“You said midnight at the earliest,” Ainsley says. “I planned on having everyone out and everything cleaned up by then.”

“As if that makes it okay,” Tabitha says.

“Please,” Ainsley says. “Please don’t be a buzzkill.”

Candace takes half the kids—including Emma—home in Emma’s Range Rover, and Teddy takes the rest of the kids home in his uncle’s truck. Tabitha tells Ainsley she’s not going to bed until the upstairs is spotless. There are rings on the Stephen Swift table that will never come out.

“Do you have any idea how much money this table cost me?” Tabitha asks. Then, before Ainsley can answer, she says, “Twenty thousand dollars.”

“Do you ever listen to yourself, Tabitha?” Ainsley says. “You are so materialistic.”

Do you ever listen to yourself? Tabitha thinks. You sound like a privileged, entitled snot.

“Do not,” Tabitha says, “call me that.”

“Why not?” Ainsley says. “Emma calls her father by his first name.”

“It shouldn’t be your aspiration to be like Emma,” Tabitha says. “That girl is bad news. Always has been, always will be.”

“Always has been, always will be,” Ainsley says in a high, mocking tone. “You’re so judgmental.”

Tabitha is about to say that she’s supposed to be judgmental where Ainsley is concerned, because how else will Ainsley figure out what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not? But this will no doubt end up sparking angry responses, coming one after another like an endless string of firecrackers.

Tabitha lets it go.

They get the table returned to its usual place, moving it together, which feels sort of okay—thirty seconds of a common goal. Tabitha empties the ashtrays and tosses out the roaches. She and Ainsley throw the beer cans in the recycling pile.

“So,” Ainsley says. “You came home early. How was your night?”

Oh, how Tabitha would love to change the tenor of the evening by sinking into the Gervin and telling her daughter about her night—the party on the Belle, meeting the captain, going to Nautilus, bumping into Ramsay. But Tabitha recognizes Ainsley’s words for what they are: a strategy. Ainsley has never once asked Tabitha about her night. Ainsley is painfully self-absorbed. Ainsley asking now is Ainsley wanting to butter Tabitha up so that Tabitha forgets she’s supposed to punish Ainsley.

It doesn’t matter how Tabitha fields the question, because at that moment Ainsley finds the cup in the kitchen that contains her submerged phone. The scream could shatter glass.

Tabitha feels a childish sense of triumph. Gotcha, she thinks.

Later, when Tabitha is lying in Ainsley’s bed—she isn’t about to sleep in her own bed after what happened—and Tabitha is wondering just whose flawed genes her daughter inherited, she remembers Harper’s text. She checks her phone. It is now 12:15 a.m., the hour she was expected home.

She clicks on Vineyard Haven, MA.

The text says: Billy is gone.

AINSLEY

They are going to Martha’s Vineyard.

Billy is dead. Billy is the only grandfather Ainsley has ever known, because her father’s father, Wyatt senior, died before Ainsley was born.

Ainsley, Tabitha, and Ainsley’s grandmother, Eleanor, take the fast ferry from Nantucket to Oak Bluffs. While standing in line, Ainsley accidentally refers to it as Oaks Bluff, and she is reprimanded by a woman even older than Grammie who is standing behind her. This woman puts a hand on Ainsley’s shoulder and says, “One tree, many bluffs. Or, more likely, one kind of tree, many bluffs.”

“Whatever,” Ainsley says.

Eleanor pipes up. “One needs to know.”

Ainsley nearly rolls her eyes in her mother’s direction until she remembers that she hates her mother. Tabitha intentionally destroyed Ainsley’s phone, and thus Ainsley has no way to get hold of anyone—not Emma, not Teddy. Her mother kept her in the house all weekend, even though it was beautiful weather. Her mother didn’t go to yoga class and, even more shocking, didn’t go to check on things at the boutique.

Ainsley had said, “You can go into the store for a few hours, Tabitha. I’m not going to go anywhere.” (This was a barefaced lie. As soon as Tabitha pulled out of the driveway, Ainsley intended to ride her bike to Teddy’s.)

Tabitha said, “Grammie is going in for me.”

“Grammie?” Ainsley said. Eleanor is a designer. She is an artist and a genius, but she has not, to Ainsley’s knowledge, ever gone into the boutique to manage or supervise. That has always been Tabitha’s job.

“Yes,” Tabitha said. She had given Ainsley her fakest smile. “I’m staying here with you.”

Spending two days shut up in the house without a phone had been a living hell. Because Billy had died, Tabitha spent most of the time mooning around. She pulled out old photo albums—all photo albums were old, Ainsley knew, but these were really old—displaying pictures of her mother and Aunt Harper when they were babies. Tabitha had encouraged Ainsley to join her on the sofa, which smelled like marijuana smoke and probably would forever, a fact that secretly pleased Ainsley. Tabitha had said, “You should see these. These are pictures from when we were a whole family. Your grandparents are married, and Harper and I are wearing matching outfits.”

Ainsley did not deign to respond. Her mother could ground her, and her mother could drown her phone, but her mother could not make her speak.

Ainsley spent the majority of her time in lockdown worrying. Ainsley and Teddy had planned on going to dinner at the Jetties, where, it was rumored, G. Love was going to play a surprise set. They had heard this from Teddy’s uncle Graham, who would be shucking oysters and clams at the raw bar. With Ainsley grounded, Teddy might offer to take Emma to the Jetties instead. As Ainsley lay in bed watching reruns of Chopped on TV, Emma and Teddy might be drunk and swaying together in the crush of people energized by G. Love’s magical appearance. They might kiss. Emma is a thrill seeker without morals; she would think nothing of stealing Ainsley’s boyfriend. Ainsley wants to hate Emma, but she can’t, so Ainsley hates Tabitha.

Tabitha had started drinking wine at five o’clock—the expensive Nicolas-Jay Pinot Noir, from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, that she used to drink before Ramsay put her on rosé. Tabitha had then asked Ainsley if she wanted a glass.

Ainsley had thrown her mother a look of contempt. What mixed messages she was sending! The whole reason Ainsley was under house arrest was because she had been drinking (and smoking weed and turning the living room into a frat house), and what does Tabitha do? Offer Ainsley a glass of wine. Ainsley was so agitated about the Emma-Teddy scenario forming in her mind that she could have used a drink. But three years earlier, when Ainsley was first experimenting with alcohol, she had consumed a bottle and a half of the Nicolas-Jay Pinot Noir. It was delicious, she’d thought initially—like a rich, plummy juice. But shortly afterward, she’d started puking purple. She would never drink red wine again.

Tabitha passed out by nine, and Ainsley would have sneaked out at that point, except that Eleanor had been alerted to her granddaughter’s escapades, and an alarm had been activated that would sound if anyone broke the threshold of the driveway in either direction. There would be no coming or going that night.

Ainsley had ended up paging through the photo albums by herself, and she had to admit it was fascinating. There were clippings of Billy and Eleanor on the society pages of the Boston Globe—in every photo, Billy leaned in to kiss Eleanor’s cheek while she gave the camera a brilliant smile. They looked pretty much in love to Ainsley. There was another photo in the album that showed Eleanor, enormously pregnant—the size of a hippo, really—draped in a yellow dress that might also have been a pup tent. Billy wore square wire-framed glasses and white bell-bottoms and a white patent leather belt, and he held up two fingers over Eleanor’s shoulder. So… this was the day they found out they were having twins. The dates were stamped onto all the photos, and this one said: OCTOBER 10, 1977. Ainsley felt like she knew that Grammie didn’t discover she was having twins until very late in the pregnancy, and now she sees it was only six or eight weeks before the twins were born.