Clearly it would be a mistake to get involved with a firm associate. But Christ, was she firm. Ha!

Carla had tits that she didn't mind leaving mostly exposed. They'd be nice and heavy, a real handful. And a trim little ass. She wore short skirts all spring and favored jeans on dress-down Fridays that showed a thin slice of skin when she sat down. Sometimes she wore those summery dresses that would cling. He liked to think about what she'd look like with nothing on. He thought he pretty much knew.

But it was Lottie's name he called out when he came.

Jon wrung out the washcloth and shut off the water.

The icy blast of the air conditioner hit him as he stepped back into the bedroom. At least without Lottie here he could keep it as cold as he wanted. He went to get a shirt from the drawer and found he was on his last one. Jesus, Lottie. She knew he'd need shirts for the whole time she was gone.

The phone buzzed. It was her.

hi sweetie- shirts being delivered later today. Ethan sounds like he's having a great time w ur folks. caroline dester says hello. did you open the pics? i think you should come here this weekend. love you, Lx The only thing that registered in her note was the name Caroline Dester. Caroline Dester was in Maine with Lottie? The Caroline Dester?

Jon wrapped the towel around his waist tightly and started a text. Then he thought he'd better phone. He pressed her speed dial but of course he couldn't get through. This whole week it had been impossible to reach her. She must be e-mailing from the coffee shop on the mainland. Why couldn't he get through?

The phone swooshed again.

PS: I think Beverly Fisher could use a good lawyer. Lx "Lottie, what are you talking about?" he said aloud. He didn't know who the hell Beverly Fisher was but Caroline Dester was worth a fortune. The Desters were surely represented by some ancient white-shoe firm, but there could be some billing for a scrappy IP attorney like him if he had an in. What was Lottie doing hobnobbing with Desters? Wasn't she sharing the house with that other mom from Ethan's school?

Jon pressed Lottie's speed dial again. Where the hell was she? And now he was getting late for work. It was another rotten day in August and the last thing he wanted to do was have to walk fast and sweat through his jacket. Carla sweated, but in a good way.

The landline rang.

"Lottie?" But it was his mother. He couldn't believe he hadn't checked before he picked up.

"Jon, dear." He could tell from the sound of her voice that something wasn't right.

"What's the matter? Is Ethan okay?" His heart raced.

"No, Ethan's fine," she said. Jon let out his breath. "But we need you to take him back home this weekend. Your stepfather has a summer flu and I can't take care of them both. I'm sorry, Jonnie. I called Lottie so she could break it to you but I couldn't get through to her."

"Can't you have him sleep over at Mrs. what's-her-name next door and watch him during the day?"

His mother didn't respond, as she tended not to when Jon turned into the eleven-year-old version of himself. Which happened every time he spoke with her.

He sighed extravagantly. "Okay, Mom, I'll take him for the weekend. But I can't deal with him next week, too." His stepdad was probably not that sick. "Somebody in this family has to work every day and right now that person seems to be me." God, I am a spoiled brat, he thought. "Are you going to bring him down?"

"No, Jon, I am not going to bring him down. You're going to come here, pick up your son, and take care of him. Come up tonight after work and then the two of you can leave in the morning. I'm sorry for Ethan but I can't take care of both of them. Call in sick."

"People don't get sick at law firms, Mother," Jon said. "I haven't taken a sick day since I got there."

"All the more reason to now," she said. Her tone was irksome but reasonable. "They won't fire you for being sick."

"Ha." Little did she know. Partners were fired for sneezing too much. And the goddamn Acela cost a fortune.

"I'll pay for the train fare, Jon. I know money is tight. Here's Ethan."

"Hey, bud," said Jon. All he heard was Ethan's breathing. "Buddy?"

"Daddy?" said Ethan.

"Yes, little buddy?"

"Can you come get me?"

Goddamn his mother.

"Okay, guy. Daddy will come get you."

He'd have to call in sick. He hoped no one would move into his office-such as it was-while he was gone. He'd take his mom's car and drive up to Maine like Lottie said he should for the weekend. Leave Ethan there for the week or even the month. And then he'd head back to the office to see that narrow slice of skin again.

The next morning, after a dreamless night of uninterrupted sleep, Rose did not feel the urge to go into town, either to get groceries or to find a signal. Now that they'd stayed more than a week on Little Lost, having days at a stretch without getting in a car and going to the mainland was much more appealing than not. Nor did she want to knock on the door of another cottager to use his landline, especially since now she awoke with the sun. Fred used to kiss her hands and call her Rosie-fingered Dawn.

Hopewell was on the west side of Little Lost Island, so they did not get a direct view of the sunrise from anywhere at the cottage. That was a small price to pay for the sunsets they saw, looking at another cluster of islands off in the distance (Mount Desert? Deer Isle? Rose wasn't sure). Even so, the ambient light of dawn, and the stillness of the earth as it awakened, was enough to get Rose out of bed, into something resembling clothing, and out of the cottage to greet the day.

