Merry unfurled an embroidered linen runner down the length of the table and set the hurricanes and the porcelain bowl in its center. “A few dahlias from the garden, and we’re good.”
“The room feels less fussy,” Peter admitted. “I might actually like being in here.”
It was, he supposed, a metaphor for his life. Once he’d met Meredith a few years before, all that was rigid in his mind and soul had gradually relaxed into something far healthier. Almost, but not quite, as effortlessly as moving the table—it began, he thought, with seeing his space differently. As mutable rather than fixed. Open to change, instead of resistant to it.
“Your mother will hate how I’ve messed with her house,” Merry said.
“Yes, she will.” He reached out and pulled her into the crook of his shoulder, where her head briefly rested. Julia Mason stood for all that was most constricting and suffocating in Peter’s life. She was sarcastic, unrelenting in her criticism, and convinced that by choosing Merry, her son was marrying beneath him. She once used the archaic term mésalliance, and when Peter exploded, shrugged that Merry would never understand the word anyway. His mother’s impending arrival to the island was tiresome but necessary; Peter refused to let it ruin his happiness. He had allowed Julia to ruin too many things in the past.
“Will it be a problem?” Merry asked. “If your mom’s annoyed?”
“Not for me.” He touched her forehead, smoothing away a pucker of concern with one fingertip. Merry was looking tired. She had to work a full shift starting at 6 a.m. the next morning. At this rate, she’d be exhausted by Saturday. She was still the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“Do you know that I can’t wait to marry you?” he asked.
Merry kissed him, and moved without another word to gather up the books they’d piled on the hallway chairs.
He was skinning and boning the bluefish he’d caught that afternoon off Watch Hill when Ashley found him at the stern.
“I wish you’d teach me how to do that,” she said, as he slid the narrow steel blade between the flesh and the skin. “You make it look easy. Then again, you make everything look that way.”
He shrugged. “It’s a knack. Not a skill.” Ash would never know how hard he worked to look effortless. Or what it cost him.
“How’d you two meet?” she asked, with a slight tilt of her chin toward the flybridge above. Matt stood at the controls, intent on reaching Oak Bluffs tonight, unable to hear them.
“I don’t even remember anymore,” he said.
“I think you’re lying. Why would you lie to me?”
He lifted his eyes from the fillet. She was staring at him, really seeing him, for the first time in weeks.
“You knew him in Chicago. Didn’t you?”
Her words were as targeted as bullets. No fool, Ash, though she sometimes tried to look that way.
“Yes,” he told her. And tossed the bones overboard.
Chapter Two
“We’re going to have to get everybody off,” Jack Mather declared flatly that Monday morning. He was sitting on a barstool when Dionis padded into the kitchen, still in her pajamas, dark hair streaming down her back. It was a little after 7:30 a.m. and the thick smells of burnt coffee and crisp maple bacon suggested winter to her nose. The opaque gray light beyond the small window over the kitchen sink deepened the idea. Fog. The weather had changed. Autumn was here.
“It’s not going away—just getting bigger.”
“What is?”
Jack set down his coffee mug and sighed. “The nor’easter I told you about.”
“I thought it was supposed to dodge us. Head north.”
“It did,” he agreed, “where it ran smack into the remnants of a tropical storm off the coast of Labrador and turned into something much nastier. It’s a Cat Two right now and circling back toward us.”
“A hurricane?” Dionis echoed in disbelief. “They never hit New England.”
Her father slid his bulk off the stool and shuffled around to the coffee maker. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. But the last time something like this happened was in ’91. You were pretty young, then.”
Four years old, Dionis thought. When Mom left.
“I’m not surprised you don’t remember.”
“You mean the Perfect Storm,” she said quietly. The name a journalist and Hollywood had given it. The remnants of a tropical storm and a nor’easter had collided in the North Atlantic. It had been deadliest offshore.
Jack handed her a fresh mug of coffee, black the way she liked it. She and her dad were roughly the same height; her eyes met his over the mug’s rim—blue eyes, worn as old denim.
“They’re tracking it, right,” she said tentatively. “So, we’ll know when and where it’s going to hit.”
“It’s headed southeast, but expected to circle back west. Right now, the National Weather Service is predicting landfall at New Bedford or Rhode Island. Some day this week.”
“South of us,” Dionis pointed out. “We’ll just get a ton of rain.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it turns west early—and makes landfall here. We have to evacuate Tuckernuck regardless, Di. Packing up the folks still left out there, and shutting down all the houses, will take every hour we’ve got left.”
Dionis thought of the undulating terrain of the smaller island, the way most of the homes were positioned on heights in the moors for the best possible view of the surrounding ocean. Hurricane winds would lift off a few roofs, and smash a lot of windows unless they could get them boarded up in time. Even then, a few of the houses—abandoned family properties, rarely inhabited—were in poor condition, just begging to be trashed by a violent cyclone. The Mathers couldn’t do much about those; they weren’t responsible for them. But if their clients’ houses were damaged, they’d be held accountable. Jack Mather was paid to provide off-islanders with peace of mind.
“I get it,” she muttered. “Even if it’s a false alarm, we have to act like it’s a crisis. We’ll take a financial hit if we’re not all over this.”
“Sooner rather than later. If the seas get too high for the work skiffs to navigate . . .” Jack glanced at his watch. “Be ready to leave in half an hour, okay? We’ll go house-to-house, figure out who’s still on Tuck and tell everybody we meet that they’ve got to be packed up and ready to leave by tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday morning at the latest.”
“I’ll print up a notice we can drop at each door,” Dionis suggested, “in case we miss somebody.”