“The most important element, no matter what anybody says, is the talent,” Lock told Claire. “It’s what sets our event apart. Anyone can put up a tent. Anyone can hire a caterer and throw together an auction. But we get music. That is what makes us sexy. That is why people come.”

“Right,” Claire said.

“And rumor on the street is that you know—”

“Max West,” Claire said.

“Max West,” Lock said. Again the smile, this time hyped up with admiration. Well, yeah, of course. Max West was a superstar; he was right up there with Elton John, Jon Bon Jovi, Mick Jagger. He’d had more than thirty hits. He’d been singing for nearly twenty years, since the summer after his and Claire’s high school graduation, when he played the Stone Pony in Asbury Park and an agent heard him, and . . . yeah. Rock star. Claire’s heart had been broken. God, had she cried, every night after the show, back behind the club, where it smelled like empty beer bottles and trash—she had cried and held on to Matthew’s neck because she knew it was ending. She was going to RISD, and he was going to . . . California. To record an album. They had been different people then. He had really been a different person—Matthew Westfield—before he became Max West and played the inaugural parties in Washington, before he played for Princess Diana, before he sold out Shea Stadium six nights in a row, before he recorded a live album in Kathmandu, which went double platinum. Before he got married, twice, and went into rehab, three times.

“Yes, I know him. We went to high school together. He was my . . . boyfriend.”

“That’s what someone told me,” Lock said. “But I didn’t—”

“You didn’t believe it?” Claire said. Right. No one ever believed it at first. Claire and Matthew had been best friends since seventh grade, and then, one night years later, when they were old enough to be horny and curious, Matthew had kissed her—on a school bus, at night. They were in the chorus together, returning from a trip to the old-folks’ home. Not only was Matthew in the chorus, but he was also the lead tenor in the barbershop quartet, and that was the music the old people had liked best. “Sweet Rosie O’Grady.” They clapped like mad, and Matthew hammed it up, bowing, and kissing an old woman’s hand. Standing on the top riser in the soprano section, Claire had felt unaccountably proud of him. So on the dark bus heading back to school, they sat together as they had a hundred times before, and Claire rested her hand on Matthew’s thigh, then her head on his shoulder, and the next thing she knew, they were kissing.

“It’s not that I didn’t believe it,” Lock said. “It’s just that, I don’t know . . . he’s so famous.”

“But he wasn’t then,” Claire said. “Back then he was just a kid, like the rest of us.”

“The question is,” Lock said, “can we get him?”

“I can try.”

“For free?”

Claire sipped her wine. “I can try.”

Lock leaned toward her. His eyes were bright. He had very kind eyes, Claire thought. Very kind or very sad. “You would do that?”

“All I have to do is track him down,” she said. She wrote on the first line of the first page of her notebook: find Matthew. That would be the hard part, finding him. “I haven’t talked to him in years.”

“Really?” Lock said. Now he sounded worried and possibly even suspicious. “Do you think he’ll remember you?”

“I was his high school sweetheart,” Claire said. “You don’t forget your high school sweetheart, do you?”

Lock was staring at her. Claire felt the trill of the piccolo travel up her spine, and the bass notes of the tuba reverberate in her stomach. Being with Lock, alone, in this “meeting,” was messing her up. Or maybe it was thinking about Matthew that was making her feel this way—like a teenager, like she was forming a crush, like the world was filled with outlandish romantic possibilities.

“What else?” she said.

Before he could answer, Claire’s eye caught on something on the bookshelves to the left of the twenty-paned window. It was a glass vase with green and white tiger stripes and a star-shaped opening. It was one of Claire’s pieces, right there in her direct line of vision, but she hadn’t noticed it until that second. It was like not recognizing one of her own children. She stood up and took the vase off the shelf, turned it in the light. Two summers earlier, when she was between commissions, she had made twelve of these vases for Transom, a shop in town. The colors varied, but they all had tiger stripes or leopard rosettes. The Jungle Series, she called it. Claire’s glassblowing career had been all about custom-made, one-of-a-kind commissioned pieces for very wealthy patrons, so it had been fun, and liberating, for Claire to do these vases, which were light, easy, whimsical. Transom had sold out of the vases in only two weeks.

“Where did you get this?” Claire asked.

“In town. At that shop . . .”

“Transom?”

“On the corner there, yes.”

“You bought it?”

“I bought it.”

“You bought it . . . for yourself?”

“For myself, yes. For the office. We kept flowers in it for a few weeks, but I prefer it empty. It’s a work of art by itself.”

“Oh,” Claire said.

“I’m a big fan of your glass.”