnetism, a masculinity, a sly sense of humor that makes him appealing to women of all ages.

“I’m okay,” Maia says.

“Oh yeah? Really? I’d say you’re better than okay. I’d say you’re the coolest young lady on the whole island.” He winks at her. “And of course, the prettiest.”

Maia fist bumps him. “Facts.”

This makes Mick laugh. He turns to Ayers. “Yeah, I’d say she’s okay. Self-esteem fully intact.”

“What are you doing here?” Ayers asks. Without thinking about it, she finds herself rubbing Gordon’s sweet bucket head, and he closes his eyes in ecstasy. Gordon feels about Ayers the way Maia feels about Mick: pure devotion.

“Hangry,” Mick says. He devours his slice in three bites and reaches over to take what’s left of Ayers’s slice, and she lets him. “I have to be at work in an hour.”

Right, Ayers thinks. The only other people who eat at three thirty in the afternoon? Everyone in the restaurant business.

“So how was your date last night?” Mick asks.

“What date?” Maia asks Ayers.

“Friend of mine, Baker,” Ayers says. “We went to dinner.”

“I call shenanigans,” Mick says. “I swung by De’ Coal Pot. You weren’t there and you hadn’t been there. I asked.”

“We went somewhere else,” Ayers says.

“Where?” Mick says.

“Who’s Baker?” Maia asks. “Do I know him?”

“You don’t,” Ayers says. “He’s visiting.”

“He’s a tourist,” Mick says.

Maia tilts her head. “I thought you didn’t date tourists.”

“There’s an exception to every rule,” Ayers says.

“So you’re dating that guy, then?” Mick asks. “Seriously? He looks like… a banker.”

Ayers throws back what’s left of her wine. Oh, how she would love to order another, but she can’t. She has to drive all the way across the island to Scoops, and then drive home.

“He’s taking me to Caneel Bay tomorrow. The hotel. Overnight.”

Mick cocks an eyebrow. “Really? So he is a banker.”

“None of your business,” Ayers says.

“Are you jealous?” Maia asks Mick. “Do you still love Ayers?”

“Maia!” Ayers says.

“Yes,” Mick says. He turns to Colleen and orders a pizza—the pepperoni and ham, which Ayers could have predicted. Mick is a devout carnivore. “Yes, I do still love Ayers.”

“Mick, stop,” Ayers says.

“Do you really?” Maia asks.

“Yes, I do, really.”

“Oh,” Maia says. “I thought you broke up with her.”

“I did something wrong and Ayers broke up with me,” Mick says. “I made a huge mistake and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. But just because I made that mistake doesn’t mean I don’t still love Ayers.”

“Love is messy,” Maia says. “My mom used to tell me that. She said love is messy and complicated and unfair.” Maia rolls her eyes. “I’ll take a no-thank-you helping.”

Mick laughs again, and Ayers asks Colleen for a box to take the rest of Maia’s pizza to go.

“On that note,” Ayers says. “We’re leaving.”

“Ayers…,” Mick says.

Ayers bends down to kiss Gordon between the eyes. Then she turns to Maia. “Ready for ice cream?”

“Facts,” Maia says.

CASH

He is so juiced about taking Baker by surprise with the arrival of Anna and Floyd that he has ignored the fact that they will have another situation on their hands.

That situation is named Irene.

But first, first, Cash takes a moment to savor Baker’s shock and obvious discomfort at seeing his wife and son. He looks caught. He is caught. The only thing better would have been if Ayers had come with Baker to the bar. But no—that would be cruel to Floyd. Cash will avoid compromising Floyd at all costs. He’s learning what it’s like to be the son of a philanderer.

If it were only Floyd who had arrived unexpectedly, the scene would have been touching indeed. Floyd grabs Baker around the legs and Baker, although seeming disoriented at first, squeezes Floyd tight, kisses the boy on the cheek, then squeezes him again. Cash has to admit: Baker is a good dad, very open with his affection, just like Russ used to be.

Baker and Floyd go down to look at the water, and Cash turns to Anna. She seems different here, on the island. Her hair is down and she’s into her second margarita, so she is super-relaxed. Has Cash ever seen Anna relaxed? Maybe once, when she and Baker came to Breckenridge, but that time, Cash remembers, she had turned her hyper-competitive nature toward skiing. She was faster than Baker and more technically sound than Cash, and she had taken great pride in her superior speed and prowess. Now, she is only competitive about her margarita drinking, and Cash can get behind that—especially since Irene, who is unaware of Anna and Floyd’s arrival, waits at home.

“Floyd missed him,” Anna says to Cash. “It wasn’t until Baker left that I realized how much he does—the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping, the laundry. He coaches Floyd’s basketball team, takes him to chess club on Sundays, and he’s on the fund-raising committee of Floyd’s school, so the phone kept ringing with people donating things for a silent auction that I knew nothing about. I haven’t given him nearly enough credit.”

“He told me you left him,” Cash says. He eyes his own second margarita, half gone.

“Am leaving,” Anna says. “I told him just seconds before your mother called with the news.”

“Ah,” Cash says. He finds he’s disappointed that Baker was telling the truth. “It’s a… colleague of yours?”

“Louisa,” Anna says. She raises a palm. “Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. I like men, I’m attracted to men. This came out of nowhere, but it’s big and it’s real.”

“No judgment here,” Cash says. “Any chance this might be a phase? Any chance you might salvage the marriage?”

“Nope,” Anna says. “But we can salvage the family, I’m pretty sure. We can have a functional divorced relationship, with shared custody.”

Baker and Floyd reappear. “I’d love to join you two for a drink,” Baker says, “but I think we should get Floyd home. He’s overheated.”

Anna pulls out a fifty and leaves it on the bar, much to Cash’s relief. “I made a reservation at a place called St. John Guest Suites,” Anna says. “I didn’t want to assume there would be room for us at the villa.”

“Oh, there’s room,” Cash says. “You can cancel your room.” He then thinks of Irene. “Or keep it—you may want privacy, and you probably won’t get your money back anyway.”

“Nonrefundable,” Anna confirms. “But I’d love to see the place. And to see your mom, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Cash says.

