ZOE

It was embarrassing for her now to think about how blessed her life had been before. The things she had taken for granted mocked her. She had known hardship, certainly—Hobson senior had dropped dead, she had been left to raise the twins alone—but for the most part Zoe considered herself lucky.

She had grown up the only child of older parents. Zoe had been an accident, born after her mother believed herself to be beyond conceiving. Her parents were professional, urbane, and erudite: her father had worked on Wall Street for years before opening his own brokerage firm in Stamford, Connecticut, and her mother was a vice president at Mount Sinai Hospital, a job she was unwilling to give up after her daughter was born.

Zoe had been raised by a string of beautiful blond au pairs who lived on the third floor of their stone mansion in Old Greenwich and who accompanied the family on vacations so that Zoe’s parents could dance the night away in the ballrooms of cruise ships. Their names remained with Zoe—Elsa, Pleune, Dagmar—though the girls themselves were interchangeable. Zoe had learned about nearly everything from these girls, including how to ride a two-wheeler, how to swim the backstroke, how to play “Chopsticks” on the piano, how to apply mascara to her lower lashes, and, later, how to roll her own cigarettes and tie the stem of a maraschino cherry into a knot with her tongue.

At fourteen Zoe had been sent out into the world—to Miss Porter’s, where her natural abilities got her decent grades but where she couldn’t summon the ambition to battle it out for the top ranks. She was happier being known as mellow and laid-back, a bohemian, a connoisseur of the Grateful Dead and CSNY and the Band. She wore long silk broomstick skirts or the batik sarong that her parents had sent back to her from their holiday in Bali. Zoe let her hairstyle get dangerously close to dreadlocks, inviting a firm talking-to by school administrators. She had her left ear pierced three times and got a tattoo of a dancing bear on her hip bone. While her mother never learned about the tattoo, the words of Zoe’s roommate Julia Lavelle, a straitlaced girl who wouldn’t even deign to watch Life of Brian in the commons room on a Saturday night, would later come back to haunt her: “That tattoo is going to be with you for the rest of your life, you know, and it might not seem so cool in thirty years.” Julia Lavelle had been correct: the rainbow-colored bear still graced her hip, and though the men she had been with—Jordan being the most vocal among them—claimed to find it cute, to Zoe herself it now seemed sorely ridiculous.

The summer between her junior and senior years of high school, Zoe’s parents took her to Italy for a month. Zoe had thought about declining this invitation, asking for the money instead, and following the Dead through the American Southwest and California. But the idea of actually spending time with her parents was novel enough to be intriguing.

And sure enough, that month in Italy had changed Zoe’s life. Her parents treated her like an adult. Her mother, using the lightest touch, suggested a haircut in Rome, and the result was a layered style that, unlike the tattoo, had weathered the test of time. Zoe selected an Italian perfume to replace her patchouli; she bought suede Fratelli Rosetti boots and retired her Birkenstocks. Her new look got immediate results. One night at a trattoria in Trastevere, Zoe met an American graduate student in art history named Alex, who invited her to share a bottle of wine and a plate of fried artichokes with him. Zoe lied and told him she was a sophomore at Vassar. She lost her virginity to Alex (last name unknown, a source of minor embarrassment now) in a studio apartment in the shadow of the Vatican. She walked past Saint Peter’s Square and back to her hotel at two o’clock in the morning, feeling as if she had just conquered the free world. Alex’s body had been as smooth as the surface of a Bernini sculpture.

The only thing that would have made it better, she thought, was if Alex had been Italian.

Next time.

But for Zoe, the most important aspect of Italy was this: it was there that she discovered food. This happened in a tiny restaurant in Ravenna, where she and her parents had traveled to see the Basilica of San Francesco, the site of Dante’s funeral. One of Zoe’s father’s impossibly sophisticated friends had recommended a restaurant to them, a place with just fourteen seats, where the wife cooked and the husband waited on tables. Zoe ate squid ink ravioli stuffed with fresh ricotta in a truffled cream sauce, grilled langostini, and crema calda with wild strawberries. Her parents poured her wine on the implicit understanding that she was to drink it not to get drunk but to enhance the pleasure of the food.

