Ethan asked to sit next to Lauren at dinner. She hadn’t seen the kid since last summer, and yet he loved her. She wished she could still see the world through the forgiving eyes of a six-year-old.
“I saved you this seat,” she said, smiling at him.
Ethan was quiet but achingly cute, with big brown eyes and the same high forehead and good cheekbones Lauren had inherited from her father. He looked more like Lauren than Stephanie, and Lauren wondered if her sister realized this, if he reminded her of when they had been young and best friends.
“I like this long chair,” Ethan said, looking up at Lauren.
“Me too. It’s kind of kooky. Like your great-grandmother,” she said. The wall banquette was upholstered in an outrageously bold chinoiserie pattern her grandmother once had identified as Chiang Mai Dragon. The walls were cerulean blue, the modern table white marble. Her grandmother had tried as hard as she could to do a simple beach house, but with some rooms she’d caved to her truest design impulses. The living room was all distressed wood and white linen, framed starfish, and several vintage suitcases stacked next to a towering bookshelf. But if you turned a corner, you’d find a velvet-upholstered modern wingback chair under a large-scale abstract painting. Lauren’s grandmother had a fondness for monogrammed trays and chinoiserie vases, and her collections of zebras—Lalique zebras, porcelain zebras, hand-carved wood zebras—were scattered everywhere.
“I don’t think that’s a nice thing to say,” said her mother. “And Ethan, hon, it’s called a banquette.”
The salt and pepper shakers were little bluebirds. Ethan reached for one.
Her mother’s marinated flank steak was set out on an American flag–pattern serving tray, a nod to the holiday weekend. Lauren appreciated the attempt to make things festive, but since her husband’s death, she’d found the sight of the flag funereal.
“This room is pretty crazy,” Stephanie declared, opening a bottle of wine. She seemed overdressed for dinner at home in her skintight jeans perfectly flared around her ankles and her strappy, high-heeled sandals. Lauren hadn’t changed out of her running clothes.
“I don’t think you need to drink tonight,” Beth said. Stephanie poured a glass anyway.
“Listen to your mother,” Howard said.
She ignored him too.
Ethan played with one of the bluebirds, tilting it so it spilled salt onto the table.
Stephanie went to the kitchen and returned with a plate of Bagel Bites. They actually looked pretty appealing. As if reading his aunt’s mind, Ethan smiled at Lauren, his big brown eyes wide and adoring, and handed her one of the crusty little circles.
“Aw, thanks, hon. Looks so good, but that’s yours.” She tousled his hair.
“Lauren, a friend of your father’s—you remember Simon Hanes—is opening a restaurant in the Borgata this summer. Seafood. Very fancy,” said her mother.
So that was why Neil Hanes was in town.
“Oh, well, that’s nice,” Lauren said, reaching for a piece of corn on the cob.
“Tell her, Beth,” her father prompted.
Her mother cleared her throat. “We were thinking, maybe once things got off the ground, you’d like to work there instead of that little place you’re at now?”
Lauren shook her head. She knew her parents meant well, but their pushing and prodding was getting more invasive. They just didn’t get it. Four years into her life on the island, at least her old friends had taken the hint and left her alone. At first, after Rory died, they offered to come to town for weekends or just to meet her for dinner. They sent invitations to weddings and birthday parties. For a while, she felt obligated to concoct some reasonable excuse to decline. And then, she did not.
“Why would I want to work at the Borgata?” Lauren said.
“Well, you’d be more in the swing of things. Less isolated. It might be fun. Even in the winter, you’d have steady business.” Lauren could hear the subtext: And you might meet someone.
“Thanks, but I’m happy where I am,” she said evenly. She couldn’t get angry with her mother. After all, her mother never got impatient with her. Beth, on top of the long hours she had always put in at Adelman’s, helped run Lauren’s foundation. It was so much work, more than Lauren had imagined when she began with the simple idea of raising money to donate to various causes in Rory’s memory. Her favorite organization was Warrior Camp, a place for soldiers to heal from the trauma of combat. And yet, as passionate as she felt about this work, when she was invited to fund-raisers or meetings, she would not leave the island.