He tries to text Irene about their impending arrival, but his phone has no service on the north shore road. Oh well, he thinks. His mother has been through a bigger shock than this; she’ll be fine. Then again, his mother has been through such a big shock that it feels unfair to pile on more. Cash is sitting in the backseat of the Jeep with Floyd as though he, too, is a child—but he is also the architect of this mess. He alone knew Floyd and Anna were coming. He could have—should have—given Baker and Irene fair warning.

Baker turns right and they wind up the hill and pull up to the gate, which they’ve left open since their arrival. The house comes into view.

“Wait,” Anna says. She turns to Baker. “This is where you’re staying?”

“This is the villa,” Baker says flatly. “My father’s villa.”

“I don’t believe it,” Anna says.

Baker doesn’t respond. He parks and gets out of the car. “Come on, buddy,” he says to Floyd. “You want a tour?”

Baker and Floyd head up the stone staircase to the main deck, with Anna and Cash following a few steps behind. Anna is plainly floored. Cash tries to remember what he felt like six days ago when he saw this place for the first time. He had been gobsmacked. Now he takes it for granted.

“Outdoor kitchen,” Baker says. “Pool, hot tub…”

“The pool has a slide!” Floyd shouts. “To another pool! This house has two pools, one on top and one at the bottom!”

Anna stands on the deck and takes in the view. “What was going on?”

“We’re still not sure,” Cash says. “The helicopter crashed in British waters. Dad’s boss, Todd, signed off to have his body cremated. We’re waiting for the ashes and for a report from the crash site investigators, but it’s tricky because the Brits are the authority, not the FAA or the coast guard. The pilot was killed—he was British—and a local St. John woman.”

“Local woman?” Anna says. “Did your father have a mistress here? Was he that cliché?”

“I think he might have been, yes,” Cash says.

They step into the kitchen, where Irene is sitting at the table. Her head is buried in her arms. She’s asleep.

“Your poor mother,” Anna says. “Don’t wake her.”

Irene raises her head, blinking. “Oh,” she says. She gets to her feet and offers a hand. “Hello, I’m Irene Steele.”

“Irene,” Anna says. “It’s Anna. Anna Schaffer. Baker’s wife.”

Irene steadies herself on the back of a chair. “Anna,” she says. “What are you doing here?” The question comes out as accusatory, just as Cash feared it might, but Anna wears a heavy suit of armor, so Irene’s tone bounces right off of her.

“I brought Floyd down,” she says, and she opens her arms. “I am so sorry about all of this. How awful it must be for you.”

Irene stares at Anna for a moment and then she walks right into Anna’s arms and the two women embrace, and Cash is as amazed that his mother is accepting comfort as he is that Anna is offering it—but he is also relieved.

Baker and Floyd enter the kitchen, Floyd gets a hug and a kiss from Grammie, and Baker announces that he’s taking Floyd down to look at the beach.

“That’s fine,” Anna says. “Then someone should probably drive us to our hotel.”

“Hotel?” Baker says.

“I got a suite at a boutique place in Chocolate Hole,” Anna says. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t sure how big this home was.”

“There are nine bedrooms,” Irene says. “Stay here, please.”

“Floyd will stay here,” Baker says. “Anna can go to the hotel.” With that, he takes Floyd’s hand and leaves the kitchen, shutting the side door firmly for emphasis.

Irene raises her eyebrows. “Is something going on?”

Anna says, “Baker and I are splitting. I’ve met someone else. Another surgeon at the hospital, actually. Her name is Louisa.”

Cash wishes he’d had a third margarita, or even a fourth, although he admires Anna’s ability to just come out with the plainspoken truth. Her tone is matter-of-fact and holds not even a hint of apology.

Irene opens her mouth, then closes it, then starts to laugh. Cash cringes. Why is he the one who has to bear witness to this confession? Why didn’t he go to the beach with his brother and nephew, or run upstairs to the guest room he has claimed as his own and hide under the bed? Why does he have to be standing here, watching his mother laugh at Anna’s moment of coming out? Irene laughs so hard that tears leak from her eyes. She’s trying to stop herself; she struggles to catch her breath.

“I’m sorry,” Irene says finally. “It’s just I didn’t think anyone else in the whole world could take me by surprise, but you’ve gone and done it. You’re leaving Baker for a woman?”

“A person,” Anna says, and Cash wants to applaud. “Another doctor, who also happens to be female, yes. I’ll apologize for being the one to break up the family, Irene, but I won’t apologize because Louisa is a woman.”

Irene nods. “I didn’t mean to laugh at you. I’m a bit self-absorbed these days, but I appreciate your being direct. Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“I’m tired,” Anna says. “But thank you for asking.”

“It’s just as well,” Irene says. “I have a delicate matter to discuss with the boys.”

“Delicate matter?” Cash says. “Did you get news?”

“Something like that,” Irene says. She smiles at Anna. “Thank you for bringing Floyd down. It’s a lovely surprise. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Irene leaves the kitchen.

When Anna turns to Cash, she expects him to be angry or offended—but she’s beaming. “That went much better than I expected,” she says.

Baker and Floyd come up from the beach and the adults agree that the best course of action is for all of them to drop off Anna at the St. John Guest Suites and then for the menfolk to pick up dinner at Uncle Joe’s B.B.Q. Baker seems nervous and agitated. He drives like a bat out of hell all the way to Chocolate Hole, and when he pulls into the driveway to drop Anna off, he says, “How many nights did you book?”

“Two,” Anna says. “And I thought you would come back with us.”

“No!” Baker says, his voice like a hammer. “As you can see, my mother needs me.”

“Cash is here to care for Irene,” Anna says. “But you have a child who needs you. I need you.”

“What you mean is that you need me to come home and be a parent because you’re too busy to do it.”

Cash glances at Floyd. He has headphones in and is fully engrossed in his iPad, but still.

“Don’t do this here,” Cash says. “I don’t want to hear it, and neither does you-know-who.”

“Cash is right,” Anna says.

“I’m not leaving in two days,” Baker says.

“We’ll discuss later,” Anna says. She gets out of the Jeep, grabs her bag, pokes her head in the backseat window. “Thanks for coming to get us, Cash. Floyd, I’ll see you at some point tomorrow.” Floyd doesn’t look up. Anna removes one of his ear buds. “See you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Floyd says. “Bye.”

Maybe she’s not the most maternal presence, but Cash still finds his sister-in-law impressive. He notices her posture as she goes to greet the owners, trailing her roller bag behind her, the picture of extreme self-confidence, uncompromising in her principles.

