Benton said to George, “Are you a Stones fan, man?”

George said, “Isn’t everybody?”

Benton plugged his phone into the outdoor speaker and played “Loving Cup.” He poured the last of the sparkling wine between Grace’s and Clara’s glasses.

Benton said, “This has sort of been the theme song of our summer.”

Clara said, “I can honestly say I’ve never had this much fun at a shoot before.”

Grace agreed. It was fun. She envisioned life with Benton being this playful, this sensuous and carefree, every single day.

As Clara finished her wine, she ran through the notes she’d taken, aloud: Benton, Ohio State grounds-crew work-study job; Surrey, England; passion for roses; Savannah, Oxford, the Nantucket Historical Association.

Clara looked up and narrowed her eyes. “How did you find Grace?”

Benton gave Grace a look that could only be described as filled with love. “She found me,” he said.

Clickclickclick.

NANTUCKET

Many of us knew the Pancik property would be featured in Sunday’s Boston Globe, but others were taken by surprise as we stirred cream and sugar into our freshly brewed coffee and opened our newspapers. However, even those of us who knew to expect the article were astonished by what we saw. For starters, the article was entitled Nantucket’s Private Eden. And the first photo—BAM! larger than life and in full color—was of Grace Pancik feeding Benton Coe a fat, delectable strawberry.

Whoa!

The caption read: Homeowner Grace Pancik enjoys an alfresco luncheon with landscape architect Benton Coe, owner of Coe Designs.

The article read: Some matches are made in heaven, such as the one between Nantucket resident Grace Pancik and Benton Coe, the man she hired to design and execute the landscaping of her three-acre property in Wauwinet.

Whoa!

Followed by a few paragraphs of background on Benton: impressive, but nothing we didn’t already know.

Followed by a few paragraphs of background on Grace: Mrs. Pancik was a French-literature major at Mount Holyoke College, which explains her fondness for the garden bench salvaged from the Jardin des Tuileries that is said to date back to the age of Louis XIV, Colbert, and the renowned Parisian landscape architect André Le Nôtre. This exact bench used to grace a long terrace, overlooking the Seine, called the Terrasse du Bord-de-l’Eau and most likely provided respite for the likes of Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet after a tiring visit to the nearby Louvre. Such vivid historical details thrill Mrs. Pancik and fuel her romantic imagination.

Mrs. Pancik is also passionate about her daylily bed, which she planted as a tribute to her beloved, now-deceased grandmother, Sabine Roddin-Baste, who kept an estate in Wayland with an apple orchard and a croquet lawn.

“My grandmother Sabine adored daylilies,” Mrs. Pancik said. “She was the one who fostered my deep appreciation for green spaces.”

Followed by a photo collage: Grace aboard a riding mower, looking not unlike a queen upon a throne; Grace and Benton hanging side by side from a branch like children on a playground; Grace drinking from a flute of champagne as Benton gazed upon her; Grace wading in the shallow end of her pool; Benton standing in the rose bed with a gargantuan pair of clippers; one of the hens—Martha or Dolly—strutting in the yard; and the inside of the garden shed, copper farmer’s sink gleaming like a new penny. The sign above the sink read: A garden is not a matter of life or death. It is far more important than that.

Followed by paragraphs about how Grace and Benton collaborated on every aspect of the yard in their attempt to create different “moments.” The pool and hot tub, tiled in bottle green and surrounded by antique pavers and real Nantucket cobblestones, made one feel that one had happened across a swimming hole in the woods. The rolling green lawn encouraged a stroll toward the Adirondack chairs, set where one could simultaneously hear the stream that ran along the back of the Pancik property and see the sailboats on Polpis Harbor. Suspended between two-hundred-year-old elms was a hammock where Mrs. Pancik often relaxed as she read Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas within full view of the glorious rose bed, featuring twenty-two varieties of rose.

“But the essence of what we were trying to accomplish,” Coe says, “is embodied in the garden shed.”

Mrs. Pancik agrees. “That’s really our baby,” she says.

Jody Rouisse called Susan Prendergast. “I, for one, think it’s disgusting,” she said. “I mean, is it not obvious to everyone on earth that those two are lovers? She was feeding him.”

“Like Adam and Eve in the garden,” Susan said. “Do you think the writer had inside information?”

“There was no mention of Eddie,” Jody said. “I mean, they referred to her as Mrs. Pancik, but it was like Eddie and the twins didn’t exist.”

“I have to say, the way Benton is looking at her in that one photo is pretty hot,” Susan said. “I wish someone would look at me like that.”

“I thought the mention of the bench from the Tuileries was pretentious. And Grace reads Victor Hugo in the hammock?” Jody said. “It’s probably more like Cosmo.”

“She was a French-literature major,” Susan said. “I hear her library is stacked with first editions.”

“Well, what about Grace calling the garden shed their ‘baby’?” Jody said. “You know, Jean Burton thought she looked pregnant. I think there’s a good chance that shed isn’t the only baby.”