hell are you playing at? You can’t just accept another offer without coming back to me first!”
“Do we have anything in writing?” Daff plays dumb.
“No we damned well don’t, but we had an agreement.”
“We did? I thought our agreement was off.”
“No, it’s not off!” Mark Stephenson yells. “Get me that house, and of course I’ll pay you! What’s the offer for? How much do I need to pay?”
“I’m sorry,” Daff coos. “I’m afraid the deal is now off the table. I only came here as a courtesy, not as a negotiating tactic.”
His voice turns menacing. “You listen here. There’s no such thing as fucking courtesy in this kind of deal. You tell me right now how much I need to pay, or I swear to you . . .”
“You’ll swear to her what?” Michael appears in the doorway, just as Daff is starting to worry.
“Oh!” Mark Stephenson’s expression changes instantly, affecting a charm he quite clearly doesn’t have. “Michael.” He extends a hand which Michael ignores. “I had no idea you were here.”
“Clearly,” Michael says wryly.
“I was just making the point that this is no way to do business, ” Mark Stephenson says. “I understand that your mother has an offer on the table, and I’d like to come up with a competitive offer. Whatever it is, I’ll top it by . . . half a million.”
Michael shakes his head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Well, how much is the offer? I can go up if I have to.”
“No,” Michael says firmly. “I don’t think you understand. Some things, and some people, cannot be bought. My mother is one of them. Come on, Daff, we’re done here.”
Taking her arm, he leads her out of the room.
Summer 2008
Bee wakes up, as she does every day, just before five thirty a.m. In the old days, living in Westport, married to Daniel, waking up was always a struggle for her—she’d lie in bed trying to sleep her life away, until one of the girls woke her up, and bleary-eyed she would be forced to get up, stumble downstairs and blindly reach for the coffee as she made breakfast for the girls.
Now it is an effort to sleep past five. She awakens every morning filled with energy, jumping out of bed, padding across the floor, stepping onto the deck outside her bedroom to watch the early morning sun, listen to the crickets, the soft silence, and gaze at the boats bobbing lazily on the water in the distance.
She runs downstairs, pours herself some coffee and sits outside on the doorstep, sipping slowly as Albert, a stray kitten that seems to have adopted them, winds himself around her ankles, mewing for breakfast, before jumping on her lap and purring contentedly as she absentmindedly rubs him under the chin.
Every morning, as she sits here, she is filled with bursts of joy, a happiness she didn’t know she would ever find, for she always looked for it in the wrong places.
For years she thought a man would bring her happiness. When she married Daniel, she expected to finally find it, but it is only now, now that she is truly on her own, with her girls, doing work she adores, that she knows what happiness is.
She and the girls are still in the house on Quidnet, but it has been a year since they moved in, a year of testing the waters, finding out whether Nantucket is a place they could live, rather than just stay until they find their footing again.
A year later, Bee knows Nantucket is home.
When her dad died, it was a huge scandal. There had already been gossip about Everett Powell returning but a tenacious journalist had followed it up and got the story, and for a few weeks Bee had the unpleasant experience of being at the center of a news story that felt like it had no end.
The New York Post got hold of it, running the story for days, photographers and journalists camped outside her house to get pictures of her and the girls. The local papers all tried to woo her into talking, as a new-found member of island royalty, but she didn’t speak.
Eventually they all left her alone, moved on to the next story, and other than a few stares when she went to do her shopping, she was able to live her life. In some ways, she was relieved the story came out. Arthur Worth wrote to her, and she went to his house, staying for hours to