Besides, this kind of task was right up her alley. How many times had she been told she had an obsessive eye for detail?
Three hours after her initial arrival at the house, she ran through her mental checklist. Decluttering was the fun part. Evan had the owner’s permission to tuck away distracting personal items such as family photos and knickknacks. The flowers she had purchased—at a deli in the city instead of a florist in East Hampton so she could pocket the extra cash she’d been given—were split between two vases in the living and dining rooms. The area rug she had brought as instructed from Evan’s office was in place in the front hallway to conceal the wear and tear on the floorboards. She even had the cinnamon rolls ready to go in a pie pan in the refrigerator. Evan could arrive tomorrow at noon and do nothing but turn on the oven. A hint of Barefoot Contessa, courtesy of Pillsbury.
Of course, none of these superficial touches should actually matter. This house, by $3 million South Fork standards, was a dump. Terra-cotta kitchen tiles, laminate countertops, dingy, dated wallpaper. The real draw of the house was the lot—two full acres on a dead-end road. Whoever bought this place would tear the house down and start all over. But in the Hamptons, even a teardown was supposed to be staged.
She had nearly completed her inspection when she spotted the problem. The windows!
“Hamptons buyers want a light, bright, airy home, not a man cave,” Evan had told her.
She quickened her pace with each additional shade pulled. All she could see outside was darkness. Standing alone in the isolated living room, backlit in front of all those windows, was giving her the heebie-jeebies.
She took one final look around the house. It was perfect. She sent a quick message to her boss: The place is all set. I did it tonight to make sure I didn’t run into a time crunch tomorrow morning. Thanks again for trusting me, Evan. Hope you and the kids are having the best time!
She returned the key to the lock box hidden on the back deck and locked the sliding glass kitchen door. The front door would lock automatically behind her. As she made her way to leave, Hope felt a surge of pride. She had found this job entirely on her own—no help from Lindsay or anyone else from Hopewell. And she was actually good at it. Maybe if people got to know her as Evan’s assistant—instead of “poor Hope”—she could eventually find work as an interior decorator, or maybe one of those professional organizers who streamlines a house from top to bottom. She could find clients through Yelp and Instagram and get paid in cash. Lord knew there was plenty of money to be had in the Hamptons.
She smiled reflexively when she saw his face at the front door. It wasn’t like her response to the man at the gas station. She smiled at a neurological level, straight from some primal, emotional part of the brain.
It was the way a human face responds on instinct when a person sees someone from their past in an unexpected place.
It took her brain a few seconds to catch up to her facial muscles. He shouldn’t be here.
She turned to run, but he grabbed her arm. The feeling of his fingers digging into her skin burned hot with a distant memory. It had been fifteen years.
He leaned close toward her and smiled, nothing friendly about it.
“What kind of game are you playing, Hope? Isn’t that what you call yourself now?”
2
Saturday, June 12, 10:45 p.m.
Lindsay Kelly reread the text she had drafted: Haven’t heard from you for a few days. Is everything still okay?
Too anxious. She erased and tried again. I was thinking about coming out to see you next week. Too soon?
Six weeks before, when Hope suddenly declared that she was moving to East Hampton, Lindsay had played devil’s advocate, reminding her friend that she had a life in Hopewell. She had a community and security.
“But I don’t have privacy,” Hope had said. “Or anonymity. I just want to go someplace where I can blend in. I want to be normal.”
Lindsay could still recall the hurt expression on Hope’s face when she had responded, “You have no idea what you’re saying. I mean, it’s not like you even know whether you ever were normal.”
She regretted the words the second they escaped her lips. Even now, she didn’t really understand why she had allowed herself to say something so cruel. In that moment, Lindsay immediately vowed that she had to support her friend, no matter what she decided. And so, two weeks later, with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, Lindsay had helped Hope move to the eastern end of Long Island’s South Fork, riding the train from Penn Station to Princeton, where Hope had picked her up to go to U-Haul, where Lindsay rented the moving van she would drive while Hope followed in her own Honda Civic. Of course, in Hope’s case, “her” Honda Civic was also in Lindsay’s name—title, registration, insurance, all of it—but explaining a borrowed car from a friend was easier than an unauthorized driver on a rental in the event that they ran into a problem.
They had managed to pack all of Hope’s belongings from her garage apartment except for one piece of furniture—a solid oak armoire. Lindsay smiled to herself, recalling the ridiculousness of their failed attempt.
“All right. We’re taking this armoire,” Hope had announced, “and that’s all there is to it.” It was a reference to both a classic Seinfeld episode and the fact that Lindsay had, in fact, taken the armoire after finding it abandoned on the curb with a “Free” sign taped to it. She discovered later that a visiting professor at Princeton had bought the armoire from one of the vendors at the Antique Center and then ditched it in the front yard at the end of the semester when he decided that schlepping it back to his permanent residence in New York City wasn’t worth the effort.
They managed only to tip the clunky wardrobe onto the floor horizontally before Hope burst out in laughter, wiping her palms on the baggy denim cutoffs she had worn for the move. “Oh my god, it seems even bigger now that it’s empty.” She had tugged her sandy blond hair from the long ponytail at the nape of her neck, shaken it loose, and then pulled it into a sloppy topknot instead. “Gross, I’m super sweaty. How did we even get this thing up here in the first place?”
“You don’t remember?” Lindsay had done her best to impersonate Hope trying to wrangle the thing down the street by herself, one scoot at a time. “Tony made Max and Bobby carry it for you once they all stopped laughing.” Tony and Grace Beckett were Hope’s landlords, and Max and Bobby were their now-grown sons.
A look of recognition had washed over Hope’s face. That’s when Lindsay said the armoire might be trying to send a message that it wasn’t too late to unload the van and stay put. Before Hope could respond, Lindsay had jumped in to clarify. “I just want to make sure you’re a hundred thousand percent certain before we break our backs getting this lead-filled coffin down the stairs.”
It wasn’t that Lindsay was unsympathetic to Hope’s complaints about Hopewell. Lindsay loved her hometown, but there was a reason she had opted to stay in Manhattan after graduating from law school. In a borough of fewer than two thousand people, not too many of them were strangers, and Hope had it worse than the usual resident. When she first arrived, everyone was curious about her. She was a walking, talking, living, breathing real-life mystery. But over the last decade and a half, Hope had woven herself into the fabric of the community, and it was precisely because of the incestuousness of their small town that Lindsay knew Hope would always be safe in Hopewell. The doctors still took care of her pro bono, even for things that had nothing to do with her original trauma. She had a rent-free garage apartment, thanks to Tony and Grace, the couple who organized the first prayer circle after word got around town about the stranger who turned up at the hospital with life-threatening injuries but no identification. All they asked in return was that she watch the house when they left for their frequent camping trips. The police understood why she couldn’t have a driver’s license, and also knew that their beloved ex-chief—Lindsay’s father—considered Hope a second daughter, so they pretended not to see her on those occasions when they spotted her behind the wheel.