A person, Anna said to Irene. Another doctor, who happens to be female. Cash chuckles and moves to the front seat, next to Baker.

“Don’t kill me,” he says.

Turns out Baker isn’t angry. Scratch that: he is angry, but his anger is secondary to his panic. He had told Ayers he would take her to Caneel Bay the following night—dinner, hotel, the whole enchilada.

“I had to text her and cancel,” Baker says. His voice is low, even though Floyd still has his headphones in. “I told her our sister showed up unexpectedly.”

“Our sister?” Cash says. “You lied to her?”

“I didn’t lie,” Baker says. “She’s your sister.”

“She’s my sister-in-law,” Cash says. “She’s your wife.”

“I couldn’t very well tell Ayers my wife showed up.”

“Estranged wife,” Cash says. “You could have said your estranged wife showed up with your child out of the blue and you need a few days to deal with it. Ayers is cool. She would understand.”

“Ayers is cool,” Baker mimics. “You have no idea whether she’s cool or not cool. Stop pretending like you know her better than I do.”

“I wasn’t saying that. But I have spent time with her, and I do happen to think she’s cool. I hiked with her, and we went on Treasure Island together. I’m sure it comes as a crushing blow, but she likes me.”

“She may like you just fine,” Baker says. “But she likes me more. All women like me better, Cash, starting with that sweet little… what was her name?”

Claire Bellows, Cash thinks.

“Claire Bellows,” Baker says. “I bet you still haven’t forgiven me for Claire Bellows.”

“Claire Bellows was my girlfriend,” Cash says. “And you slept with her—not because you liked her, but because you wanted to prove to me that you could.”

“You knew Anna and Floyd were coming,” Baker says. “And you didn’t tell me.”

“If you’d answered your phone, you would have known.”

“You’re in love with Ayers yourself,” Baker says. “And that’s why you didn’t tell me Anna was coming.”

“You shouldn’t have been on a date with Ayers,” Cash says. “You’re pretending you’re a single man, but you’re far from it.”

Baker pulls up in front of Uncle Joe’s B.B.Q. and puts the car in park. “Get chicken and ribs,” Baker says. “And a bunch of sides.”

“I need money,” Cash says.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Baker says. “I’ve paid for everything on this trip. You haven’t paid once.”

“I told you my bank card doesn’t work down here.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Baker says. “What’s the issue? You own a business, right? A business that Dad handed you on a silver platter. Are the stores not making money?”

Cash stares at the dashboard. He’s going to punch his brother. He clenches and unclenches his fists. They are right downtown, people are everywhere, Floyd is in the backseat, he has to control himself.

“The stores failed,” Cash says. “They’re gone. The bank owns them now.”

Baker throws his head back to laugh. Cash gets out of the Jeep, but instead of going to Uncle Joe’s B.B.Q., he storms off toward the post office and the ferry dock.

Baker yells from the car. “Cash! Where are you going, man? Listen, I’m sorry.”

Cash doesn’t turn around. He ducks behind a tree and watches Baker drive past, looking for him.

Cash isn’t flat broke. He still has twelve dollars, which, because it’s now happy hour at High Tide, will buy him another margarita.

An hour later, he’s buzzed and indignant. The heinous things Baker said roll through his mind, one after the other. You’re in love with Ayers yourself… a business that Dad handed you on a silver platter… she likes me more. All women like me better… Are the stores not making money? Baker thinks he’s better than Cash. He has always thought that, and maybe Cash had thought it, too. But Baker isn’t going to win this time, not if Cash can help it.

He calls Ayers’s cell phone. He vaguely recalls that she’s busy tonight, not work, some other commitment—but she answers on the second ring.

“Cash?” she says. “Is that you? Is everything all right?”

He breathes in through his nose. He tries to sound sober, or at least coherent. “Baker canceled your date for tomorrow night?” he says. “He told you our sister arrived on the island?”

“He did,” Ayers says. “I didn’t realize you guys had a sister. Neither of you mentioned her before…”

“We don’t,” Cash says. “We don’t have a sister. Baker was lying.”

“Oh,” Ayers says.

“The person who showed up was his wife, Anna. And she brought their son, Floyd.”

“Oh,” Ayers says. “He told me they’d split. That she left him.”

“She’s leaving him, yes,” Cash says. “That part is true. For another doctor at the hospital where she’s a surgeon. But she’s here now, with Floyd. Baker didn’t know they were coming.”

“He didn’t?” Ayers says.

“He didn’t at all,” Cash says. “He was blindsided and he didn’t want you to know, so he lied and said it was our sister.”

“I see,” Ayers says.

“I’m pretty drunk,” Cash says. He’s standing in Powell Park near the gazebo. The sun is setting and the mosquitoes are after him. “Do you think you could come give me a ride home?”

“I wish I could,” Ayers says. “I’m busy, I’m sorry.”

Cash takes a breath. He’s come this far; he might as well go the rest of the way. “Ayers, I have something to tell you. I’m in love with you.”

“Oh, Cash,” she says. “Please don’t make this complicated. You’re a great guy, you know I think that…”

“But you have the hots for Baker,” Cash says. “Because that’s how things always go. Women think I’m a great guy but they have the hots! for! Baker!” He’s shouting now, and he has attracted the attention of a West Indian policewoman, who crosses the street toward him. “You really shouldn’t be interested in either of us. Do you know why?”

“No,” Ayers says. “Why?”

“Russell Steele? Rosie’s boyfriend? The Invisible Man?” Cash says.

“Yes?” Ayers says. She sounds scared now. “Yes?”

“He was our father,” Cash says. And he hangs up the phone.

HUCK

Hard things are hard. And there’s no instruction manual when it comes to parenting—or in Huck’s case, step-grandparenting—a twelve-year-old girl.

His dinner with Irene, instead of heading in an amorous direction, as he had hoped, ended with a quandary. Irene was dead certain Maia was Russ’s blood daughter. Huck had been skeptical. Why wouldn’t Rosie have just said so? Why make up the story about the Pirate and then pretend the Invisible Man was a different guy? Rosie was prone to drama; maybe she wanted her life peopled like a Marvel comic.

