“Oh, Kate. That’s rough.”
Rough was one way to describe it. Kate had spent a decade building that lab, fighting for funding, publishing papers that nobody outside her field would ever read. She’d poured herself into the work the way she’d once poured herself into her marriage—completely, methodically, at the expense of almost everything else.
And now the work was paused and the marriage was over and her daughter was falling apart and the man she loved lived in a world she couldn’t fully enter.
Quite the list, Dr. Wylie.
“So I’ll stay,” she said, straightening in her chair as they finished their drinks. “Emma needs to be away from Ithaca. I need time to figure things out with Eli. And Tessa is going to have a real wedding if I have to drag her down the aisle myself.”
Vivien smiled at her. “I think Destin is exactly where you’re supposed to be right now.”
Kate wanted to say that she didn’t believe in “supposed to be.” That the universe was an expanding cosmos, not a conscious force arranging people’s lives like furniture.
Then she thought about Tessa’s face at the courthouse, radiant and certain. She thought about Eli in the kitchen, with his whispered warmth. She thought about Emma, who was somewhere in the Summer House right now, probably still curled up with her earbuds in, hiding and paying for a dumb mistake.
Maybe “supposed to be” was just another way of saying “out of options.”
“All right,” Kate said, picking up her coffee. “But I would like a favor from you.”
“Anything,” Vivien said without hesitation, which touched Kate.
She leaned in with a smile that felt coy, but was genuine. “Can I read more of that diary? The one from when we were seventeen? It might give me insight on another seventeen-year-old girl I love.”
“Of course! It’s yours. And when you finish that, there’s one more, from the last summer.”
“Oof.” She dropped back on the chair. “Let’s do seventeen first. I liked that summer.”
Vivien gave her a sly look. “You’ll like this one, too.”
She hoped so. Her life couldn’t get much messier.
The spreadsheet on Meredith’s laptop had seventeen rows, four alphabetical columns, and a formula she’d written at two in the morning that she was now fairly certain contained an error in the third nested function. She squinted at the screen, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, tempted to check her email…again.
She resisted the urge but lifted her gaze to take in the Summer House from her centrally located position at the dining table in the main living area.
In the kitchen straight ahead, Atlas let out a squeal that could have meant delight or protest—with a four-month-old, the line between the two was almost nonexistent. Whatever it was, the sound was loud enough to make Jonah unlock his infant son from a chest harness to move him into his bouncy seat on the island, explaining to the baby that it was time for Daddy to cook.
With Atlas secure, Jonah turned to the refrigerator to set up hismise en placefor the feast he was creating to celebrate Dusty and Tessa’s super-fast civil service that morning.
The newlyweds hadn’t wanted a crowd but agreed to a family dinner tonight.
“What are you working on, Mer?” Jonah asked, glancing back at her as he laid out veggies and a cutting board. “Wait. Don’t tell me. Spreadsheet for the seating chart tonight?”
She curled her lip, long used to her older brother’s teasing about her obsession with organization. But wasn’t that exactly whatmise en placewas? She let it go and shrugged.
“It’s a spreadsheet, but work.”
“That’s not fun. Work is…work.”
“For some, work is fun,” she muttered, getting a wry smile in response. “You cook, I toil in joy.”
He tipped his head in concession and lined up some peppers and onions.
Through the sliding glass doors that opened onto the deck, she could hear her father’s voice mixed with Peter McCarthy’s deeper one. The two men were talking softly with Peter’s son, Connor, the conversation broken by occasional laughs.
Aunt Vivien and Peter were together now—properly, officially together—and he’d been a fixture at the Summer House over the past few weeks. Lately, Connor came along, dragging his cast-covered broken wrist like an albatross that had ruined his life.
From the beach just over the dunes, Meredith could hear the sounds of her little cousin Nolie, her childish laughter like music in the summer air.