God, yes! Zoe thought with each mouthful. Ecstasy! Better than the sex she had so recently been introduced to by Alex Last-name-unknown. The meal was transcendent. Her parents enjoyed it, but it wasn’t the epiphany for them that it was for their daughter. They had tasted food like this before. For Zoe, it was like the sun’s coming up. Before they left the restaurant, Zoe peered into the kitchen at the wife/chef. Her hair was in a tight bun like a ballerina’s; her eyes were narrowed in concentration as she flipped mushrooms in a sauté pan. Zoe could hear opera playing in the kitchen, and she saw that the woman’s lips were moving. Yes! Zoe thought. Yes!

Zoe’s parents had no qualms about sending her to the Culinary Institute. True, it wasn’t Vassar (where her mother had gone) or Penn (where Julia Lavelle was headed); around Miss Porter’s, it had the whiff of a vocational school. But her parents recognized Zoe’s passion for food, and to their minds, her becoming a chef was preferable to her joining a nudist colony or moving to Haight-Ashbury to volunteer for some left-wing cause they’d never even heard of.

The CIA had led Zoe not only to her career as a chef but also, of course, to Hobson senior, who had in short order made her a mother. She had endured some dark, dark times: Hobson’s death, the deaths of both her parents, the harrowing challenge of raising two children by herself. But at some point—when the kids were seven or eight—Zoe began to feel as if she had emerged from a tunnel. She thought, The hard stuff is behind me now. She thought, I have a good job, a house on the beach, a group of close friends to do fun things with, and two exceptional kids. She didn’t have love, but that seemed okay, maybe even preferable. The kids were her love life. And she maintained her freedom.

And so, how how how could she explain Jordan?

They had been friends for years and years, and yet now Zoe found it hard to recall a time when they were just friends.

She had spent her first years on Nantucket living in a bubble. She had taken the job with the Allencast family and enrolled the kids at Island Day Care. Zoe met a few other working parents while picking up and dropping off Penny and Hobby, but they were all of them so busy that their interactions remained superficial. Zoe frequently worked weekends, when she hired a babysitter. She always had Mondays off, but on Mondays the rest of the world worked; it wasn’t easy to forge a social life on Mondays alone. Zoe tried to get out. Her first year on-island, she attended Town Meeting and marveled at how everyone in the high school auditorium knew everyone else, friendships that clearly spanned centuries. This was one of those times when Zoe wished she’d moved to a less insular community, maybe a city, someplace with single mothers in abundance. But it was at this very Town Meeting that Zoe first laid eyes on Jordan Randolph. He was presenting an article, wearing suit pants and a crisp striped shirt and an elegant leather-banded watch—all of which screamed lawyer to Zoe, though she liked his curly black hair that grew past his collar, and also his rimless glasses. She asked the woman sitting next to her, “Who is that?” Zoe could still remember the look of wariness that came over the woman’s face. Zoe had revealed herself as an interloper, from Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps, or beyond.

“That’s Jordan Randolph,” the woman said. “The publisher of the newspaper.”

Ahhhh, Zoe thought. That’s Jordan Randolph. She had heard his name, of course. Mr. Allencast liked to complain about Jordan Randolph’s liberal politics, which had endeared Zoe to the mysterious Mr. Randolph before she ever saw him. She had been intrigued, even back then.

She didn’t actually meet Jordan until she enrolled the twins in preschool. The Children’s House was the only Montessori on the island, and it was difficult to get into. Rumor had it that people called the school from the delivery room of Nantucket Cottage Hospital and asked to have their newborns put on the waiting list. At first the twins weren’t admitted. Zoe was certain this was because she was a transplant and a single working mother, and because placing two children in the school was five times as hard as placing one. She was secretly crushed, but she resigned herself to keeping the twins in day care. They would survive. However, when Mrs. Allencast discovered that the twins hadn’t been admitted, she made a call—she and Mr. Allencast donated to the school annually—and sure enough, an invitation to enroll them soon followed.

At the Children’s House, the level of parent involvement was high. There were meetings and fund raisers and potluck dinners and slide shows and student presentations. There were five precious minutes every weekday morning when Zoe stood in the cramped coatroom while Penny and Hobby changed out of their street shoes and into slippers, then solemnly kissed her good-bye and disappeared down the stairs for songs and story time.