Her mother glanced at her father: Well, I tried.
Silence fell over the table. The only sound was Ethan crunching on the mini–pizza bagels. Things were always awkward when the whole family was together, but it felt especially weighted tonight, and Lauren remembered what Stephanie had said about her mother seeming upset about something—although she had put it a little more crudely, as Stephanie tended to do. She watched her mother, looking for a clue that something was wrong, and decided it was probably just Stephanie’s divorce setting her mother on edge. Of course her parents had to be upset about it, though they couldn’t have been any more surprised by it than Lauren was. After Stephanie had gotten pregnant by “some rando,” as she put it, and decided to keep the baby, there was probably little that could surprise them.
“Speaking of Simon Hanes,” her mother said suddenly, “his son Neil is here for the summer. I’m sure you two met at some point. Very good-looking young man.”
“I literally just ran into him a few hours ago,” Lauren said.
“You didn’t! What a coincidence!” her mother said, way too delighted.
“You should spend some time with him. Very ambitious young man. He’s a screenwriter now,” her father added. “Moved to LA after graduating from Penn.”
“Yeah, no, thanks,” Lauren said.
“I’ll spend some time with him,” said Stephanie.
“You’re not even divorced yet!” their father said.
“Oh, as if that’s the issue. I could be totally single, never married, and you’d still only think of setting him up with Lauren.”
Lauren glanced uneasily at Ethan. “Hon, can you get me a bottle of water from the fridge?” she asked, and he dutifully scooted away. She turned to Stephanie. “Why do you have to make everything about you?”
“Like you don’t? Your whole Jackie Kennedy routine is getting old.”
“Really? You’re criticizing my life?”
In that moment, it was hard to believe they had once been close. But they had. Lauren, dark-haired, dark-eyed, quiet and watchful; Stephanie, blond and blue-eyed, outgoing and a chatterbox. A year apart, their mother called them “the twins.”
Whatever shortcomings Lauren had, she knew her sister would fill the gap. And vice versa. When Stephanie was flailing in ninth-grade math—tripped up by quadratic functions in algebra—Lauren, a year younger, tutored her. Stephanie might have been the blonde, but Lauren was the golden child—well behaved, smart, caring.
Stephanie had set the course of their school years when, struggling academically, she’d fought her parents when they tried to switch her from public middle school to private school. Why didn’t she want to go to private school? “Because it sucks,” she told Lauren. And so when Lauren finished elementary school, she too chose public school.
“Baldwin Academy is so much calmer. More intimate. It’s a better fit for you,” her mother had argued. This was a time when Lauren was struggling a bit with her weight. The public-school kids could be cruel. Of course, private-school girls were no better. But when parents pay twenty grand a year, the administration has an incentive to enforce some semblance of decorum. Lauren didn’t care; she was going to school with her big sister.
She was less confident that she’d made the right decision when high school loomed. By that time, Lauren had grown to her full height, five foot six. Her high cheekbones and brown eyes had won her comparisons to the lead actress on her favorite show, Alias. She was finally pretty. Nowhere near Stephanie’s loud, flagrant beauty, but pretty enough. Still, starting high school was scary, and starting high school at a big place like Lower Merion was terrifying. So many things could go wrong. You could end up anonymous—a loser. You could end up harassed—tormented on the notorious Freshman Day, the first Friday the thirteenth of the school year. Rumor had it that some girls got their entire ponytails cut off, and some boys were stuffed into lockers.
On the first day, some of Lauren’s friends’ older siblings pretended they didn’t know the younger ones, warned them not to even acknowledge them in the halls. But the scheduling gods had smiled on Lauren and given her the same lunch period as Stephanie. Stephanie, her long blond hair loose and lustrous, her perfect body poured into jeans and a ribbed tank top from a recent shopping spree at Urban Outfitters, had put her arm around Lauren and taken her from table to table.
“This is my baby sister,” Steph had said, first to the sophomores, then to a few tables of juniors. “Don’t fuck with her.”
“Hey, baby sister,” a few boys had said mockingly.
But no one fucked with her. Not once; not ever.