To prove her point, Irene brought Huck a framed photograph: Rosie with an older gentleman, lying in a hammock. Russell Steele. But in the photo, Russ was wearing sunglasses. There was something in his face that was replicated in Maia’s face, but without seeing his eyes, Huck couldn’t be 100 percent sure. Then Irene scrolled through the pictures on her phone and found a good, clear picture of her husband’s face.

Yes, Huck thought. There was no denying it. Maia had the same half-moon eyebrows, the same slight flange to the tip of her nose, the exact same smile.

“Uncanny,” Huck said.

“She’s his,” Irene said.

“Yes.”

“Yes, you see it?”

“Impossible not to see it.” Huck remembered back to when he and Ayers told Maia that Rosie was dead. She had said, What about my father? She knew. They’d told her, maybe. She was twelve, old enough to understand. It also explained why Russell Steele paid for Rosie’s living expenses and Maia’s tuition. Huck had checked Rosie’s bank account balances. She had seven thousand in her checking and a whopping eighty-five thousand in savings, and it looked as though she might have some kind of account in the States. Huck would need to hire a lawyer to get access to that money on Maia’s behalf, and he supposed he would need to legally take custody, although his distrust of lawyers and his distaste for paying their exorbitant fees had kept him from doing anything just yet. The custody question was a moot point—or so he had assumed. No one on this island was going to dispute his claim to the girl, not even the Smalls, Rosie’s father’s people. So there was no sense of urgency. Until now. Maybe.

“I’d like to meet her,” Irene said.

Huck could not put the inevitable off any longer: he needed a cigarette.

“I’d like to smoke,” he said.

“I’ll join you,” she said.

They stepped out onto the deck and Huck lit up. He took a much-needed drag, then handed the cigarette to Irene. “Or I could light you your own.”

“A whole cigarette would be wasted on me,” Irene said, though she inhaled off his deeply. “I know she’s not related to me.”

“Just let me think a minute,” Huck said. “I need to consider Maia. Maia’s emotional state, Maia’s best interests.”

“I don’t think there are blueprints for this,” Irene said. “The circumstances are unique. I, for one, can’t accept the information that Russ has a child, a daughter, without wanting to meet her.”

“What do you hope to get out of it?” Huck asked.

“I’m not sure,” Irene said. “I loved him. She’s his. I think my motives are pure.”

“You think?”

“The boys—Baker and Cash—are her brothers.”

“Half brothers.”

“Fine, half brothers. But that’s still blood. That’s still family.”

Huck didn’t like where her reasoning was headed. He was Maia’s family! He had been the third person to hold her after she was born. He had taught her how to cast a line, bait a hook, handle the gaff. He drove her to school, packed her lunches, signed her permission slips. It rankled him that “the boys, Baker and Cash,” shared blood with Maia when he did not.

Irene was a perceptive woman. She put a hand on his arm. “I’m not going to take her from you, Huck. I just want to meet her. Let her know we exist. She’s twelve now. Even if we don’t tell her, she’ll find out eventually and there will be resentment. Aimed at you.”

“Let me think about it,” Huck said. “I’ll call you by Wednesday night.”

“Thank you, Huck,” Irene said. “Thank you for even considering it.” She gazed up at him, her eyes shining; she looked, in that moment, as young and hopeful as a woman in her twenties. Huck flicked the butt of the cigarette over the railing. It was time for him to leave.

Irene stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. It was official. Despite the bizarre, twisted chain of events that had brought them both there, he liked her.

On Wednesday, he picks Maia up from school at noon. She has a half day and he didn’t schedule an afternoon charter because they have an important mission.

They stop by home to grab the things they need. Huck loads the buoy, rope, and anchor into the back of the truck. Maia emerges with a paper lunch bag.

Thirty minutes later, they are in The Mississippi, heading for the BVIs. It’s a clear day, cloudless; the sun is so hot it paints fire across the back of Huck’s neck. He pulls his bandana out and imagines it’s still damp with Irene’s tears. He hasn’t been able to think of much besides Irene—half because he’s starting to feel something for her, half because she has asked him to make an impossible decision.

“How was your night with Ayers?” Huck has been so preoccupied with Irene that he has neglected to ask until now.

Maia is facing into the wind, wearing an inexpensive pair of plastic sunglasses that she decorated with seashells she and her mother collected on Salomon Beach. “Impossible-to-reach-Salomon-Beach” had been Rosie’s favorite. Maia has a faraway expression on her face, and Huck wonders what’s going on in that mind of hers. He nearly repeats the question, but then Maia says, “It was fine. I think Ayers is having man problems.”

“Oh really?” Huck says. “Someone new, or is she still hung up on Mick?”

“Someone new,” Maia says. “A tourist, I think.”

“Bad news,” Huck says. He casts a sidelong glance at Maia. “You’re not allowed to date until you’re thirty, by the way.”

“We saw Mick at Pizzabar in Paradise,” Maia says. “He told me he still loves Ayers.”

“Oh boy,” Huck says. “Sounds like you had an educational night.”

“She likes the tourist,” Maia says. “But they had a date for tonight, and he canceled. She was upset. I told her she should go back out with Mick. I like Mick.”

“I know you do,” Huck says. Huck likes Mick, too. Mick always buys him a round at the Beach Bar, and he buys Huck’s fish for the restaurant. But Mick had gotten mixed up with one of the little girlies working for him and Ayers gave him the boot.

Now she’s interested in a tourist? No, Huck thinks. Not a good idea. Although Huck, of course, has no say.

Huck steers the boat past Jost and up along the coast of Tortola. He’s in British waters now and he expects to be stopped by Her Majesty’s coast guard; Huck isn’t allowed to be over here without going through customs. But the border control and BVI police boats must all be at lunch or at the beach, because he moves toward their destination unimpeded.

North of Virgin Gorda, southeast of Anegada. It’s a haul—which, he supposes, is why Russ and Rosie decided to take a bird. It was only an irresponsible decision because of the weather; it must have seemed like a good gamble, though, and if Huck had all the tea in China and a bird at his disposal, he might have chanced it as well.

They pass Treasure Island, which is on the way from Norman Island to Jost Van Dyke, and Maia starts waving her arms like crazy.

“Ayers is working today,” she says.

“Does she know what we’re doing today?” Huck asks.

“I didn’t tell her,” Maia says. “I didn’t tell anyone.” Treasure Island is past them now, and The Mississippi catches some of her choppy wake. The boat bounces, but Maia enjoys it the way she might a ride at the amusement park. She’s his girl.

