Augusta won the first round, guessing Max was “Greta Thunberg,” and they cracked new beers and played again, this time Caroline writing down “Tiger Woods,” to throw people off her scent. Fran won that round, and by the third everyone was too drunk to remember all the names and became distracted telling the story of some guy they’d known in tenth grade who had been sent away to military school for stealing a police car and was now teaching driver’s ed in Lynnfield.
Caroline was about to search the pantry for crackers when Colin announced that he and RJ were going to the bar. He had put on a baseball cap and button-down.
“You can’t drive.” Augusta looked upset.
“We’re riding the bikes!” RJ was hammered. “Eben? Coming?”
“Nope,” Eben declined. “I went to summer camp in Maine, and I can speak from experience that nothing good happens after midnight at a bar up here.”
Augusta was whispering to Colin, clearly displeased, but Colin just kissed her forehead and followed RJ out the door.
After they left,Caroline brushed her teeth at the kitchen sink, aware that the entire cabin shared only one bathroom. She peed quickly and when Van came out to the sleeping porch she was nestled under a dusty old quilt with her book. She couldn’t fall asleep without reading, but on nights like this, nights where she was drunk enough to feel the lines of text weaving on the page, she knew she would have to wake up in the morning and move her bookmark back a dozen pages, with no memory of what she’d read.
There were two single beds on opposite sides of the room, and afterVan kissed her goodnight, he retreated to the other bed instead of climbing in with her. It made sense, he was six feet tall, but she still felt a little lonely. She turned out the light and waited for sleep to come. She heard the bathroom door open and close, she heard footsteps in the hall, a cough, and then the human noises subsided. She flipped her pillow and quietly rearranged her blankets. Her pajama bottoms were making her too hot and she felt itchy from the salt water. She tried to count out her breathing and relax, but she felt like she could hear every weird sound from the woods, mice and bats and nocturnal birds rustling around, wind and distant cars. The harder she tried to fall asleep, the more impossible it was.
When she became aware of a different noise nearby, Caroline sat up to listen. Someone was knocking. Was it Colin or RJ? Were they locked out of the house? As quietly as she could, she pulled back the covers and crept to the door of the sleeping porch. The light outside the kitchen door was still on and so she walked carefully down the hall and stopped, peeking out the window. Nobody. She listened but heard nothing. Then the knocking again. It was coming from inside. Caroline turned the corner and there, outside Eben’s room, was Augusta, tapping on his door. Augusta saw her and so Caroline lifted her chin, silently asking her what to do. Augusta shook her head once and turned away, back toward her own room. Caroline stood there for a moment, unsure, before retreating to the sleeping porch.
All night Caroline had seen that there was something going on between Augusta and her brother. The rhythms were off between them. Eben was so easy with everyone else. He gently teased them, he let his shoulder bump theirs when he laughed at the table, he collected their empty cups and stacked them up after the game. He didn’t do that with his sister and Colin. Eben seemed watchful around them.
She quietly climbed back into her bed and pulled the covers high. Itwas so hard for her to figure out this group. If she had grown up in Greenhead, would they make more sense to her? Would they be her friends? Caroline didn’t think so. In some ways, they actually seemed unlikely friends for Van. They all treated him with such affection—who wouldn’t love Van?—but it was like they thought his seriousness and his intellect was a quirk rather than a virtue.Aw, Van understands the carbon cycle! That’s so funny! Look! Van knows the name of the governor of California!How random!It was like they were missing the very best parts of him. The parts she saw and loved.
As Caroline tossed and turned her thoughts tipped into the specific anxiety that comes from insomnia in a strange house. What was she even doing here, in this remote cottage in Maine, surrounded by these people? She had left her apartment, she had left her friends, she’d left the career she’d worked so hard to earn. And why? Caroline had loudly offered a million excuses when she left New York. She had said she wanted to write. She had said she needed to get out from her mother’s shadow. She said New York had changed too much after the pandemic. But deep down she knew it was, in part, for a much stupider reason. Deep down, it was because of a boy named Ned Clark.
When Caroline had been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house, her boss gave her a corporate card and a mandate: Take a literary agent out to lunch every day until you find a new writer. It was both wonderful and terrible. Every single day she ate sushi or salmon, salads with shaved fennel or hamburgers on puffy brioche. But between each bite she had to learn to make professional lunch chat. Most of the agents were older than she was, so she’d try to impress them, reading up on their authors ahead of time and thendelivering minor dissertations on their work. When the agent was her age, she could relax a little, even trade some light gossip, but the entire time there was still an elephant in the room: Caroline’s famous mother. She was just too big an industry figure to be ignored.
In Caroline’s early childhood Gwendolyn Lash had been a normal, if somewhat successful, writer. She had typed away in her home office while Caroline’s father worked long hours at a white-shoe law firm. She had an agent, Marcy Pringle, who took her to lunch once a year, an event so exciting her mother would try on her entire closet before heading out the door. But when one of her books was made into a major Hollywood movie, her career took off and the orbit of their household had shifted. Caroline’s father stopped working at the firm, instead overseeing her mother’s book and film contracts. Her agent was no longer an Oz-like figure hiding behind an annual lunch; instead, Marcy Pringle saw Gwendolyn at least once a month, sitting in on marketing meetings and orchestrating international sales. Gwendolyn Lash had become a living legend—a household name, aJeopardy!clue, and a very rich woman.