Zoe first saw Lynne Castle in that coatroom. Lynne was instantly friendly, offering her hand, introducing herself. She was the mother of Demeter, who was the same age as the twins, though Lynne was quick to add that she also had two older boys who had gone through the school a few years earlier, making her something of a fixture there. In fact, she was president of the Board of Directors, but she said she was always thrilled to meet young, new parents who might, somewhere down the line, take over leadership roles, because really, she confided, she was getting too old for this.

Zoe had laughed. Lynne was charming. She was a little older than Zoe herself, maybe as many as ten years older, with a stolid, matronly look about her. She had graying hair that she wore pushed behind her ears, carried about thirty unneeded pounds, and boasted a wardrobe straight out of the Orvis catalog, circa 1978. Zoe wondered what she had looked like to Lynne, with her zippy haircut, the ends newly dyed red, and her dramatic makeup and her houndstooth pants and her chef’s clogs. In hindsight, she supposed that she must have resembled a cross between Cyndi Lauper and Julia Child. But Lynne Castle seemed to like her anyway.

Zoe met Al Castle and Jordan Randolph the following February, when the school held what was known as Fathers’ Night. The twins had been talking about this occasion for weeks, and it bound Zoe’s stomach up in knots. She had hoped to give it a miss altogether, but the twins told her about the pictures they had drawn and the preparations they had made, and Zoe thought, All right, fine, I’ll go. She wasn’t sure the teachers would even let her through the door, though they knew her situation. There wasn’t one suitable man in Zoe’s life who could fill in. She thought briefly of asking Mr. Allencast to go, but the twins were terrified of him, and Zoe wasn’t all that sure that her employer, at age sixty-eight, would want to accompany her three-year-olds to this lofty event.

And so Zoe attended Fathers’ Night on her own. Her presence was alternately ignored and lauded. It made certain fathers uncomfortable, and to those men she wanted to say, “Listen, my husband is dead.” One father, a man Zoe now knew to be Lars Peashway, Anders’s father, had clapped her on the shoulder and said, “You’re very brave.” And Zoe thought, Brave? I’m not brave, mister. I’m just doing what has to be done.

The only fathers who didn’t treat Zoe like an oddity or a martyr were Al Castle and Jordan Randolph. Right off the bat, they included her. They told her that their kids, Demeter and Jake, talked incessantly about her twins.

“I think Jake is especially fond of Penny,” Jordan said.

“I think Demeter is especially fond of Hobby,” Al said.

The two men gave each other the wink-wink, and all three of them laughed. Zoe knew that Jordan was Jordan because she had attended Town Meeting, but she let him introduce himself.

“I’m Jordan Randolph.” He was wearing a sapphire-blue sweater and jeans and sneakers. The beautiful watch with the leather band. The rimless glasses. There was no reason, now, for Zoe to be anything but truthful about it: she had fallen in love with him way back then.

“You may know my wife?” he said. “Ava? She has the long braid? She’s Australian?”

“Yes, yes,” Zoe said. Of course, the most beautiful and best-dressed mother in the coatroom, the one with the cool accent whom Zoe had overheard talking about going to the U2 concert at Boston Garden—that was Jordan Randolph’s wife.

“Jake is our only child,” Jordan said. “But we’re hoping for another.”

“Well,” Zoe said, thinking, Dammit! “Good luck with that.”

Willing herself not to moon any further over Jordan, Zoe then turned her attention to Al Castle, who introduced himself and said, “You must know my wife, Lynne?”

“Ah, yes,” Zoe said. Al and Lynne were a perfect match in their upstanding, verging-on-middle-aged ordinariness. “I like Lynne very much.” This was true. Lynne was the only mother who consistently said hello to her and stopped to chat with her in the parking lot. Lynne knew that Zoe was a private chef for the Allencasts, and Zoe knew that Lynne was starting up a permitting business at home now that Demeter was in school all day.

“She says you drive a Karmann Ghia,” Al said. “Is that true?”

“Guilty as charged,” Zoe said.

“What year?” Al asked.

“Nineteen sixty-nine.”

