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Peter hesitated for a moment. “It’s only something that happened a long time ago. Something that probably isn’t true.”

“Come on. Don’t dance around it,” Nathaniel said, tightening his hand into a fist.

“It’s something about what you were up to during the first part of the century,” Peter said. “Doesn’t that sound dramatic? The year 2000 sounds not so very long ago. But the beginning of the century was twenty-six years ago! How is that possible?”

At this, Nathaniel’s head began to pound. He’d been twenty-two at the start of the century, an entirely different man, with different commitments and different desires. His stomach tangled itself into knots.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Peter continued. “I wanted to check in on you and see how you’re doing. But it’s clear that you’re absolutely fine, just as you always were.”

Peter wished him good night and hung up, leaving Nathaniel in an anxious fit.

The year 2000. That was the same year Nathaniel had asked Cynthia for a divorce. It was also the same year that—admittedly—he’d had his only extramarital affair.

He wasn’t proud of it. He’d nipped it in the bud as soon as he could. Of course, ending it had been easier than expected, as his father had immediately launched him into another string of his companies, demanding more of his time and his heart than he’d known how to handle.

For the first time in ages, Nathaniel found himself thinking of Rose Calder, that beautiful young woman who’d worked at the resort where he and Cynthia occasionally stayed, drank fancy cocktails, and schmoozed with other members of the Nantucket elite.

Now, his hands shaking, he searched for Rose in an incognito window on his computer. Could she be the one causing this drama? Could she have seen him listed as a mayoral candidate and decided to blackmail him? But no. The first step of being blackmailed was hearing from the blackmailer, wasn’t it? They had to tell you what they knew and what they wanted from you, so that you could give them what they wanted and make them go away.

He’d, of course, witnessed his father being blackmailed at least three times.

But Rose Calder seemed to have an ordinary, beautiful island life. She owned an adorable bakery. She had a teenage daughter who sometimes smiled in photographs of the two of them. Rose seemed tremendously involved in islander activities. She’d raised money for the sailing club and had arranged a beach cleanup last year and the year before.

Nathaniel gazed at Rose’s gorgeous smile, his heart thumping. He yearned to go back to the summer of 2000, if only to listen to the way he and Rose had laughed together. He yearned for the simplicity of falling in love with a girl who actually liked him and didn’t care about who he was and what he could give her.

But—and maybe this was Cynthia’s voice, the one that lived in the back of his mind—Rose was the only woman he’d had an affair with over the years. The fact that it had happened during the first year of the 2000s, the first year of the century, the same year that, Peter said, Nathaniel had apparently been “up to no good,” was not easy to ignore. Plus, he knew that Rose’s internet presence didn’t tell the whole story. It seemed like she was single. Maybe she needed the money to keep the bakery alive. Maybe she was willing to do anything to get back at him for leaving the way he did (although he couldn’t fully remember how he’d left).

Maybe Nathaniel should arrange a trip to Nantucket just to check in on things. Maybe that was the best way to keep his mayoral campaign—and his plans to become president of the United States—solidly on the rails. He couldn’t let this fall apart, not for anyone.

12

Nantucket Island

Present Day

It was the first week of October when Willow zipped up her suitcase and walked to the bus station. Now that her mother was gone and she knew Nantucket Island answered a question she had about her origins, she couldn’t wait a moment longer to go. She’d talked with her music therapy clients and told them she was taking a leave of absence. Understanding she’d lost her mother, they wished her well and told her to call them when she got back.

“We need you,” a mother of an autistic child said as she said goodbye. “But we understand you need to take care of yourself first.”

When the bus sidled up and shifted, drawing its door open with a mighty gasp, Willow’s phone buzzed with a message from Ralph. In it, he listed his cousin Eleanor Pike’s address on Nantucket Island.

RALPH: I want you to be careful out there. And I want you to know that you always have a home with me. I’m not biologically family, but I’ve loved you like a daughter the whole way through.

Willow gasped with tears, then shoved her phone into her pocket and boarded the bus. She couldn’t turn back now.

On the ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket, Willow watched an older couple play cards. Willow and her mother had once played cards almost continually, battling one another at every two-person game they could find. They’d kept score on a pad of paper near the kitchen table so they could play while they ate sandwiches or prepared for the day. The games had continued long after Willow had moved out. They stopped only when Donna truly struggled to remember the rules.

Now that summer was over, and October had cast its gloomy grays and blues over Nantucket Island, it was easier to find a temporary lodging than Willow had thought. When she walked into a bed-and-breakfast in the Old Historic District and said she wanted a room for at least a week, maybe more, the woman behind the counter said, “You can stay as long as you like, honey. The longer you stay, the better the discount.” The woman introduced herself as Tracy and said that Nantucket was “deader than a doornail,” at least until the Christmas season.

“What brings you here?” Tracy asked as she showed Willow to her room upstairs.

“I love autumn,” Willow said with a shrug. “And I wanted to get out of Boston for a while.”

“You could never get me to live in the big city,” Tracy said with a shudder. “All that noise! I don’t know how anybody stands it.”

Willow got adjusted in her new room. She unpacked her belongings and lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, at an ornate lamp and a crack in the wall. She wondered if she’d really been conceived on this moody, gorgeous island in the middle of the Atlantic. She wondered if Tracy—or someone like Tracy—was her biological mother. She laughed to herself. She was truly on a wild goose chase. But she told herself she wasn’t emotionally ready to encounter Eleanor Pike, not yet.

That evening, Willow wandered through downtown, walked the boardwalk, then grabbed a generously buttered fish dinner at one of the top-recommended restaurants near the harbor. Because she was a woman dining alone, the servers doted on her and even brought her a free glass of white wine. The restaurant owner, a guy named James, told her his son, Tommy, was still single and that she could meet him if she wanted to.