Hard things are hard. Maia asked to see the place where the helicopter went down. At first, Huck had resisted. What good would come from seeing the place where Rosie died so violently? But then Huck reasoned that any real-life visual would likely be less horrific than the pictures Maia held in her mind.

They reach the general area of the crash, according to the coordinates Huck had gotten from Virgin Islands Search and Rescue when they had delivered Rosie’s body—a huge favor pulled by Huck’s best friend, Rupert, who grew up in Coral Bay with the governor; bodies are notoriously hard to recover from the Brits—and Huck cuts the engine. The water is brilliant turquoise; the green peaks of Virgin Gorda are behind them. Huck picks up the mooring—a white spherical buoy that Maia painted with a red rose and Rosie’s name and dates. Huck had told Maia that the mooring isn’t legal; it will likely be pulled within twenty-four hours. Maia doesn’t care. She wants to go through the ritual of marking the spot.

“We’re here,” Huck says.

Maia stands, holding the buoy, and kisses it. Huck picks up the rope and tosses the anchor overboard. Maia throws the buoy over. The rose is pretty; she did a good job.

“Should we say something?” Huck asks.

“I love you, Mama,” Maia says. “And Huck loves you, too, even if he is too manly to say it.”

“Me, too manly?” Huck says. He clears his throat. “I love you, Rosie girl. I’ll love you forever. I just hope you’re with your mama now. My precious LeeAnn.”

“Amen,” Maia says.

Huck smiles, though a couple of tears fall. LeeAnn was the only one of them who ever went to church—Our Lady of Mount Carmel: she loved the priest, Father Abraham, who has an enviable charisma—but some of the faith must have rubbed off on Maia.

She opens the paper lunch bag and produces a pink sphere. She holds it above the water with two pincer fingers and lets it go right next to the buoy. The water fizzes, just as it used to back in the day when Huck would make himself an Alka- Seltzer.

“What is that?” Huck says. He’s an ecologist by nature, so he’s concerned.

“Bath bomb, rose-scented,” Maia says. “Don’t worry, it’s organic.”

They both peer over the side of The Mississippi until the rose-scented bath bomb dissolves.

“For you, Mama,” Maia says.

Huck waits a respectful moment. Just as he’s about to start the engine, Maia pulls out a second bath bomb, this one pale yellow.

“What’s that?” Huck asks.

Maia brings it to her nose and inhales deeply. “Pineapple mint,” she says. “My favorite. It’s for Russ.” She drops it in the water. “For you, Russ.”

He couldn’t hope for a more natural segue, and yet when he starts to speak there’s a catch in his throat. He’s about to change this kid’s entire life. But he won’t live forever. He’s sixty-one now, and who’s to say he won’t drown or get struck by lightning, or die of a heart attack, or get bitten by a poisonous spider, or have a head-on collision on the Centerline Road? If there’s one thing Huck can say about Rosie, it’s that she firmly believed she would live forever. And she didn’t. So it’s best to err on the side of caution. If Huck dies, the girl will have no one. Ayers, maybe, if Ayers doesn’t move to Calabasas or Albany, New York, with some tourist—but Ayers has no legal claim of guardianship.

Maia needs family—a chance at family, anyway. And Irene is right—if Huck doesn’t tell her now, she’ll find out when she’s older. And hate him.

“Speaking of Russ,” Huck says.

“Uh-oh,” Maia says. She puts her elbows on her knees, rests her chin in her hand.

“Back when I told you the news,” Huck says, “you said that Russ was your father.”

“He is,” Maia says. “Was. They told me the truth on my birthday, back in November. Russ is the Pirate. We have the same birthmark.”

Huck shakes his head. “Russ has the birthmark?”

“The peanut,” Maia says. “In the exact same spot on his back.”

“No kidding,” Huck says. Maia’s birthmark, on the back of her shoulder, is the shape and size of a ballpark peanut.

“No kidding,” Maia says. “He was my birth father after all. I kind of already knew. We have the same laugh, we both love licorice, we’re both left-handed.”

“Do you know… anything else?” Huck asks. Like where the guy was the first seven years of your life?

“No,” Maia says. “Mom said she would tell me the whole story when I was older. Fifteen or sixteen. When I could handle it better, she said.”

“Okay,” Huck says. His job has been made both easier and more difficult. On the one hand, there’s no need to pursue a DNA test if the birthmark story is true—Irene should be able to confirm—but on the other hand, Maia may not want to know the truth about her father. “Well, I’ve made a new friend recently.”

“Seriously?” Maia says. “I thought you hated people.”

Huck gives a dry laugh. “My friend, Irene, Irene Steele, actually, used to be married to Russ.”

Maia’s face changes to an expression that is beyond her years. It’s wariness, he thinks, the expression one gets when one senses a hostile presence. “Used to be?” she says.

“Honey,” he says. “Russ was married. While he was with your mom, the whole time, he was married to someone else. A woman named Irene. She flew down here when she learned he was dead, and she found me. She has two sons, one thirty years old, one twenty-eight. They are your brothers.”

“My brothers?” Maia says. “I have brothers?”

“Half brothers,” Huck says. “Russell Steele is their father and he’s your father. Their mother is Irene. Yours is… was… Rosie.”

“Okay,” Maia says. She bows her head. “Wait.”

Wait: Huck has done irreparable damage. Something inside of her is broken… or altered. Innocence stolen, spoiled. She now knows she’s the daughter of a cheat and a liar.

“He loved Mama,” Maia says.

“I know,” Huck says.

“But love is messy, complicated, and unfair,” Maia says, like she’s reciting something out of a book.

“That’s a dim view,” Huck says. “I loved your grandmother very much. We were happy.”

“Mama used to say that.”

Rosie might have known about Irene—must have known, Huck thinks. It was one thing for Russell Steele to keep Rosie a secret from Irene. Could he really have kept both sides in the dark? “Did they ever explain where Russ went when he wasn’t around?”

Maia shrugs. “Work.”

“Did they ever say what kind of work?”

“Business,” Maia says. “Finance, money. Boring stuff.”

“Boring stuff indeed,” Huck says. He takes a sustaining breath. He has not ruined her. She had a clue, an inkling, that Russ was keeping secrets. Huck is grateful that Rosie and Russ didn’t see fit to burden Maia with any information about Russ’s business, even though Huck is dying to know what the guy was into. “Okay, now for the tricky part.”