“The best,” Al said. “I own the car dealership on Polpis Road. If you ever decide to trade that baby in, I’ll give you an unbeatable price.”

“I can’t believe you’re talking business to the woman,” Jordan said. He stared at Zoe for a second, enough time for her to register: blue sweater, blue eyes. Then he smiled. “I’m off to do puzzles,” he said. “Wanna come?”

What had followed was no less profound than an adoption. Gradually, over the years, Zoe had been taken in by the Randolphs and the Castles. They became family. Lynne Castle was officially Zoe’s closest friend, though the person Zoe spent the most time courting was Ava Randolph. She wanted Ava to like her. Ava reminded her of a smoothly polished stone, with her long, honey-blond hair, her perfect skin, green eyes, and rarely seen dimples. But like a stone, she was cool, and not just with Zoe but with everyone. She disliked Nantucket and fancied herself a sort of captive there; she was always talking about how she was about to go off to, or had just come back from, Australia. Her own sun-drenched country, that place where she’d rather be. It was Ava’s aloofness that captured Zoe’s imagination. She played hard-to-get, and Zoe wanted to win her over. She wanted to win!

For years Zoe tried. For years she beat herself up over it, thinking, Ava doesn’t like me. She thinks I’m loud and obvious and American. She thinks I’m a terrible mother because I work. Ava didn’t have a job outside of her home; she devoted all her time and energy to parenting Jake. She didn’t have to find a babysitter or, like Zoe, occasionally leave the children at home by themselves because she had to cater a dinner party on a Saturday night. She didn’t leave permission slips unsigned or forget sneakers for the kids’ phys. ed. days, or space out on getting cards for the class on Valentine’s Day. These misdemeanors were Zoe’s and Zoe’s alone, and she couldn’t help feeling that Ava Randolph might just be writing them all down on a list somewhere, a list that she secretly showed to Jordan every night before dinner.

Had it always ultimately been about Jordan? Zoe wondered. She’d been trying to woo the wife, but was it really the husband she wanted? Even back when Zoe first knew them, Ava and Jordan had openly bickered and argued. Zoe had always taken Ava’s side, even when she thought Jordan was right. Eventually Zoe became the person Ava complained to about her husband: Jordan’s breath stank in the morning; he had never once emptied the dishwasher; he refused to travel back with her to Australia no matter how she begged and pleaded, so that she and Jake always had to go alone; he was obsessed with the newspaper. Ava had never known a man who was so absorbed in his work; in Australia, she said, even bank presidents stopped to have a coffee in the afternoon. Even the mining magnates and the real estate moguls took Sundays off and pushed their children in their prams and sat down to leisurely lunches. But on Sundays Jordan wouldn’t leave his house until he had devoured every inch of the Sunday New York Times; Ava wasn’t allowed to speak to him if he had a section of the newspaper in his hands. “He doesn’t get it,” Ava said. “He doesn’t get me! We want two different things!” All Jordan wanted was to work; all Ava wanted was another baby. Zoe would listen to her alternately yearning and complaining. She prayed every night for another baby, a brother or a sister for Jake. Ava told Zoe that a baby was the only thing that would make her life bearable if she had to stay in this country. This left Zoe feeling embarrassed about her own matched set of children. She assured Ava, “It’s going to happen for you, I can feel it. You will get your baby.”

There had been nights when Zoe truly believed that all she wanted was for Ava to become pregnant, even when the dinner party was over and the Castles and the Randolphs all walked out the door together, arm in arm and laughing, on their way to their cars, leaving Zoe standing in the doorway all alone.

She had been hiding among them. She was the lonely, swaying sapling amid the tall, rooted redwoods that were those other couples, her friends.

When Jake and the twins were in sixth grade, Ava finally did get pregnant. Zoe had to admit she’d been shocked by the news. Ava had been trying to conceive for so long that Zoe had given up hope on her behalf. She had become, in Zoe’s mind, a tragic figure, a woman who was never going to get the one thing she most wanted.

But then it seemed that she was.

And after all those years of hoping and wishing for her friend, Zoe was even more taken aback to find herself overcome by jealousy. It was as undeniable as a stain across her face and neck. Could anyone else see it?