As teenagers, the sisters never had a reason to be competitive. They didn’t want the same things.
At least, not until Rory.
Now, Stephanie pushed her chair away from the table.
“Where are you going?” her mother said.
“Out.”
Stephanie stormed off. Lauren sighed. Drama queen.
“Aunt Lauren?” Ethan said, appearing in the doorway of the dining room. He had a bottle of water in one hand and the package of cinnamon buns from Casel’s in the other. “Can we open these now?”
“We’re still eating dinner, hon,” Beth said.
Ethan looked around the table. “Where’s Mom?”
Lauren and her mother exchanged a look.
“Sure,” Lauren said. “We can open that now.”
Matt slipped into a seat near the back of the NYU auditorium. There were a few open spots closer to the front of the room, but Matt always felt more comfortable near an exit route. Maybe this was a result of his early years working in undesirable locations, or maybe it was just a by-product of his natural impatience.
“Our thinking on head injury is evolving, and the way we research these injuries is changing.”
The irony was not lost on Matt that after avoiding science as much as possible for his entire academic life (there had been one particularly miserable eight weeks of summer-school chemistry), he now spent his free time sitting in dark lecture halls learning about it. His e-mail in-box was filled with event alerts for brain-injury panels the way it had once been stuffed with announcements of Red Hot Chili Peppers tour dates.
“Today, we’re challenging two core beliefs: First, that brain disease is caused by only those severe hits that result in concussions and, second, that brain injury is due to blows that cause the brain to bounce around inside the skull. That theory is incomplete.”
He’d been looking forward to this talk, a public lecture given by a visiting professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, for weeks. He’d requested an interview, but no luck. And considering the way things had gone with Craig Mason last week, it was just as well. American Hero was on pause. Maybe permanently this time.
“We believe long-term brain damage can result from the accumulation of minor blows. And we believe the real damage happens deeper inside the brain than previously thought and that this is a result of fibers within the white matter twisting after impact. Given these two things, sports helmets as they are currently designed do not protect players from concussions and the resulting long-term brain disease.”
The doctor introduced a bioengineer from the Camarillo Lab at Stanford. He’d developed a mouth guard that helped track the force of injury in football players.
“If you look at this screen, you’ll see the g-forces of ten hits,” the bioengineer said. Matt hated charts. He glanced down at the program he’d been handed at the entrance and flipped to the back. The Stanford study thanked a list of donors. Matt recognized many of the names, all the usual suspects in the arena of traumatic brain injury. The few he didn’t recognize, he circled now with a Sharpie. He never knew where he’d find an important lead. At one name toward the bottom, his hand froze. The Polaris Foundation.
He named him Polaris. What kind of name is that for a dog from a six-year-old boy? But he loved the stars.
Could it be a coincidence?
Matt slipped from the auditorium. The sunlight outside was blinding after the half hour he’d spent in darkness. Matt rushed into a coffee shop and pulled his laptop from his messenger bag while standing in line to buy the coffee that would rent him table space.
Squeezing into the corner of a long wooden communal table, Matt gave a cursory nod to the pretty blonde who smiled at him. Then he put on his headphones to discourage conversation and did a quick search for the Polaris Foundation. He wasn’t surprised to come up empty. A lot of public foundations didn’t have websites. Next, he tried the foundation-center database. He hadn’t used the site in a long time, not since the early days when he’d searched for any type of Rory Kincaid foundation. At the time, he’d had no doubt someone in Rory’s family would start a foundation in his name, and he’d been right: his brother Emerson had started the Rory Kincaid Scholarship Foundation for student athletes. But that had proved a dead end because Emerson wouldn’t speak to him and Lauren Kincaid wasn’t involved.
Matt’s login failed. His subscription had run out, and the credit card he originally used had been maxed out long ago. Without hesitating, he pulled out his debit card and used it for the subscription. This is how one slides into bankruptcy, he thought. But it was a fleeting concern, because within thirty seconds he had a name attached to the Polaris Foundation: Lauren Adelman.
Heart pounding, he dug deeper, searching for the Polaris Foundation’s IRS form 990-PF.
The address was in Longport, New Jersey.