“It’s a good cause,” she said.

Jason huffed, turned the volume up. And that, she supposed, was the best she could hope for.

“You’re a complete idiot, Clairsy. A bloody fool.”

This was Siobhan, the next morning on the phone, after Claire had told her, Lock Dixon asked me to chair the summer gala for Nantucket’s Children, and I capitulated like a soldier without a gun.

“I’m not a fool.”

“You’re too much yourself.”

“Right,” Claire said, losing enthusiasm. “Jason is not amused. Have I made a whopping mistake?”

“Yes,” Siobhan said.

Claire had spent the past twenty hours convincing herself that it was an honor to be asked. “It will be fun.”

“It will be work and stress and heartache like you’ve never known.”

“It’s for a good cause,” Claire said, trying again.

“That sounds rather canned,” Siobhan said. “Tell me something true.”

I did it because Lock asked me, Claire thought. But that would send Siobhan through the roof. “I couldn’t say no.”

“Bingo. You have no boundaries. Your cells don’t have membranes.”

Correct. This had been a problem since childhood: Claire’s parents had battled constantly; their problems came in thirty flavors. Claire was the only child, she held herself accountable for their misery, and her parents did nothing to dissuade her from this. (Things had been different then with child raising.)

She was an easy mark, too easy. She could not say no to Lock Dixon, or anyone else, for that matter.

“I want you to serve on my committee,” Claire said. Siobhan and Carter owned a catering company called Island Fare. They did big events like the Pops concert on Jetties Beach, as well as hundreds of smaller cocktail and dinner parties, lunches, brunches, picnics, and weddings, though they had never catered the summer gala. Claire was asking Siobhan to be on the committee because Siobhan was her best friend, her darling, but right away Claire sensed tension.

“Are you asking me to cater the gala?” Siobhan asked. “Or do you expect me to slave with you on it while some other mick gets the job?”

“Oh,” Claire said. Of course, if it were up to her, Siobhan and Carter would cater the event, but Claire didn’t know if being cochair gave her the power to hire anybody, and even if she did have the power, she wasn’t prepared to wield it yet. What if she hired Carter and Siobhan and someone called it nepotism (which, of course, someone would)? Worse still, what if Claire hired Carter and Siobhan and her fellow board members expected a deep discount that Carter and Siobhan either didn’t want or couldn’t afford to provide? God, how awkward! She’d been in charge for five minutes and already she was facing an impossible situation.

“Listen,” Claire said, “you don’t have to—”

“No, no, no, I will.”

“But I can’t promise anything about the catering.”

“That’s okay.”

Claire wasn’t sure, exactly, where that left things. Was Siobhan on the committee? Would she come to the meeting at eight o’clock on Wednesday, September 19? She would not, Claire decided. She would forget about the meeting, and Claire didn’t call to remind her.

So when Claire Danner Crispin reached the top of the narrow staircase of the Elijah Baker House (a grand house, built in 1846 for Elijah Baker, who had made a fortune fashioning ladies’ corsets out of whalebone) and stepped into the office of Nantucket’s Children, she found only . . . Lock Dixon. Lock was sitting behind his desk in a blue pinstripe shirt and a yellow tie, his head bent forward, so that Claire could see the bald spot on top. He was writing on a legal pad, and he didn’t seem to have heard Claire on the stairs (impossible: she was wearing clogs). Rather, he had heard her and simply had yet to acknowledge her. Claire felt self-conscious. She should have called Siobhan and dragged her along, no matter how uncomfortable or unethical it was.

“Lock?” Claire said. “Hi.”

Lock raised his head. He was wearing half spectacles, which he whipped off immediately, as if they were some kind of secret. He smiled at Claire. It was a real smile, it broke his face open, and Claire felt the air in the room crackle, practically, with the power of that smile. It sent an electric current through her heart; it could have brought her back from the dead, that smile.

Claire took the smile as her reward for saying, Yes, I’d love to. Really, I’d be honored. When you were a cochair of the summer gala, people were glad to see you walk in the door. Or grateful. Or relieved.

Lock stood up. “Hi, Claire, hi, hi. Here, let me get you a—”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. “Are we meeting here, or in the . . .”

The Nantucket’s Children office consisted of two rooms divided by a hallway, and at the end of the hallway was a powder room and a small kitchen. One room was the actual office, where Lock worked and where Gavin Andrews, the office manager-bookkeeper, had his desk, and across the hall was the boardroom, which held a large, round table and eight Windsor chairs. Every detail of the Nantucket’s Children office transported one back to the whaling heyday that put Nantucket on the map: the floor was fashioned from 150-year-old pine boards, and the doorways were topped with leaded transom windows. With the old- fashioned charm, however, came old-fashioned conveniences or the lack thereof. The board meetings were stifling in the summer and freezing in the winter, and every time Claire used the powder room, the toilet backed up.