But with the pregnancy, Zoe and Ava grew even closer. Ava literally let her hair down—took it out of its tight braid, let it flow down her back. She was exhausted and nauseated, but she had moments of playfulness. She made fun of herself—her flatulence, her constant need to pee. She leaned on Zoe, asking if Jake could spend the night at Zoe’s house so that she, Ava, could sleep in. Jake had never been allowed to sleep over before, presumably because Zoe let the twins watch R-rated movies and gave them Laurie Colwin’s slumped brownies within an hour of bedtime. Ava started confiding in Zoe about how much she missed her mother and sisters back home in Australia. She couldn’t believe she was going to give birth to another American, she said.

And then the baby was born, and there was a celebration!

Lynne called Zoe at work to tell her that Ava’s water had broken and she was in labor, seven centimeters dilated. There would quite possibly be a baby by lunchtime. Zoe got off work at two o’clock and raced home to pick up the wrapped box containing a tiny pink layette (Ava was convinced the baby was a girl). She then waited for the twins to be disgorged from the door of Cyrus Peirce Middle School. They were as excited as Zoe was; Jake had been plucked out of the middle of social studies by his father.

Zoe’s first instinct was to drive right to the hospital to wait for the baby to be born. But once the twins were ensconced in the Karmann Ghia, she had second thoughts. They had not technically been invited to wait at the hospital. They were close friends of the Randolphs’, but they weren’t family. But then again, Ava had no other family on the island, and Jordan was an only child. Should Zoe drive to the hospital? She was paralyzed by indecision, feeling suddenly insecure about her status in the Randolphs’ life. She decided to just drive home and wait for the call.

At that moment her cell phone rang. It was Jordan.

“It’s a boy!” he said. “Eight pounds four ounces, ten fingers, ten toes. Mother and child are both doing fine.”

“A boy!” Zoe cried out.

“A boy!” Penny and Hobby shouted.

“Ernest Price Randolph,” Jordan said. “Baby Ernie.”

“Oh,” Zoe said. “Congratulations!”

“Come!” Jordan said. “Come see him!”

Zoe had to admit, it was one of the most joyful moments she had ever experienced on Nantucket. Ava lay in bed, looking as if she had been through a war: she was pale, and there were bruised circles under her eyes, and her hair was matted to her head like a wet mop. But she was triumphant, she was almost forty years old and she had fucking done it, delivered a baby whole and healthy. The baby was asleep in Jake’s arms, and Penny and Hobby started arguing about who would hold him next. Zoe kissed Ava’s clammy forehead, and tears filled her eyes. She didn’t have words; the moment was simply too big. She handed Ava her present, and Ava unwrapped the sweet pink outfit and they both burst out laughing, and the tears found their release. Then Jordan walked in carrying a bottle of champagne. A moment later Al, Lynne, and Demeter Castle arrived, and Ava showed them the pink outfit, and there was more laughter. Penny scooted down the hall with a handful of dollar bills to get sodas from the vending machine, and Jordan popped the champagne, and Zoe snapped pictures of Hobby, who at age thirteen was already six foot one, holding tiny baby Ernie. Lynne Castle hugged Ava, and Al handed Jordan a Cuban cigar that he’d gotten on his last business trip to Quebec. Ted Field poked his head in to shake hands with Jordan, then Al, and to make sure Ava was feeling okay. Jordan handed Zoe a paper cup of champagne, and Zoe toasted him and looked into his blue eyes, and she felt a moment of pure happiness for these people who had gotten their heart’s desire.

Then Zoe accepted the sweet package that was Ernest Price Randolph, and she quietly introduced herself to him. “I’m Zoe,” she said. “I’m your friend.” Then she named the other people in the room: “Your mommy, your daddy, your big brother, Jake. Dr. Field, who delivered you. And over there are my babies, Penny and Hobby. And that’s Al Castle and Lynne Castle and Demeter. Look how lucky you are, baby Ernie,” she whispered. She raised him up and kissed his impossibly soft cheek. “Look at all the people who love you already.”

