There was another knock before Claire could reach the door—crisp, insistent. Claire peeked out the window—another car in the driveway, a cherry red Land Rover with roo bars. So not the Girl Scouts. The first thing Claire saw when she opened the door was the hair, long and lustrous.

“Isabelle!” Claire said. Now she was officially aghast. Zack’s diaper was so heavy it was falling off. Claire could hear the girls pounding on the door of the outdoor shower to get J.D. out.

“Hello,” Isabelle said, with a mixture of surprise and distaste, as though it were Claire who had ambushed her at home and not the other way around. She stepped inside. “Is Lock here?”

“Yes,” Claire said. She looked down at her cover-up, her legs, her feet. Isabelle was looking very tan and lithe in a white eyelet sundress, and Claire was wearing a trash bag with four hot, sandy, hungry children running around like wild Indians. When she had woken up this morning and felt like something bad was going to happen, she could never have predicted that it would be something this specifically bad. But as Isabelle walked past her into the great room without so much as a word of apology, or, for that matter, greeting, Claire got ahold of herself. Lock and Isabelle had shown up without warning and had plopped themselves down in her home. She would not allow herself to feel self-conscious about how she looked or about the fact that there was no babbling koi pond at the entryway or that she didn’t have a pitcher of gin and tonics and hors d’oeuvres ready. She would deal with these people graciously, then send them off.

First, however, she had to deal with the Indians.

“I have to change a diaper,” she said. “Lock, will you pour a glass of wine for Isabelle, please? There’s a bottle of cold viognier in the fridge.” This was, incredibly, true, and Claire was secretly thrilled. She took Zack upstairs, rinsed him off in the sink, changed his diaper, and dressed him in an adorable blue terry cloth playsuit. When she came back down, Lock and Isabelle were seated at the bar with their drinks, popping cold grapes, while the three kids stood, wrapped in towels, dripping onto the floor and looking like refugee boat people.

“Go get dressed,” Claire said, “and I’ll let you watch a little TV before dinner.”

“What’s for—”

“Steaks,” Claire said. “And corn.”

The children slinked off, casting furtive looks at the strangers in the kitchen. As soon as the kids were gone, Isabelle got down to business.

“We have a serious problem,” she said.

Out the mudroom window, Claire saw Jason’s truck pull into the driveway. She felt a wash of relief.

“We’ll find another caterer,” Claire said.

“I’ve called everyone on Nantucket. I spent all day on the phone and so did Gavin and so did Lock. No one is available. I called all the restaurants; I even called the head of the high school cafeteria.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Claire said.

“Someone said the woman did private catering on the side. I called fourteen places on the Cape, all the way down to Wareham, and nobody can do it. The party is too big, they don’t have the staff, it’s too expensive to get here, we don’t have a prep kitchen . . .”

“It’s not looking good,” Lock said. “To bring someone in from New York, which is what we may have to do, will be prohibitively expensive. And again, the problem of the prep kitchen.” He took a swill of beer. Claire needed a drink herself, but Lock had not poured her one. Claire pointedly poured herself a glass of wine. She looked at Lock and Isabelle, sitting side by side in their perfect summer clothes like two people who had escaped from a Renoir painting. They were a natural pair. Claire could see this suddenly, clearly, without feeling one way or the other about it. They should be together. Isabelle was unmarried, or nearly so; the two of them were much better suited for each other than Claire and Lock. She wasn’t able to follow this train of thought, however, because at that moment, Lock dropped the bomb.

“We need you to try one more time with Siobhan.”

The “we” bugged her royally. “We,” meaning Lock and Isabelle, meaning the people who had slaved over the problem while Claire was at the beach, meaning Nantucket’s Children—it didn’t matter.

“I did,” Claire said. “She said no.”

“We need you to try again again. We need you to beg. No food, no drink. Or food and drink that is so expensive, we don’t make one red cent on this gig, after all the work we’ve done. You get it? We’re up against the wall. Desperate.”

“Desperate,” Claire repeated. She looked at Isabelle, who had her head bowed in folded hands, in a posture of prayer. It fell to Claire and Claire alone—again! Would it never end?

The mudroom door slammed. Jason stepped into the kitchen. He looked at Isabelle, then Lock, then Isabelle again. Claire felt a sting of jealousy, but how could Jason keep from staring at Isabelle when she had all that beautiful long hair and the even tan and the thin gold bracelet at her wrist and the perfectly shaped nails polished to look like glass? She was the most put-together woman who had ever graced their house.

“That Jaguar yours?” Jason said.

“The Rover is mine,” she said.

“Jason, this is Isabelle French, my cochair for the gala. Isabelle, my husband, Jason Crispin.”

“Pleasure,” she said, and they clasped hands.

“Jason,” Lock said, standing. Jason and Lock shook hands.