and M club in East Berlin. She’s gorgeous, breathtaking, but wow—inappropriate. Why didn’t Savannah steer her toward something a little more subdued?
At that moment, Savannah steps out of the church. She’s in a navy sheath that has a block of happy yellow at the hem; when Vivi blinks, tears fall. Savannah only wears clothes that are black, white, beige, or denim blue (with gold and silver thrown in for evening), and Vivi recalls telling Savannah many times in late-night drunken conversations that when she died (in the vague and distant future), she wanted Savannah to wear color to her funeral.
Savannah remembered. And she’d done it. Because Savannah Hamilton is a best friend for the ages.
The expression on Savannah’s face when she sees Carson’s outfit tells Vivi that Savannah did suggest something more modest and Carson ignored her. Surprise, surprise.
Savannah beckons and the kids trudge up the steps. Willa and Carson are…holding hands? Has Vivi’s death brought them together? Was that what it took for them to realize they’re sisters? How many times had Vivi pulled her girls away from each other, their faces flushed, Willa with angry pink scratch marks down her cheeks, Carson’s green eyes flashing with fury and guilt? After one of their slapping-and-hair-pulling fights, she’d said to them, “I would have given anything in this world to have been blessed with a sister.”
Martha pipes up. “Sisters can be a mixed bag.” She gives a weary laugh. “Having a sister doesn’t always mean an automatic best friend.”
“Did something happen between you and Maribeth?” Vivi asks.
“Story for another day,” Martha says.
Savannah shepherds the kids inside and the doors close behind them, leaving everyone else to bake out on the street.
Dennis arrives; he’s wearing his gray suit even though Vivi told him at Willa’s wedding that the pants were a bit tight in the seat and the gray a little too corporate for Nantucket. Despite the grown-up attire, Dennis looks as lost and sad as a little boy. The only person Vivi confided to about her split from Dennis (I need space, the book is coming out, away on tour, think it would be best if you stopped spending the night, you might want to start dating someone else and if you do, I totally understand) was Savannah. Savannah felt Vivi needed to pull out the hatchet and make a swift, clean break. “It will feel cruel in the moment,” Savannah said. “But it’s kinder in the long run.”
I’m sorry, Dennis, Vivi thinks. If she had known she was going to die, she might have spared him the indignity of the breakup. She wishes she could set Dennis up with one of the single women from her barre class.
“You can make that happen,” Martha says. “But you’ll have to use one of your nudges.”
No, no, Vivi thinks. She isn’t going to squander one of her nudges on Dennis’s future romantic happiness. He’ll have to find someone on his own.
Vivi sees Marissa Lopresti show up. Her dress gives the Collette Dinnigan a run for its money—it’s a backless black minidress with a plunging neckline and cutouts at the sides. It’s the same dress Marissa wore to Money Pit for Christmas dinner last year. Vivi had raised her eyebrows then and offered Marissa a sweater, and Marissa had given Vivi an incredulous look, as if to say that a sweater would completely negate the point of the dress.
Marissa is attended by her sister, Alexis, five years older, and her mother, Candace, who, thanks to a lot of Botox, looks only five years older than Alexis. Candace Lopresti is a consultant for the luxury-hotel industry. She travels all the time for work—to the Oberoi in Mumbai, to the Mandarin Oriental in Canouan. While the girls were in middle school and high school, respectively, she left them at home with her mother, who was quite elderly (and senile). This arrangement had the appearance of propriety, of checking the box of “girls, chaperoned,” but Vivi happens to know that Alexis, at least, had run wild. It is oh so ironic that Alexis now works at the police station, because Alexis Lopresti was a very bad teenager.
“You shouldn’t judge,” Martha says.
True, Vivi thinks. Carson wasn’t much better.
Once Leo and Marissa started dating, Marissa handled her mother’s absences by basically living at Money Pit, often staying an entire weekend. “My mom’s away,” she would say on Friday afternoon when she showed up with her Louis Vuitton Keepall, an exorbitantly expensive piece of luggage that her mother had