Coco Martin, officially Nicole, was a striking young woman with dark hair and green eyes. She had a stunning figure, and the poise of someone older than her years. What made her remarkable and even more appealing was that she was totally unaware of her great beauty. She was modest as well as spectacularly beautiful. Men had stared at her for years and she was oblivious to them. Women would have been jealous of her, but she was so kind to everyone that they forgot what she looked like, and genuinely liked her. She had turned twenty-one at the end of last year, and had just finished her junior year as a journalism major at Columbia University. It had been a major coup when she landed a summer internship at Time magazine. She’d found the notice on the bulletin board in the school of journalism. The position was intended for graduate students, but after her interview, they had been so impressed that they had hired her. She was thrilled. She had started two weeks before and she was excited to have the opportunity to work at such a prestigious magazine.
It was a hot Friday in July when she boarded the jitney in New York for the three-hour trip to Southampton to spend the weekend with her parents. She was an only child, and had always enjoyed an unusually close relationship with them, even when she was very young. They treated her more as an adult than a child, and took her everywhere with them. They had had some wonderful trips together, and welcomed her among their friends when they entertained. The three of them enjoyed one another’s company. Tom and Bethanie were proud of their only daughter.
Their marriage had gotten off to an unusual start when they were young themselves. They had met when they were both in college and fell madly in love, although they came from vastly different backgrounds. Tom Martin had grown up dirt poor, as he readily admitted, in the Midwest. He had gotten a full scholarship to Princeton, and it changed his life. His parents would have been more than satisfied if he had wanted to be a plumber or electrician, or at the most maybe an accountant. But Tom had never accepted his parents’ limited vision for him. His friends in college convinced him that it was more profitable to manage other people’s fortunes than try to make his own from scratch. After Princeton, he got an entry-level job at a New York bank and eventually, after working diligently, with Bethanie’s help, he attended business school at Wharton, and in time became one of the most respected investment advisors in New York. He was a quiet, discreet man, not given to showing off, although he had a business partner, Edward Easton, who was far more visible and one of the well-known stars in the business.
Like Coco, Bethanie had been dazzling when Tom met her, a stunning beauty and a lively, creative young woman. She was studying photography in the department of visual arts at Brown University, and had genuine talent.
Bethanie was from a venerable old New York family. Both she and Tom were only children and she had made her debut the year before she met Tom. They had fallen in love when they were both nineteen, had met at a party in New York and had been together ever since. When Bethanie told her parents they wanted to get married after they graduated from college, they’d objected strenuously, and thought that Tom would never amount to anything. They wanted her to marry someone from their own social circle, not a poor boy from a simple background with ambitious dreams. They didn’t see how he could go very far. Bethanie saw all his strengths and merits, and had total faith in him. Even if he would never become a material success, and remained poor forever, she loved him. When her parents flatly refused to agree to the marriage, two weeks after they graduated, Bethanie and Tom pooled what they had in their checking accounts, went to Las Vegas for the weekend, and got married in the Elvis Chapel. The Monday after, she faced her parents with the news, and they were outraged.
Tom took the bank job he’d been offered, and found work waiting on tables at night to save for business school. Bethanie refused to accept her usual allowance from her parents and took freelance photography jobs, and worked as a waitress