A Summer Affair: A Novel - By Elin Hilderbrand Page 0,3

think he wants?” she asked Siobhan.

“He wants to shag you,” Siobhan said. Then she laughed as if the idea was preposterous and hysterical, which, indeed, it was.

Lock Dixon had called Claire at home and invited her to lunch at the yacht club.

“There’s something I’d like to talk with you about,” he’d said. “Are you free Tuesday?”

Claire was taken completely by surprise. When she’d seen his name on the caller ID, she’d nearly let it go to voice mail. “Yes. Yes, I am. Tuesday.”

It was something to do with the charity, she decided. Since selling his company in Boston and moving to Nantucket year-round, Lock Dixon had graciously agreed to serve as the executive director of Nantucket’s Children, the island’s biggest nonprofit organization. “Graciously,” because Lock Dixon was so wealthy he never had to work again. Claire had joined the board of directors of Nantucket’s Children right before she became pregnant with Zack, but because of her fall in the hot shop and Zack’s premature birth and all the complications thereof, she had been little more than a name on the letterhead. Still, it was the charity, now, that connected them.

But there was an invisible thread, too: the unspoken accusation about Daphne’s accident. Did Lock want to revisit the night of the accident now, years later? Claire fretted. She buttoned her cardigan wrong; she nearly locked her keys in the car in the yacht club parking lot.

And yet, once Claire and Lock were seated, overlooking the trim yacht club lawn and the blue harbor beyond, it was he who seemed nervous, worked up, agitated. He wiggled in his wrought iron chair; he fussed over what Claire might order from the menu. (“Get anything you want,” Lock said. “Get the lobster salad. Anything.”) After their orders were placed and small talk was exhausted, there was a dramatic pause in the conversation, a making way, a throat clearing. Claire nearly laughed; she felt like she was being proposed to.

Would she consider chairing the Nantucket’s Children Summer Gala the following August?

Claire filled with relief. It felt like laughing gas; it felt like she might levitate. It felt like the invisible thread had been snipped, cut: she was free from the awful weight that attended her connection with Lock Dixon. Was it okay, then, to imagine that the accusation she had seen in his eyes years earlier had been nothing more than a figment of her imagination?

She was so caught up in wondering that she didn’t respond. In truth, it would be fair to say she hadn’t even heard the question. It was like the time she fainted during track practice, when she was seventeen, and she became convinced that she was pregnant. She was dead certain; she had Matthew ready to sell his guitar so they could pay for an abortion, but she cried herself to sleep, worried that she was going to burn in hell, and she decided to keep the baby. Her mother would raise it while Claire went to college . . .

When Claire went to the doctor, he said, You’re not pregnant. The problem is that you have anemia.

Anemia! She had shouted the word with glee.

“Chairing?” she said now.

“It’s a lot of work, but probably not as much as you think. You’ll have a cochair. I know you’re busy, but . . .”

Yes, three children and a baby and a glassblowing business put on hold for the foreseeable future so she could focus on her family. She was not the right person to ask. Not this year. Maybe down the road, when she had her head above water. Then it dawned on Claire why he was asking her: The summer gala was a concert. Lock was coming to her because they wanted Matthew to perform. Max West, her high school sweetheart, now one of the biggest rock stars in the world.

Claire took in some of the rarefied yacht club air. There were a million thoughts zipping through her mind: Jason would kill her. Siobhan would laugh and call her a pushover (No Boundaries!). Margarita, no salt. It will never come out. Would Matthew do it if she asked? She hadn’t spoken to him in years. He might, he just might. Anemia! Nantucket’s Children was a good cause. The best cause.

Trumping all those thoughts was this: Lock Dixon was the one person Claire could not say no to. What had happened the night of Daphne’s accident hung in the air between them, unfinished business. It hung between them in a way