Two months later, at six o’clock in the morning on Monday, March 31, Zoe got a dramatically different call from Lynne Castle. She could barely make sense of what Lynne was trying to tell her: Ava had gone into the nursery to check on the baby, and…

“What?” Zoe whispered. She had heard what Lynne was saying—“stopped breathing,” “SIDS,” “died in his crib”—but her mind wouldn’t allow it. She had seen Ava and Ernie only a few days before, at the post office. Ava had been standing in line, waiting to pick up yet more baby gifts sent from Australia, and Zoe had offered to hold Ernie while she carried the presents out to her car. Ernie was more alert than the last time Zoe had seen him. He could focus his eyes, which were the deep, concentrated color that Zoe could think of only as Jordan blue. She had bounced him a little; the warm, curved weight of his head fit in her hand like a ball. She had kissed him repeatedly, and he had gurgled, then smiled. Zoe was in love with her twins, she positively adored them, but they were hitting the hard, bumpy road of adolescence. Penny had just gotten her first period and was prone to unpredictable mood swings; Hobby’s feet stank up the whole house. Zoe held Ernie and thought, I want another little one just like this.

Ernie, baby Ernie, had stopped breathing. Ava had gone into the nursery and picked him up and he had been as cold and inert as a doll. He was dead.

Poor Ava, oh poor Ava!

At the graveside funeral, Ava wore a black dress. Beneath the dress, her breasts had been bound with Ace bandages to keep her milk from coming in. The other children—Jake and Hobby and Penny and Demeter—released white balloons into the sky, a gesture that Lynne had dreamed up as a way to help them grapple with this unexpected death: little Ernie’s soul had been released from his body and carried off by the wind, she told them.

Zoe thought this was a gross oversimplification with a little bit of mystical nonsense thrown in, but she sobbed along with everyone else when the balloons were released. She, along with everyone else, waved good-bye.

Lynne Castle took charge of organizing a meal dropoff for the Randolph family, but Zoe disregarded the schedule and took something of her own over every single day: white chicken chili for Jordan, a delicate vegetable terrine for Ava, pizza pot pie for Jake. She made blueberry muffins and squeezed pitchers of fresh orange juice. She baked loaves of sourdough bread. She made pan after pan of slumped brownies. Sometimes she handed these dishes to Jordan, who always thanked her with a depleted smile. At other times Jordan’s car was gone, which meant Ava was alone inside, but Zoe never mustered the courage to knock; she just left the dishes on the front porch.

If she wants to talk, Zoe told herself, she’ll call me.

But Ava never called, and what at first passed for a respectful silence turned into a gully, then a canyon.

Months passed, summer arrived. The Randolph family didn’t make it to the beach even once. Zoe called Jordan at the newspaper and begged him to let her take Jake to the beach with the twins. Just one Sunday? Just for a few hours?

Jordan breathed heavily into the phone. “My hands are tied,” he said. “Ava wants to keep him home.”

“For how long?” Zoe asked. “Jesus Christ, Jordan, the kid is thirteen years old. He needs to be outside, with his friends.”

“Zoe,” Jordan said. “Please.”

Zoe put a handwritten note in the mail to Ava: I realize how badly you must be hurting. Please know I’m here anytime you want to talk.

Zoe heard nothing back. It began to feel as if they’d never been friends at all. Zoe attended all the usual summer parties alone, or with the Castles, and she fielded inquiries about how Ava was doing. At first she wasn’t sure what to say. Then she came up with a few lines and repeated them: “She and Jordan are circling the wagons, trying to get through this. Thanks for asking.” What she might just as well have said was, “Why are you asking me? I have no idea.”

Zoe broached the topic with Lynne Castle.

“Ava has gone completely silent,” Zoe said. “She’s shut me out.”

Lynne said, “I make overtures, but I don’t get very far.”

Zoe wanted to know what that meant, exactly. Did Ava talk to Lynne? Did she answer the phone when Lynne called?

“Jordan and Jake have been over for dinner a few times,” Lynne said.

Zoe’s thoughts fluttered like a flock of startled birds. “They’ve been over for dinner?” she repeated.

Lynne pursed her lips, as though tasting something sour. “I think Ava is being especially hard on Jordan. Because of, you know…”

“Because of what?” Zoe asked.

Lynne sighed. “It’s just so sad,” she said.

As the holidays approached, Zoe took on more private catering jobs. She spent time with the twins, cheering at Hobby’s football games, delivering Penny to singing lessons.

