These things happened, and Lock’s well of happiness and love dried up, and then eventually his sadness and disappointment and anger dried up, too. He felt nothing; he was a desert.

It was easier to live this way than he had thought. He immersed himself in work. He loved his job, liked it better than the career he’d built for twenty years at Dixon Superconductors in Boston. He enjoyed being on Nantucket, part of a community where he could make a difference. He garnered genuine satisfaction from fund-raising and from administering those funds for Nantucket’s Children.

Contrary to popular belief, there were kids on this island who were truly needy, as needy as kids in the inner city, kids who lived in basement apartments that housed fourteen people, who only made it into the shower once a week, who got the majority of their clothing and shoes and toys and furniture from the “take it or leave it” pile at the town dump, whose parents worked so hard, for such long hours, that the kids were left to play foosball at the Boys & Girls Club until eight o’clock at night with only a bag of pretzels for dinner. Lock’s circles were wide enough now to include people like this; everyone who knew Lock respected him and thought he was a good man. He was doing a job that needed to be done, even though he never had to work again. He was steadfast with his wife through the maelstrom of her attacks; he was solid. A rock. A desert. He had no feelings. Things were not good, but they were easy.

How to explain about Claire? He had known her for years; she was a face in the background. He had never thought her particularly beautiful; he had never been partial to redheads or women with a Victorian pallor. He had always admired Claire’s glass, but that was solely an appreciation for her work. Something about the curves of the pieces struck him as sensual, and her use of color resonated with his own personal aesthetic. He thought her work was good, technically, and he thought it was beautiful. The Bubbles sculpture displayed in the foyer of the Klaussens’ summer home had captured his imagination the way marbles and kaleidoscopes had as a child. He made a point to see the Bubbles sculpture in the Klaussens’ Park Avenue apartment, as well as the piece at the Whitney. And then one year, on their way to ski at Stratton, they had detoured to the museum in Shelburne. But Lock’s admiration for Claire’s work was disembodied from the artist; it didn’t explain his sudden fall to her feet. It happened to him like an accident, like a crash, a blow to the head, on the night of the first gala meeting. There was something about Claire that night—she was nervous, earnest, and yet confident (about Max West, about her glass). She had been wearing a jade green T-shirt that plunged to her breasts, and tight jeans; her hair curled in tendrils around her face, and she wore a perfume that made something inside him stir when she walked into the room.

Woman, he thought. Perfume, hair, breasts, smile. And a smile in her voice. When she was talking about Max West, she said, Back then he was just a kid, like the rest of us. She was drinking wine and her cheeks flushed; she was a woman and a girl at the same time. When she stood to look at her own work on his shelf—a vase—she brushed past him; he noticed her scent again, and her jeans. She picked up the vase and turned it gently—and at that moment, Lock’s fascination with her was born. She had made that vase; she had blown it out with her own lips. This aroused him. He was shocked—because along with his emotional life, his sexual life had also died. Daphne wanted sex in spurts and bouts: twice a day for a week, and then not again for twelve months.

But watching Claire, whole parts of him were suddenly alive with possibility. He might have been seeing her for the first time. Boom, a blow to the head, a blow to the heart. She took the job as gala chair, not because she was power-hungry or needed her name in lights, but because she wanted to help; in this, they were the same. She was darling. He wanted her.

It started out slowly. One kiss, another kiss, more kissing—if she had had any hesitations, she would have asked him to stop, right? He had been through university before the age of date rape and “No means no,” but he was the father of a girl (now a teenager), and hence he understood. He moved things along with Claire very slowly, though there was a tide of ache and longing in him to push it faster. They kissed and he touched her breasts, her delicate nipples, and she gasped as if she’d been burned. He pulled away immediately: Had he hurt her? Had he pushed things too far? She said, If you stop, I’ll kill you. And they laughed.

He felt guilty—not for himself, but for her. She had a husband, Jason Crispin, and she said she loved him. Lock wanted to know what she meant by this. How did she love him, how much did she love him, and if she loved him, why was she willing to be with Lock? Because she was willing. All through the fall, through the holidays, and into the winter, she met him. Some nights they stayed in the office; some nights they met in the garden at Greater Light, now a preserved (but little visited) historic site, and they made out like teenagers, with Claire sitting on the chilly cement steps as Lock reached into her blouse, then into her jeans. Sometimes they drove in Claire’s Honda Pilot beyond the water tower or to the end of Capaum Pond Road, where they grappled for each other over the children’s car seat, their feet muddling the pages from coloring books and empty juice boxes on the floor of the car. Lock was reluctant to make love in the car, not because it was uncomfortable (though it was), but because the children’s presence was almost palpable. The Honda was a piece of Claire’s actual life, it was an extension of her home, and Lock felt like an intruder. But Claire loved to have him in her car; she got a delicious satisfaction, she said, from remembering their coupling as she drove the children to school. And so they went out in the car frequently because, more than anything, Lock wanted to make Claire happy. Unlike Daphne, Claire could be made happy, and this was what satisfied Lock the most, what filled him up. Claire smiled, she laughed, she giggled. I feel like a kid again, she said. You’ve changed my life.