A Summer Affair: A Novel - By Elin Hilderbrand Page 0,1

hadn’t been keeping track. Was one more the difference? Claire had wanted Daphne to be happy; she had wanted Daphne to have fun. Claire was the one who invited her along. Daphne had already bought a round of drinks, several rounds; it seemed, in retrospect, that Daphne had been pulling out money all night, leaving lavish tips for the bartender, throwing sixty dollars into the fishbowl on top of the piano for the cabaret singer. Claire had been relieved to reciprocate, to order Daphne a margarita, no salt, and pay for it.

Smashed, Siobhan said.

The margarita wasn’t the problem; the margarita itself hadn’t done any damage. The problem was that when the night ended, when the bar closed and the seven mothers spilled out onto Easton Street, Daphne had climbed into her car, a Lincoln Navigator. Claire and Siobhan and Julie Jackson got into a cab, and they had encouraged Daphne to join them in the cab. Come on, Daphne, there’s plenty of room! Let us take you home! In Claire’s mind, the details were smudged; what she remembered was that they had encouraged Daphne to get into the cab, but they had not demanded it. They had not said, You shouldn’t be driving, or We’re not willing to let you get behind the wheel of a car, though that was what they should have said. The woman had consumed any number of margaritas and then strolled across the street and into the darkness, jangling her keys, her red scarf trailing elegantly down her back. Claire had been too intimidated to stop her. Claire had thought, She is rich enough to know what she is doing.

Claire sat by the phone, waiting for Siobhan to call back with details from Fidelma, her Irish connection at the police station, who was getting information from her cousin Niamh, who worked as an intensive care nurse at Massachusetts General: Daphne’s going into surgery. It’s touch and go. They don’t know what they’re going to find. Daphne was going sixty miles an hour down the ridged dirt road that led to her house. Sixty miles an hour—the car must have been rocking like a washing machine. And then the deer, from out of nowhere. She cut the deer in half; the car flipped onto its side. No one saw or heard the accident—the road was lined with summer homes and it was the middle of March. No one was around. Daphne was pinned in the car, unconscious. The person who found her, finally, was her husband, Lock Dixon. After calling her cell phone forty times and getting no answer, he left their ten-year-old daughter, Heather, asleep in the house and set out to find his wife. She was two hundred yards shy of the driveway.

Claire cried; she prayed, working her way around the rosary beads while her children watched Sesame Street. She went to church with all three children in need of a nap and lit four candles—one for Daphne, one for Lock, one for the daughter, Heather, and one, inexplicably, for herself.

“It’s our fault,” Claire whispered over the phone to Siobhan.

“No, baby, it’s not,” Siobhan said. “Daphne is a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions. We told her to get in the bloody cab, and she refused. Say it with me: She refused.”

“She refused.”

“We did what we could,” Siobhan said. “We did our best.”

Tense hours spun into tense days. Claire’s phone rang off the hook. It was Julie Jackson, Amie Trimble, Delaney Kitt, all witnesses.

“I can’t believe it,” Julie Jackson said.

“I know,” Claire said, her heart pounding, the guilt rising in her throat like bile.

“She was so drunk,” Julie said.

“I know.”

“And then she drove,” Julie said.

“I should have made her get in the cab,” Claire said.

“Mmmmmm,” Julie said.

“I feel horrible.”

There was a long pause, during which Claire could feel pity rather than a sense of shared culpability.

“Are you going to . . . I don’t know, set up meals or anything?” Julie asked.

“Should I?” Claire said. This was what they did when someone was sick or had a baby: one person organized, and everyone signed up to take food. Was Claire the one who should organize? She didn’t know Daphne well enough to send over a parade of unfamiliar faces with covered dishes.

“Let’s wait and see what happens,” Claire said, thinking, She has to live and be okay. Oh, Lord, please!

“Keep me posted,” Julie said. “And know I’m thinking about you.”

About me? This was meant to be comforting, Claire knew, but it gave