She thought, Of course Lynne has had Jordan and Jake to dinner, she can ask them to dinner because she’s married to Al; they’re a respectable family. But if I asked Jordan and Jake to dinner, it would look like… well, it would look like something else.

Christmas Stroll weekend arrived. The Stroll was Zoe’s favorite event of the year. Downtown was a holiday wonderland. Christmas trees, lit and decorated, lined Main Street; the shop windows were filled with elves and candy canes and glittering glass balls. On the Saturday of Stroll weekend, Main Street was closed to traffic so the crowds could walk up and down the cobblestones, listening to the Victorian carolers, sipping hot chocolate, and waiting for Santa to arrive on the ferry.

That year was especially busy for Zoe. She was catering a large party Saturday night at a home on India Street. The woman throwing the party, Ella Mangini, was one of Zoe’s favorite new clients. She had silver hair that she wore in a swinging bob and an irrepressible sense of fun. She drank a glass of champagne with Zoe in the kitchen before the guests arrived, wearing just her slip and fuzzy slippers. Ella was unmarried, though she intimated that she’d had many, many lovers. She was aghast when Zoe said that she hadn’t dated anyone seriously since the children were small.

“The kids are enough to fill my emotional life,” Zoe said. “The kids are, most of the time, too much.”

“But you’re so young!” Ella said. “What about your needs?”

Zoe upended the contents of her champagne flute into her mouth. Her needs? There had been the occasional one-night stand; there had been the front-desk clerk at the hotel in Cabo five nights in a row, which for Zoe had constituted a long-term relationship.

“What about them?” Zoe said.

After the party was over, Ella returned to the kitchen alone, though Zoe saw a man in a tuxedo standing just outside the door. Ella poured Zoe another glass of champagne, pressed two hundred and fifty dollars into her hand, and said, “The food was outstanding—you’re a genius, and I adore you. Now go out and enjoy. The night is but a pup!”

Zoe had walked down the friendship stairs of Ella Mangini’s house just as it started to snow. All around her Christmas lights were twinkling, and snowflakes were drifting from the sky. The champagne had created a fizzy bubble of possibility in her chest. The night is but a pup! Penny was sleeping at Annabel Wright’s house, and Hobby was at a basketball tournament in West Bridgewater. Zoe could go home to her deserted, freezing-cold cottage, or she could proceed downtown and join the celebration.

Once at her car, she removed her chef’s jacket. Underneath she wore a sparkly red T-shirt, a concession to the season. She fluffed her hair in the rearview mirror, put on red lipstick, and thought, Okay, here I go.

She wandered down Main Street and stopped in at the Club Car, because she heard the strains of the piano and she knew that the owner, Joe, was sure to buy her a drink.

Once she had wedged herself into the packed bar, though, she felt self-conscious. She had been single basically her entire adult life; she was no stranger to walking into a bar alone. But in recent years she had grown used to the comfortable presence of the Castles and the Randolphs; without them she felt stripped, vulnerable. The piano player was banging out “Hotel California,” and people were throwing back their heads and singing along. Zoe felt a pang of regret, because how wonderful would it be if she could just get a drink and join in? If she were anywhere else, she would do it, but this island was a fishbowl, and if the eyes and ears of Nantucket saw and heard her here alone on the Saturday of Christmas Stroll, drinking and singing, people would either feel sorry for her or suspect that she was up to no good.

Someone grabbed her arm, roughly, and she spun around and landed in an empty bar stool.

“Zoe.”

Zoe looked up, suspecting that the grabber was Joe, the owner, but as it turned out, it wasn’t Joe at all.

It was Jordan.

Jordan had her by the arm. Jordan was sitting on the stool next to hers. Jordan had a beer in front of him and a glass of water. He always drank the two things side by side so he wouldn’t get “carried away,” a habit that Zoe found absurd.

“Jordan?” she said. The last person she’d ever expected to see out at the Club Car on the Saturday of Stroll weekend was Jordan Randolph. He hadn’t set foot out of the house other than to go to work (and, she supposed, to dinner at the Castles’) in eight months.

