“Okay,” he said. “I won’t.”

It was a rush, a torrent. The week following his return from Tortola he saw Claire four times. Four times! It was unprecedented, unsafe. But Lock told Daphne (truthfully), You should see the work that stacked up on my desk while I was away. And Jason had some kind of deadline at the end of the month and he was working even later than Claire stayed out. He was angry at her, anyway. They’d had an argument, and Jason was sleeping, alternately, in the guest room or on the sofa. Lock had heard about this, he’d heard about Edward and Siobhan (Siobhan wasn’t speaking to Claire, either; they had not talked in almost seven days), and he’d heard about Zack’s birthday and the encouraging news from the pediatrician. He and Claire had to catch up in bits and pieces because most of their time was spent holding each other, reassuring each other that they were really there. In a way it was the best week they’d ever had. Their emotions ran from rapture to delirium and back again; the despair of being apart was in their past. Guilt had been suspended, as had fear. Their first thoughts were not of being careful—twice, Lock had to keep Claire from embracing him in front of the twenty-paned window (the private detective, stupidly, haunted him). Their first thoughts were only of each other.

Gavin took advantage of the week Lock was away to steal, steal, steal, steal, steal. He skimmed off every check that came into the office, including a check for fifty thousand dollars from a prestigious women’s shoe company in New York, which Isabelle French had enlisted to underwrite the gala. (He kept a thousand dollars for himself.) He had nearly ten thousand dollars in cash stowed away in the utensil drawer of his parents’ kitchen. Gavin found taking money while Lock was gone almost too easy; he was able to cover his tracks, then double-check and triple-check that they were covered. It lacked the risk of skimming funds right under Lock’s nose. It was almost more quickening to pilfer money from petty cash for his lunch (which he also did each day Lock was on vacation). Gavin was happy to see Lock return, not only because it put the fun back into his game, but because Gavin had missed his employer. Lock was a truly wonderful man—this had come into clearer focus after Lock had gone away. Gavin felt bad about deceiving him, but this guilt only added extra oomph to Gavin’s treachery.

He fantasized all the time about getting caught. He had a favorite scenario in which he invited Lock and Daphne to his parents’ house for dinner, and in an attempt to locate a serving fork or an extra dessert spoon, one of them opened the utensil drawer and discovered the money. And they said, Where did you get all this money?

Though they knew there could only be one place.

I am a thief. Gavin thought this all the time now. He had come around from considering it “skimming.” Skimming was back when his cache was merely hundreds, but now that it was about to top five figures, it qualified as stealing. He was a thief. And clearly his mind had been ruined (as his mother had always feared) by movies and TV, because his self-image took on a more and more glamorous sheen. Instead of seeing himself as a rotten, dishonest brat who was freeloading off his parents and now taking important funds from little kids whose lives were infinitely more difficult than his had ever been, he put himself in a category with Brad Pitt in Ocean’s Eleven, someone who disarmed elaborate security systems, cracked codes, slipped on velvet gloves.

There were fissures, however, cracks in his resolve, through which his panic escaped. He could not get caught! It wasn’t that he had much to lose—the nitty-gritty facts were that if he got caught, he would have to move out of his parents’ house, and he would lose his job and his three or four friends. But all of that was going into the rubbish bin, anyway. Once he had enough money (how much was enough? A hundred thousand? Could he actually take a hundred thousand and not get caught?), he was leaving. He was off to an island in Southeast Asia so remote it didn’t even have a name (at least not one pronounceable to native speakers of English). It was important to Gavin, however, that he leave on his own terms—in glory, as it were. The people of Nantucket would learn he was a thief, but by then it would be too late. He would have vanished, never to be heard from again; he would have gotten away with it. It was imperative that Gavin get away with it—unlike the debacle at Kapp and Lehigh, where he’d had his hand slapped like a little boy, where his “crime” had been categorized as naive and juvenile. It was important that he succeed in this one thing.

And, too, he was having fun. If he got caught, the fun would come to an abrupt halt.

One night, the week after Lock returned, Gavin experienced unprecedented panic. He was at dinner with Rosemary Pinkle, the recently widowed woman Gavin had befriended at the Episcopal church; they were both fans of the evensong service, and their friendship had grown to encompass monthly dinners out. These dinners sustained Gavin’s altruistic side and reinforced his belief that he was not a complete loss in the human-kindness department. He listened to Rosemary’s stories about her departed husband with careful attention; Rosemary and Clive Pinkle had traveled extensively and Rosemary’s stories were fascinating. She did on occasion lapse into unexpected moments of melancholy—she shed tears, she broke down into sobs—at which point Gavin held her hand, hoping that should his father die first, there would be a young man in Chicago who would fill a similar role for his mother.

On the night in question, Rosemary was in high spirits. She was a gardener and heartened by the fine weather, and by the fact that the deer were staying away from her tulips. She and Gavin were eating at American Seasons, newly opened for the season, a further harbinger of summer. Just as Gavin was delving into his cream of sorrel soup, he was struck by a paralyzing thought. That afternoon at work, he had sent out a letter to the women’s shoe company in New York, thanking them for their underwriting donation and confirming the 501(c)(3) status of Nantucket’s Children, making the donation tax-deductible. As Rosemary detailed to him how she had outsmarted the deer (she had sprinkled the mulch around the tulips with human hair, collected from a salon in town), Gavin questioned the amount he had typed in the letter. The check had been for $50,000; he had “deposited” $50,000 and taken $1,000 as cash, making the net deposit $49,000. That number, $49,000, was the number that stuck in Gavin’s mind—and he became more and more fearful as he pretended to eat his soup, and as he pretended to listen to Rosemary (the salon had been glad to get rid of the hair), that he had typed in $49,000 as the amount of the donation, instead of $50,000. The letter had been signed by Lock (who did not read it), stamped, and taken to the post office. However, if Gavin had indeed typed in $49,000 instead of $50,000, someone from the women’s shoe company would call to inquire, and this would cause either Lock or Adams Fiske to look more closely into the matter.