As Caroline wined and dined the agent community, trying to establish herself as an editor, they pumped her for information about Gwendolyn. People wanted to know if she wrote her own books (she did), if she wrote the film scripts (she did), and if she was really as glamorous as she looked in her author photos (she was—she had a new photo taken for every book jacket, a massive production that involved lighting assistants, professional hair and makeup, and once a diamond necklace procured from the PR team at Cartier).
When she asked Ned Clark to lunch, she couldn’t quite tell which kind of lunch it would be. He was five years older than her, he wore a suit and tie, he knew the coat-check girl by name, and he already had several bestsellers on his list. But he was funny, he smiled at Carolinelike they had a secret, he almost always had a vape pen in his hand, and he never once mentioned her mother. Ned seemed unfazed by Caroline’s proximity to fame. His own star was on the rise, he owned a loft in Tribeca, and, according to another assistant at Caroline’s office, he had once brought Zosia Mamet as his date to the PEN gala.
He made Caroline nervous, but after their lunch she couldn’t stop thinking about him. When he had emailed a week later, asking for drinks, she immediately said yes. But he didn’t try to kiss her at drinks. They had two cocktails, gin and tonics for Caroline, whiskey rocks for Ned, he vaped surreptitiously at their table, then put her in a taxi at nine. Caroline thought he liked her but couldn’t be sure. Why ask to see her again if his interest was purely professional?
When his agency, Megavoice, held a holiday party on the roof of a hotel, Caroline was surprised to find herself on the guest list. Everyone else was a vice president, an executive editor, or a major Megavoice writer. Caroline borrowed a dress from her friend who worked for Hearst, a blue silk that brought out her eyes, and went to the party alone, planning to sip champagne in the corner while people-watching as the celebrity authors air-kissed and sparkled. Instead, Ned caught her right by the door as she came in, taking her by the elbow and steering her around the room, making introductions as though she were an important new client.
Caroline kept waiting for him to pawn her off on a lowly Megavoice assistant or excuse himself to talk to someone with a corner office, but he didn’t, he ferried her from conversation to conversation until the bartenders started packing up for the night. By the coat check Caroline thanked Ned for the party, and he leaned in to brush her cheek goodbye and whispered in her ear, asking if he could come to her apartment.
They took a taxi, Ned playing with his vape pen in the back seat andmaking Caroline laugh with gossip from the evening, theGrantawriter who asked a waiter for cocaine, the CEO who spent the whole party calling Ned’s boss by the wrong name.
Neither of them was drunk, and while Caroline offered to open a bottle of wine, Ned declined, instead kissing her gently and lifting her dress up over her head. He carefully hung it in the closet before unbuttoning his own shirt and leading Caroline to the bed. He kissed her while running his hands along her body, he whispered to her, asking if she wanted to keep going. She did, and while she didn’t come, she almost did, and that was about as good as she could expect from a first time with someone new. They fell asleep after, but when she woke in the night, her clock reading three, Ned was gone, had snuck out like a thief.
She expected him to text or email the next day, but he didn’t, and not the day after that either. On the third day, Caroline’s mother called to ask if she’d ever met a Ned Clark. Caroline said she knew him vaguely, that they’d once had lunch. “Interesting,” her mother replied before changing the subject. When Caroline read in Publishers Lunch that her mother had switched agents, had left her longtime agent, Marcy Pringle, in favor of “the more dynamic agent experience at Megavoice,” and that Ned Clark would be taking over her books and television contracts, Caroline called him right away, but he didn’t pick up. She emailed him, calling him an asshole and a creep, but he didn’t answer those emails either, and the only time she saw him in her remaining year in New York, it was across the room at Quality Italian. He was having lunch with a famous tennis star, and when she caught his eye, he raised one finger before turning his attention back to his beautiful companion. That was it. One finger. Like he was telling her to wait for something that she knew would never come.
Strong Maine Pipes
The sun came streaming into the sleeping porch at six in the morning, and Caroline woke feeling headachy and hungover from her insomnia. She desperately had to pee and hoped that nobody was in the shower. It was weird to all share the old bathroom, a long narrow closet that hadn’t been touched since the 1960s, with a clawfoot tub and plaid wallpaper. Happily, Caroline seemed to be the first awake, so she peed quietly, wincing as the toilet flushed and the pipes shook thunderously. Caroline could hear Lady scurrying down the hall and scratching at the bathroom door. She splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth before sneaking back to the sleeping porch, Lady following closely behind.
“Climb in,” Van croaked from his bed, and Caroline obliged, snuggling her nose into his neck and putting her cold feet on his warm legs. Van slipped his hand into her pajama top and ran his fingers along her ribs. On cue, Lady appeared, propping her paws up on the side of the mattress and whining. Van chuckled and cleared his throat. “What do you want to do this morning? Kayak? Hike?”
“I’m down for whatever.” Caroline disentangled herself from him and forced herself to sound game.
“You’re so cute when you lie.” Van poked her gently on the chin. “Let’s drive into town, just the two of us, and get a big breakfast with bacon, egg, and cheese. I’ll buy you all the coffee you can drink.” Caroline’s heart soared. She had never loved him more.
They grocery shoppedafter breakfast, collecting everything they would need to make lunch and dinner. Colin and RJ were still asleepwhen they got back, but everyone else was awake and groggy, and they gratefully accepted pastries and greasy bacon sandwiches.
“Are you feeling okay, Bailey?” Van asked. “I know the beds here aren’t the most comfortable. Could you sleep?”
“I always sleep like a rock here.” Bailey still had on pajamas, a tank top and shorts set, but somehow looked gorgeous, and Caroline studied her, the way she ripped off bits of croissant with her red fingernails, the way her lips looked like she’d been kissing all night.