Zoe scanned the seats next to Jordan, looking for Al Castle or Marnie Fellowes, his managing editor, or someone else who would help make sense of his presence here—but on Jordan’s other side was an attractive older woman wearing Botox, a fur coat, and a New Jersey accent, the unofficial uniform of Christmas Stroll.

Zoe squinted at him. The evening had been surreal enough thus far that she believed this might be a vision or a dream, like something out of A Christmas Carol, Jordan appearing next to her like the Ghost of Best Friends Past.

“I’m sorry,” Zoe said. “What are you doing here?”

He raised his hand and ordered her a glass of champagne. She waited for the drink to arrive, and then she raised the glass to him and said, “Happy Stroll.”

He didn’t respond. He raised his water glass and touched it to hers.

She said, “I’m curious enough to ask again: what are you doing here?”

He spun his glass of water, then drank it down until the ice rattled. “I thought getting out would make me feel better,” he said. “But I feel worse.”

Zoe nodded. She could see how this might be the case. She said, “Want to go for a walk?”

He pulled out his wallet and put a twenty on the bar, and Zoe took another pull off her flute of champagne, then followed him out. The piano player was just launching into “Daydream Believer,” which was an old favorite of Zoe’s, and she felt another pang of regret at leaving, but if the point of “going out” was to commune with other people and make a meaningful connection, then she could leave the song behind and walk up Main Street in the falling snow with her broken friend.

It was after that very short walk—less than two hundred yards to where Jordan had parked his new Land Rover (new since Ernie’s death, a kind of consolation prize for Ava, who had been asking for a new car for years, though now she drove the thing only to the cemetery to place flowers on Ernie’s grave)—that Jordan told Zoe the thing that had eluded her but that somehow explained everything.

He leaned against the driver’s side of the car, snow falling on the shoulders of his shearling jacket, snow falling in his dark curls, snow falling on the lenses of his glasses. She was tempted to take his glasses off and clean them on the hem of her shirt, but she was afraid that any sudden movement on her part might break the spell. Something was happening here, but she didn’t know what.

Jordan wiped his glasses himself, then he said, “I was at work.”

“Ah,” Zoe said. She thought he meant earlier that night, but his tone indicated that he was making some sort of confession. “You were at work? And then you decided to come out?” she prompted.

“No,” he said. “The night Ernie died. I wasn’t home.” His eyes locked on Zoe’s face. She saw the culpability; some of that, no doubt, he felt himself, but some of it must have been pressed on him. “I was at work.”

Zoe nodded slowly. He opened his mouth to speak, but she raised her hand. “You don’t have to explain,” she said. “I get it.” Zoe understood everything in that instant. She knew why Ava couldn’t talk to anyone, she knew why Jake was in lockdown, she knew it all, suddenly, with that one sentence: “I was at work.” She knew why the Randolph family was so lost.

Zoe reached out for him. It was the only thing she could think of to do. Jordan gathered her up in his arms and held her against him. They hugged fiercely, she breathed in the smell of him, she absorbed the shuddering of his sobs, she shushed him as she would have done with one of her kids. She was aware of his body, a man’s body up against hers after so much time. She felt the heat and the chemistry. “What about your needs?” Ella Mangini had asked. How easy it would be to get drawn in here, how easy to raise her face and kiss him! But Zoe was not that woman. She wasn’t going to capitalize on Jordan’s sadness. And she didn’t give him the words he so desperately needed to hear—though she did indeed believe them to be true—until ten or twelve minutes later, when she was back on India Street and safely tucked into her Karmann Ghia. It was only then that she texted those words to him:

Jordan, it’s not your fault.

But during that brief interval when she was in his arms she seized the full rush of feeling for just a second, just long enough to admit to herself that the real reason she hadn’t dated anyone in nearly ten years wasn’t the twins but rather the fact that for all that time she had been in love with one person: this man. He was the only thing she wanted in the world. But she wouldn’t get it. She pulled away. Jordan reached for her, he actually yanked at the sleeve of her coat, but Zoe stepped up onto the sidewalk and said, “I’m going home.”

“No,” he said.

She knew him well enough not to engage in an argument with him. To argue with Jordan Randolph was to lose.

Zoe headed down Centre Street toward her car, enjoying the small pleasure of her footprints in the fresh snow.