“Tricky?” Maia says.

“My new friend Irene, Russ’s wife, wants to meet you. And she’d like you to meet her sons. They aren’t taking you from me, they’re not taking you anywhere, they just want to meet you.”

“But why?” Maia says. “Wouldn’t they hate me? I’m the daughter of Russ’s girlfriend. Even though Mama is dead, wouldn’t they want… I don’t know… to pretend like I don’t exist? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

Easier, for sure, Huck thinks.

“Part of it is that they’re curious. Part of it is that… well, your mother was right about love being complicated. Irene loved her husband and you’re his child, so”—Huck can’t quite make the transitive property work here, much as he wants to—“she’s interested in you.”

Maia blinks. If she were any older, she might take offense at how objectifying that sounds: “interested,” the way one becomes interested in astronomy or penguins.

“Okay, let me ask you this. Let’s say we found out that your mom had another child, a son, say, that you never knew about until now. You love your mother and maybe you feel betrayed that your mother kept this big, important secret. You would still want to meet your brother, right?”

“I guess,” Maia says. “Do I have a secret brother?”

“Not on your mother’s side,” Huck says. “I can vouch for the fact that your mother was pregnant only once, and that was with you. But what I’m telling you is that you have two brothers. They want to meet you and their mother, Irene, wants to meet you. But you’re in control. If you say no, I’ll politely decline.”

“Will they be upset if we decline?” Maia asks.

“Maybe,” Huck says. “But that shouldn’t affect your answer. You wouldn’t be meeting them so they feel better. You’d be meeting them because you want to.” Huck pauses. The sun is bearing down on him. “I know that may sound selfish, but you have to trust me here. If you want to meet them, we’ll meet them. If you’d rather not, that’s fine. More than fine.”

Maia leans over the side of The Mississippi and peers into the water. Both the bombs have dissolved; all that remains, on the surface, are soap bubbles, like one would find in dishwater. Huck doesn’t want Maia to contemplate this particular spot for too long—the depths of this sea; the darker water below, where Rosie’s body landed.

“I’ll meet them,” Maia says. “But if I don’t like them, I don’t ever have to see them again, right?”

“Right,” Huck says.

“You promise?”

“I promise.” Huck is proud of her. She is brave and fierce and incorruptible. Huck can’t believe he thought that either he or Irene Steele or her sons could ruin Maia Small.

No matter what happens with all of this, Huck thinks, Maia is going to be fine.

BAKER

At eight thirty at night, after Floyd and Baker have eaten the barbecue—chicken, ribs, pasta salad, coleslaw with raisins, rice and beans, and fried plantains—there’s a knock at the door. Somewhere in the house, Winnie barks.

Who could it be? Baker wonders, and he wishes they’d left the gate down. He feels ill. He just indulged in some world-class stress eating, shoveling food in without even tasting it, and he can’t imagine who could be at the door this late. It’s not Cash; he would have sauntered right in. Maybe the police have shown up with Cash in custody? Maybe something happened to Cash: he hitchhiked home with the wrong person, or he was trying to hitch a ride and a driver didn’t see him and mowed him down. Maybe he did something desperate. Baker shouldn’t have teased him about Ayers, or about Claire Bellows, and he should never have forced a confession about the business. The stores failed. They’re gone. Even though Baker had predicted that would happen, he feels no joy in the reality. Poor Cash. He just wasn’t meant to run a business.

It could be Anna at the door, Baker supposes, although she would have to be a homing pigeon to find this place in the dark. There are no neighbors on this road.

He asks Floyd to run upstairs, brush his teeth, and put on his pajamas.

“No,” Floyd says.

Normally, Baker has a deep well of paternal patience, but he senses that this knock means bad news of some kind. “Please, buddy,” Baker says.

“I’m scared,” Floyd says, and Baker realizes that Floyd has every reason to be scared. This is a huge, unfamiliar house. Even Baker can’t recall which room he put Floyd’s suitcase in. Baker wants to tell Floyd that he, too, is scared—of things far more terrifying than shadows and strange noises.

It’s probably a taxi driver who picked up Cash and now is demanding to be paid.

Baker opens the door to find a tall, hulking West Indian man, and initially he thinks his guess is correct.

“Hello?” Baker says. He searches the darkness beyond the man for signs of his brother.

The man thrusts forward a square cardboard box. “For you,” he says. “Mr. Steele’s remains.”

Mr. Steele’s remains? Baker reaches out to accept the box and the man turns to go.

“Wait,” Baker says. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

“I’m Douglas Vickers, Paulette’s husband,” the man says. “Those came to her office today and she asked me to deliver them here.”

“Oh,” Baker says. In the moment, this makes sense. “Thank you.” Douglas gives Baker and Floyd half a wave and disappears down the stone staircase, leaving Baker to hold what remains of his father. The ashes have been delivered to the door like a pizza.

“Daddy?” Floyd says. There is likely a barrage of questions coming as soon as Floyd can figure out what to ask, but for now, he just seems to need reassurance.

“Everything is okay, bud,” Baker says. “I’ll be back in one second. You stay right here.” Baker turns to check that Floyd is standing in the doorway, then he goes flying down the curved stone staircase after Douglas. He catches the man just as he’s climbing into a white panel van. “Excuse me? Mr. Vickers, sir?”

Douglas Vickers stops, one leg up in the van, one on the ground, his face framed by the open driver’s-side window. “Yes?”

“You were the one who identified my father’s body, is that right?” Baker asks.

Douglas Vickers nods once. “I did.”

“You… saw him?” Baker asks. “And he was dead?”

Douglas Vickers gives Baker a blank stare, then he hops into the truck and backs out through the gate.

Once Baker gets Floyd to sleep—thankfully, Anna remembered to pack a few picture books, including The Dirty Cowboy, which reliably knocks Floyd out by the end of page six—he heads down the hallway to the room Irene has been using and knocks on the door.

“Come in,” Irene says.

His mother is sitting on the side of the bed, fully dressed, as if she has been waiting for Baker to knock.

“Is Floyd asleep?” she asks.

Baker nods.

“Good,” Irene says. “Because I have to talk to you and your brother.”

“Um, okay?” Baker says. “Cash isn’t home. I left him off in town when I got the barbecue.”

