“I don’t know. I have a feeling. Something’s up with him.” Maggie got up and started pulling eggs and cheese out of the fridge. “Want a fried egg sandwich?”

“Yes, please.” Tricia refreshed her screen. Four new emails since Maggie had walked in the kitchen, all from the law offices of Kingsley, Maxwell & Traub except one forward from Richardson & Blix. “I’m so tired and I have work to do. This family-leave thing is not really the holiday I imagined. The new team in charge at the firm has a lot of questions. And there are a bunch of emails from Cap. We need to find that manuscript. The wolves are closing in.”

“What do you mean?”

“There have been some overtly threatening letters from the publisher and some mildly threatening emails from Dad’s agent who is supposed to be on our side. Et tu, Lois?”

“I never liked her. Very suspicious.” Once Maggie latched onto a new idea, she did not let go. But, as much as Tricia hated to admit it, Maggie did

have a good radar when it came to the duplicitous. Maybe it took one to know one.

So Tricia fished around. “Another case of narcissistic personality disorder? Or something else?”

“Lois has some sort of secret life. Or a scalp disease. I’m sure of it. It’s the hats. The hats aren’t normal.” Maggie put a grilled cheese, egg, tomato, and pesto sandwich next to Tricia. “I’m headed back to the studio. One more hour. Get some sleep, Trishie.”

“Thanks, Mags.”

Tricia looked out to the boathouse. The light in the upstairs window was on.

“I thought you might be thirsty.” Tricia stood in the doorway of the boathouse, holding two beers and a blanket. It was the first seriously humid night of the summer and the wind had died down to nothing. She was in a camisole and cropped jeans, flip-flops on her feet. She’d put a swipe of lipstick on in the twenty seconds between “Don’t be an idiot” and “I should do this.” She’d practically sprinted across the lawn so she wouldn’t lose her courage. A light sheen of sweat appeared around her neck and across her chest. She was slightly out of breath. “I, I . . .”

Raj didn’t need to hear the whole sentence. He pulled her toward him and kissed her softly, first on the mouth, then down her salty neck, and back to her mouth, this time harder. His glasses bumped her and they both laughed.

“You can take those off.”

“That’s a good idea. Come in. Please come in.”

Too many ghosts. Maybe I do believe in them. She shook her head. “Let’s go down to the rowboat. You know the one under the dock, on the little beach.”

“Is that where you took all the boys in high school?”

“There were no boys in high school.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It’s true. Too skinny.”

“Too intimidating.”

“Maybe that, too. But it is where I fantasized about taking all the boys.”

Tricia pulled his hand and started toward the well-worn path in the rocks to the beach. Raj hesitated. “I don’t have . . .”

“I do. I have everything. Come on.”

The rowboat, beached under the dock for twenty years, was definitely not seaworthy. Tricia had spent many afternoons there as a kid, hiding out reading. As a teenager, she did more daydreaming, imagining just such a night. The fantasies had started again after Raj arrived at Willow Lane. She dug the beer bottles into the wet sand at the edge of the water to keep them cold. Then, she spread the blanket out over the wooden slats as he watched.

She turned to Raj and touched his chest like she’d been thinking about for days, letting her hands slide all over him. His T-shirt was a soft cotton, but underneath the fabric, she could feel his taut muscles. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back as she took in his whole body with her touch—his arms, his shoulders, the back of his thighs and around to his abdominals.

She reached under the T-shirt and felt the soft hair on his belly, then slipped her fingers under his waistband. “Let’s get in the boat,” she whispered to Raj. “Do you want a PFD? Would you feel better with a flotation device on?”

She picked a couple of orange PFDs off their hooks on the wall on the boathouse and tossed them in the boat for pillows.

“Very funny.” Raj opened his eyes and grabbed her. She let him. He let his fingers run across her collarbone and slowly down to her breasts, tracing them once, twice over the tight material. Then he used his lips to arouse her, but he wanted more. “I do think we should remove this, though. I wouldn’t want it to get waterlogged and drag you under should the ship go down.”

“That’s a good idea.” Tricia pulled the camisole off, then her jeans while Raj watched. She tossed them on the sand. She had nothing on but a pair of hot-pink boy shorts. Raj admired her standing there in the dark, lit only by moonlight. “I didn’t figure you for a pink lingerie kind of girl.”

She climbed into the boat and lay back against the blanket. “Good. Then there will be a lot more surprises for you.” He took off his glasses, folded them, and placed them carefully on a nearby rock. Then he peeled off his own shirt while she watched and climbed into the boat.

“Careful there, landlubber. You’re never supposed to stand up in a rowboat,” Tricia said. He dropped to his knees and melted into her body.

Chapter 18

It was Maggie who found the hidden memoir by accident. She was looking in the attic for a vintage Fourth of July patchwork skirt that her mother used to wear. She thought it might be in the old camp trunk with the other dress-up clothes from childhood. When she opened the trunk, it was filled with all the photos of Maeve that had disappeared from all over the house, random awards for various literary accomplishments, and a stack of old magazines, but right on top was a manuscript box with the words Snap: A Memoir by William Sweeney in her father’s loopy lefty handwriting. Maggie grabbed the box. Inside was a thumb drive—no note, no explanation, just a thumb drive. Snap: A Memoir.

The title gave her chills.

It took everything she could muster not to run downstairs screaming, “I found it! I found it!” She knew it would be a huge relief to both Liza and Tricia, whose behavior had become increasingly frantic over the last few days as the legal threats had increased. But they would also find it galling that she had found the golden manuscript after spending about forty-seven seconds total searching for it while they had spent weeks combing through everything from junk drawers to laundry baskets to boxes of old tax returns.

Maggie wanted her moment of glory. But she had a better idea, a bigger idea, so she slipped the thumb drive into her pocket.

Now, I want to find that skirt.

By the time the guests arrived on the Fourth, Maggie was practically bursting out of her skin. She wanted this to be one of those nights they

talked about in Sweeney family history forever. She’d managed to organize dinner, decorations, even find the skirt and pair it with a simple tank top for a perfect throwback look and salute to previous Fourths that their mother had hosted. On top of that, the two commissioned paintings had shipped to their new homes, and her work for the show was done and she knew it was something next-level. Maggie, attuned to the universe, believed her mother was guiding her these days. She could feel her spirit in the conservatory when she was painting. Even the inspiration to search the camp trunk came from her, Maggie was sure of it. Her mother wanted to clear the air, free the past before the house was sold and all the bits and pieces that had constituted a family were packed away or given to charity. Maggie needed to honor her intuition. She wanted tonight to be as inspired as she felt.