“Take a breath. Do you need water, coffee?” Tricia nodded. Cap called out to his assistant, “Rose, can you bring us a carafe of coffee and some water, please.”

“The only one who comes out looking good is Julia. At least he gives her credit for imparting some wisdom and humanity to us, saving us from ourselves. Again, a little pat on the back to himself for hiring Julia in our darkest hour.” Tricia didn’t need more stimulants but she accepted the coffee with milk that Rose prepared. Rose looked at Tricia with understanding eyes as she handed her the cup and saucer.

When Rose left the room, Tricia moaned, “Oh my God. That’s the look we’re all going to get for the rest of our lives once this book comes out. The look Rose just gave me with the sad eyes and the ‘poor you’ face. ‘Oh, those Sweeney sisters. They’re all a mess.’ I won’t be able to take that, Cap.

I know I have issues. But I own them. That one day in New York in a green wool coat being dragged up Fifth Avenue, then down Madison Avenue didn’t determine the rest of my life.”

“We could always delete the last chapter. No one knows.”

“Except the tech at Copy World where Maggie took the thumb drive. I have no doubt Maggie blurted out the truth about what she was copying as she stood there. Somewhere out there is a file with the complete manuscript. It will all come out at publication and then we’ll look like spoiled women who couldn’t face the truth when it emerges.”

Cap had to agree.

“The real tragedy here is that Liza, Maggie, and I were fine with who he was. Sure, we knew he was no picnic, but our mother taught us to give him a wide berth. I thought we’d had fun together. We’d sail. We’d listen to the Yankees games on the radio down at the dock. He’d show up at my cross-country meets at Yale, wearing his floppy tennis hat. Why would he do this, Cap? You knew him as a person. I guess we really didn’t.”

“Your father was a complicated man. He had his own complicated childhood and he was always looking for answers to questions. I have to guess that Serena’s appearance had something to do with this essay, one last meditation on fatherhood, a subject he really didn’t write too much about.

He struggled with the truth on this one.”

“You know, even I’m starting to think William Sweeney wasn’t a very good father. And he was a terrible, terrible husband. What he did to Mom, to her work. How could he do that?”

“I was horrified as well. I had no idea. I thought he respected your mother’s work, even if he didn’t exactly show it. He could have been so much more helpful to her. Instead, she was more helpful to him, managing his life so he could write.”

“But to burn her poems after her death because she was more talented?

Out of spite? Couldn’t he have saved them for us, even if he didn’t get them published? It’s killing me.”

“It was a tremendous disappointment to read that in the book.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to tell Liza. How do you explain away behavior like that?”

“Like I said, he was a complicated man.”

“Complicated? Or selfish? Because he always seemed to do right by William Sweeney.”

What an asshole, Serena thought as she flipped over the last page of William Sweeney’s memoir and sat back on the couch with her cup of tea to absorb what she had read. Brilliant, but an asshole. She was not surprised that she was mentioned, in so much as one could count “a daughter born outside of marriage” as a mention, but she was surprised it was a single line of prose without any exposition. Reading the chapter made her think of the conversation she’d had with her father, the man who raised her, Mitch Tucker. It was short without a lot of exposition, too.

“So, I know what happened. Mom told me.”

“She told me, too. Serena, it changes nothing for me.”

“Me, either.”

“Being your father is a . . . a great privilege. It didn’t seem like we would ever have children. And then we had you. It doesn’t matter to me how that happened.”

“Really? It doesn’t matter?”

“Not in the way you think. And not now after all these years. I sold insurance for a long time. I know everyone thinks that’s a deadly boring career, but it meant I could see inside people’s lives. And I have to tell you, some of those lives were pretty complicated, if I interpreted those surprise

beneficiaries correctly. I also watched a lot of fine families get torn up over claims and money and valuables. I don’t want that to happen to us.”

“Me, either.”

“You’re my daughter. Nothing will change that. And Birdie is my wife.

For better or worse, right?” Her father’s dry sense of humor came through over the phone.

“That’s one way to think about it.”

“Come see us soon.”

“I will.”

And that was it. Mitch Tucker, acknowledging that without Bill Sweeney, he would have no daughter, so he was letting the circumstances of her conception go. It was generous, the sort of generosity that William Sweeney acknowledged he didn’t possess.

Serena felt like she got off lucky in the book. She felt like the momentum of the memoir was building toward some sort of confessional and she had guessed what it might be when she saw the chapter title, What I Got Wrong.

First, the bombshell about Maeve’s poems. Then, the dismissal of his own daughters. She didn’t anticipate that Liza, Maggie, and Tricia would be collateral damage.

As a writer, Serena found it unnecessary to drag innocent bystanders down into one’s truth.

As a sister, Serena wanted a chance to correct the record.

She thought about the conversation with Tricia the other day, before the gallery opened. About the coverage the sisters gave each other. Even in moments that tested their family bonds, they let the hurt slide. An idea hit Serena, as she sat there drinking her tea, reflecting on the memoir and planning her next steps. She realized she could provide coverage, too.

Chapter 24

Willow Lane was nearly cleared out a week after the gallery opening.

Most of the boxes had been distributed either to Goodwill, the Pequot, or the Yale Library. Maggie and Tim managed the last details of the main house. Tim, as it turned out, could really pack a moving box. He had no sentimental attachment to anything in the house, except the signed Aerosmith poster, a relic of some charity auction. Tim thought it was

“awesome,” so Maggie promised it to him and he worked efficiently to earn it.

Tim was growing on Maggie. The one-night tri-tip grilling gig had morphed into ten days of Tim and she wasn’t sick of him yet. He was the opposite of Gray, uncomplicated and open and that suited her. Plus, he wasn’t hung up on her sister, so that was a major bonus. She was sure that if not for Tim, she might have crashed after the opening, exhilarated from the sale and guilty from her deception. But his energy, his insistence that they walk to the beach every day for a half hour of vitamin D, his willingness to join in on her sun salutations on the dock, and his nonstop singing of anything by Chris Stapleton kept her on track. Every time she asked him a question, he responded by singing the chorus to “Fire Away,” completely misinterpreting the song. Plus, he really liked her cat.

Tricia and Raj took control of the boathouse, watching the official van from Yale haul the years of work away under Raj’s watchful eye. The school took William Sweeney’s desk and chair, too. “Apparently, donations have come in in his name, so the school will rename a reading room in the library after him,” said Raj. Tricia suspected that Cap had rallied the class of ’68 to pledge the gift. It would please her to see the room during the

campus memorial in the fall. Raj was back in New Haven for a few days to oversee the acquisition.

Tricia had thought she would feel deflated, almost like watching a burial rite, as her father’s papers were carried away, but none of the sadness came.

After the last few weeks and the revelations in the book, Tricia was relieved that William Sweeney’s work would be stashed away in the sterile, safe archives of a university. Academics could pursue their theories while she absorbed the reality.

She wanted the boathouse for herself for the rest of the summer; well, her and Raj when he had time to get away from his work in New Haven. She felt confident that they were serving her father’s literary legacy in the best manner possible. The personal legacy was another story. “Working on my own timeline,” Tricia responded when Raj would check in with her emotional state.

The sisters decided to leave most of the furniture in the main house in place until the house went on the market in a month or so. Not that any of it was any good, but they needed somewhere to sit. Their realtor Nan Miller was practically begging them to put it on in August because, as she said,