“Whatever for?” Irene asks.

“He jumped out of the car, actually,” Baker says. “We had an argument. I wasn’t very nice. I was upset… he knew Anna and Floyd were coming and he didn’t tell me.”

“He didn’t tell me, either,” Irene says. “I had no idea who Anna was when I saw her. I introduced myself to her. She was so out of context and I haven’t laid eyes on her for so long…”

“Three years,” Baker says. Anna hasn’t been back to Iowa City since just after Floyd’s first birthday. “Listen, Mom, Anna and I are getting a divorce.”

“She told me,” Irene says. “She’s fallen in love with a person named Louisa.”

Baker’s eyebrows shoot up. “She told you that?”

“She did.”

Well, yes, Baker thinks, she should have. It was Anna’s news. The dismantling of their family was Anna’s doing. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re disappointed.”

“Hard to register any kind of feeling about Anna, I’m afraid,” Irene says. “She’s always been a mystery.”

“You should probably also know… if he hasn’t told you already… that Cash lost the stores. They went belly-up.”

Irene gives Baker a sharp glance. “He hasn’t told me, no. I figured as much, but it’s Cash’s responsibility to tell me, not yours.”

“Right,” Baker says. He knows his mother favors Cash, or feels more protective of him than she does of Baker. “None of my business, sorry. So listen, Mom, a gentleman just stopped by…”

“Gentleman?” Irene says. “Was he older, with a reddish beard?”

“Huh?” Baker says. His mother is on her feet now, at the front window, searching. “No, it was a West Indian gentleman. Paulette’s husband, Douglas. He brought Dad’s ashes.”

“Dad’s ashes?” Irene says. “Where are they?”

“Downstairs,” Baker says.

They get to the kitchen just as Cash stumbles through the door. Baker can smell him from across the room—tequila.

He opens the refrigerator door. “Any barbecue left?”

“Plenty,” Baker says. He’s relieved that Cash seems to be either numbed or neutralized by alcohol and that there will be no rehashing of their earlier argument.

As Cash pulls the various to-go containers out of the fridge, Irene cuts open the cardboard box.

“Actually, Cash, you may want to wait on eating,” Baker says.

“Fuck you,” Cash says. “I’m starving.”

“How’d you get home?” Baker asks.

“That tall chick that works at La Tapa picked me up outside Mongoose Junction,” Cash says. “Tilda, her name is.”

“Yeah, I know who you mean,” Baker says.

“I guess she has the hots for Skip, the bartender,” Cash says. “Funny, we’ve been here less than a week and we know everyone else’s personal drama…”

There’s a sound.

It’s Irene, wailing in hoarse, ragged sobs. She’s holding a heavy-duty Ziploc bag that contains white and pale-gray chunks. Without warning, she collapses on the kitchen floor.

For an instant, both Baker and Cash stare. They are grown men and they have never seen their mother act like this. Baker, although not surprised—he’s been wondering if his mother would break, if she would finally act like a woman who has tragically lost her husband instead of a woman moving around in an extended state of shock—doesn’t know what to do. Cash is holding the take-out containers of food and a bottle of water, seemingly paralyzed.

Cash is better at dealing with their mother. Do something! Baker thinks.

Cash sets the food down and approaches Irene cautiously, as if she’s a ticking bomb or a rabid dog.

“Mom, hey, let’s get you up. Can you sit at the table?”

Irene cries more loudly, then she starts to scream—words, phrases, Baker can’t make sense of much. He keeps checking the stairs; the last thing he wants is for Floyd to wake up and see his grandmother like this.

“… I trusted him! Bad back… clients in Pensacola! I never checked! Never questioned! Never suspected a thing… greed… the money… the house! I was married to the house! Secrets are lies! They’re lies! I never suspected… why would I suspect? Your father was so… effusive… so loving… it was too much, sometimes, I used to tell him it was too much… I told him to tone it down, it was embarrassing…” She stops. “Can you imagine? I was embarrassed because your father loved me too much. Because I wasn’t raised like that. My parents told me they loved me… once a year, maybe, and I never heard them say it to each other. Never once! But they did love each other… they just showed the love in their actions, the way they treated each other… honor, respect. They didn’t keep secrets like this one!”

“Mom,” Baker says, but he doesn’t know what to add. She’s right. Their father was demonstrative, verging on sappy. He exuded so much I love you, please love me back that Baker at least, and probably Irene and Cash as well, saw it as a weakness.

Had it all been an act, then? Baker wonders. Or had the three of them done such a pitiful job of returning Russ’s love that he’d sought affection elsewhere?

Irene holds up the plastic bag. “This is all that’s left. All! That’s! Left!” She flings the ashes across the kitchen. The bag hits the cabinets and slaps the floor. Thank goodness the seal held, Baker thinks. Otherwise they would be sweeping Russ up with a broom and dustpan.

Cash gets Irene to a chair at the kitchen table while Baker picks up the ashes. Across the label of the bag it says: STEELE, RUSSELL DOD: 1/1/19.

Baker sits down beside his mother. Cash has brought a pile of paper napkins to the table. He’s trying to put his arm around Irene, but she’s resisting—possibly because he smells like a Mexican whorehouse.

“Just let me… just let me…,” Irene says.

Baker studies the contents of the plastic bag. The pieces are chalky and porous; the “remains” look like a few handfuls of coral on the beach in Salt Pond. It’s a sobering, nearly ghastly, thought: You live a whole life, filled with routines, traditions, and brand-new experiences, and then you end up like this. Baker can’t let his mind wander to the mechanics of cremation—your body, which you have fed and exercised and washed and dressed with such care, is pushed into a fiery inferno. Baker shudders. And yet there is no escaping death. No escaping it! Every single one of us will die, as surely as every single one of us has been born. Baker is here today, but one day he will be like Russ. Gone.

He, for one, is glad the ashes have finally arrived. They all needed closure.

Baker checks the cardboard box for the name or address of the funeral home but finds neither. It’s just a plain box, sealed with clear packing tape. The bag is just a bag, labeled with Russ’s name and date of death.

How do they know this is even Russ? he wonders. It could be John Q. Public. It could be coral from Salt Pond. Baker had asked Douglas point-blank, Did you see my father, was he dead? And Douglas had stared. Now, maybe he’d stared at Baker like that because he thought the question was rhetorical. Maybe he thought the question was coming from a man half-crazed with grief, ready to grasp at any straw. But maybe, maybe, the stare meant something else.

Irene blots her nose and under her eyes with a paper napkin. “I need you boys to promise me something,” she says.

“Anything,” Cash says. But Baker refrains. Cash can be his mother’s acolyte, but Baker is going to hear what Irene is asking before he commits.

“What is it, Mom?” Baker says.

“Don’t be like him,” Irene says. “Don’t lead secret lives.”

Cash laughs, which Baker thinks is in poor taste.

“No one intends to lie,” Irene says. “But it happens. Sometimes the truth is difficult and it’s easier to create an alternate reality or not to say anything at all. I can’t imagine how soul-shredding it must have been for Russ to… to go back and forth. Rosie here, me in Iowa City.”

Baker looks at his brother. Irene knows about Rosie. Did Cash tell her?

“Mom…,” Baker says.

Irene barks out a laugh. “I found the photograph. Winnie helped me. And then I did some sleuthing. It must have destroyed your father deep inside to know he was betraying me and betraying both of you…” She stops. “Just promise me.”

“Promise,” Cash says.

“Promise,” Baker says.

“And yet, you’ve both spent the better part of a week with me. Baker, you didn’t tell me that you and Anna had split. Cash, you didn’t tell me you’d lost the stores.”

The kitchen is very, very quiet for a moment.

Baker says, “I didn’t want to make you even more upset…”

“I thought it was irrelevant,” Cash says. “Petty, even, to bring it up when you had so much else going on…”

“So you said nothing, time passed, and I had no idea about either thing. Which is why I’m asking you now to please not keep any secrets. Secrets become lies, and lies end up destroying you and everyone you care about.”

“Okay,” Baker says.

“Okay,” Cash says. He rises to fetch Irene some ice water. He is such a kiss-ass, Baker thinks, but really Baker is just jealous because he’s better at anticipating Irene’s needs.

“Thank you,” Irene says. “I haven’t exactly been forthcoming, either, as I’m sure you both realize…”

Cash says, “Mom, you don’t have to…”

“Let her finish,” Baker says.

“I tracked down Rosie Small’s stepfather,” Irene says. “He’s a fishing captain by the name of Huck Powers. He was the one who came for dinner last night. He helped me jimmy the door to the bedroom at the end of the hall.”

“What bedroom at the end of the hall?” Baker says.

Cash shrugs.

Irene says, “The door at the end of the hall was locked, and I wanted to see what was in it. I thought maybe I would find something that would explain all… this.” She holds up her arms.

“What was it?” Cash asks.

“A bed,” Irene says. “Furniture.”

“Oh,” Baker says. “With that kind of buildup, I thought maybe you’d discovered something.”

“I did,” Irene says. “Because painted on the wall, in decorative letters, was a name: Maia.”

“Who’s Maia?” Baker asks.

Irene takes another sip of her water. “Maia is Russ’s daughter,” she says. “Your sister.”

Funny, we’ve been here less than a week and we know everyone else’s personal drama…

Those words, spoken by Cash, contain some truth, but who are they kidding? Nobody can hold a candle to the Steele family when it comes to personal drama.

Russ has a daughter, twelve years old, named Maia.

He was not only hiding this home, a mistress, and whatever it was he did for a living—he was hiding a child.

Okay, fine, it happens. Baker knows it happens. There was a guy in Iowa City—Brent Lamplighter, his name was, he used to belong to the Elks Lodge—who had gotten a waitress in Cedar Rapids pregnant. That child was in kindergarten before anyone realized that he was Lamplighter’s son.

But Russ with a daughter? It’s a punch to the gut. Another punch to the gut.

Russ’s deception knew no bounds.

The only thing more shocking than the news of Russ’s daughter, Maia, is the revelation that Irene wants to meet Maia. She wants them all to meet Maia. Irene has asked Huck, Rosie’s stepfather, if that would be possible. He’s going to let her know by tomorrow.

Before Baker goes up to bed, there is something he has to do.

He steps out to the deck beyond the pool to call Ayers. The call goes straight to voicemail, which isn’t surprising, given the hour. It’s nearly eleven. It also isn’t surprising because when Baker texted Ayers—My sister showed up out of the blue and I can’t do Caneel tomorrow night. What’s the next night you’re free?—there was no response. Maybe Ayers was busy with her other “commitment,” or maybe she was angry. Maybe she thought Baker was just another tourist who made pretty promises he had no intention of keeping.

Baker can’t let himself care why Ayers hasn’t responded. He has feelings for her, but those feelings are cheapened because he hasn’t been honest.

“Ayers, it’s Baker. I’d like you to listen carefully to this message. I lied today when I said my sister showed up out of the blue. It wasn’t my sister. It was my wife, Anna, and my son, Floyd. Anna and I are estranged. She’s staying at the St. John Guest Suites, so there was no reason I couldn’t be honest about that other than I thought you’d be angry or think some kind of reconciliation was going on—which, I can assure you, is not the case.”

Baker takes a breath. He hates when people leave him lengthy voicemails. He should hang up now and explain the rest when she calls him back.

But what if she doesn’t call him back?

“The bigger issue is more than a lie. It’s a deception. I never told you the real reason I’m on St. John. The real reason I’m here is because I’m Russell Steele’s son. Russell Steele, your friend Rosie’s lover, was my father. Cash and I had no idea he owned a villa here, no idea about Rosie… it’s been a confusing time for us, and for my mother. Despite the lie and the deception, I want you to know that my feelings for you are genuine. It was love at first sight.”

Baker wonders how to sign off. Call me if you want to? Talk to you later? Good luck and Godspeed? In the end, he just hangs up.

When he steps back inside the house, he’s surprised to find his mother is still awake. She’s at the kitchen table in her pajamas, with the bag of ashes and her phone in front of her. When she hears the slider, she raises her head.

“I just got a text from Huck,” she says. “He’s going to bring Maia by tomorrow after school.”

“Great,” Baker says. He has no idea if this is great or not, but his mother seems buoyed by the news. “I’m happy to meet Maia tomorrow. But I’m flying back to Houston with Anna and Floyd on Friday.”

Irene nods. “That’s the right thing to do.”

It is the right thing to do, Baker tells himself. No matter how much it feels like just the opposite.