The coffee situation was still not settled but Lottie had found one of those drip cones for pour-overs and made a filter out of a paper towel, so Rose did the same, as they kept failing to add coffee filters to their shopping list. She'd do it now if she could find a pen.

It was cold down here. Rose wrapped herself in a blanket from the couch. She'd had no idea she should pack flannel pajamas and wool socks for an August vacation. While she waited for the coffee to filter down she stared absently at her favorite Hopewell mug, a coffee-stained seventies KEEP ON TRUCKIN' model that was just the right size and had an excellent handle. She had found it the first morning in the cupboard, where it sat next to a piece of ancient spatterware and an insulated cup that spelled out something in semaphore.

Rose added milk to her coffee, then grabbed a dark green fleece from the line of hooks next to the front staircase and quietly opened the screen door to the front porch. The deck was slick with dew and the old wicker chairs were damp. She found a dryish towel on the railing and used it as a cushion.

The wind came up and breathed in the rich molecules of the atmosphere on the island. The air was wet and cool and gray. Anywhere else you'd call this damp, but damp was such an insalubrious word. Better to call it sea tinged, redolent, complicated. Healthy, too. And fresh.

She liked to read early in the morning. Now that her life was such a mess she went back to the old books, the words that were a comfort to her. Persuasion never let her down.

She was undisturbed on the porch for an hour. Then she heard Lottie's soft tread down the hall toward the bathroom. She wasn't ready for Lottie yet, so she put the book down, patted the front cover, which was curling from the humidity, and headed toward the beach.

She was still surprised by how different the little beach looked at low tide versus high tide. Low tide exposed a wide swath of tiny rocks and weird-looking seaweed. It looked to her as if the tide was on its way in now. She walked down to the water's edge. This same water had seemed so treacherous when they had first arrived: black, cold, wet, hostile. She wasn't sorry that they had flooded the engine; the ferry was their rescue boat that night. She wondered about laconic Max as she let the water run up against her ankles. It was cold now; how frigid it had seemed that dark night.

She wasn't frigid-not at all, in fact-even though she and Fred didn't have sex as much as they did in the old days. It used to be they couldn't keep their hands off each other. They had no money, back when they were both in grad school, but the few times a check arrived from a generous aunt or an unexpected prize, they spent it on travel. They couldn't go far, of course, but the Greyhound got them out of the city and into deep country within two hours. If they left early enough and got off where they could camp, it was that much cheaper, so that's what they did.

Rose wasn't much of a camper before she met Fred. Her family was indoorsy: two bookish sisters and a much older brother whom Rose rarely saw then or now. Fred always liked her to go first on the trails, though she would have been happier following him. "That's no fun," he would say. "This way I get to follow that great ass of yours. Very motivating."

She grinned.

In those days Fred had had a fantasy of pushing her down on the moss and having his way with her in the forest-his words, of course. That was half the reason they went camping at all. Rose wouldn't let him do it right away; that was too predictable, and anyway half the fun was to work themselves into a lather as they hiked. He'd never know when she'd come across the right bed of moss (it wasn't the most comfortable place for sex, to be honest). And she'd never know when she'd feel like being taken. Plus, both of them were aware that they could be spotted by other hikers. One time she knew they had been but she had not let on. She felt a thrum through her body at the memory of it.

Fred wasn't here, though.

She thought about Robert SanSouci. Did he really have a thing for her?

She was beginning to get the impression he was fantasizing about the cottage as matchmaker. He wants someone to stay at Hopewell, fall in love with it, come back to New York, fall in love with him, marry him, open him up, adore his lute playing, and live happily ever after.

"Fat chance of that," Rose said to the cormorant spreading its wings on a rock. Cormorants have no oil in their feathers, a fact that popped into her brain from nowhere she could locate. They look like little pterodactyls. Rose thought about the twins in their preverbal stage. They squawked back then. Like pterodactyls.

I'm a married woman with two children. She didn't have to wait for the familiar pang as she thought the words. Pangs, really. Two pangs came: one for happy little Bea and a fierce one for her darling misjudged Ben. And then another one. For Fred.

Rose crouched over to pick up a bit of greenish sea glass. Lottie had gotten carried away yesterday and come home with a bucketful of bits and pieces in all different colors, many of which looked like Heineken bottles only recently rendered unto the sea. Rose was more discerning. Her eyes adjusted to the details of the tiny rocks that covered the sand of the beach. Each stone was different. Why are we all so entranced by snowflakes? It's stones that should blow our socks off. She wiggled her bare toes.

She felt a few pieces of sea glass in her pocket. The fleece she had pulled on before coming down to the beach now felt like the plastic bottle it once was. It didn't smell great either. The sun had burned off the haze and it was already warm. To say the island's weather was changeable was an understatement by any standard. In her small bedroom under the shadow of the back of the cottage, it was cool. On the sunporch it was predictably cozy. On the path up and over the top of the island it was chilly, and here on the point it had gone from rainy and cool to bright and hot. Very hot. At least in a fleece. She would have peeled it off if she had anything more than a holey tank top on underneath it.

She peeled off the fleece. Not everything is a metaphor, she thought.

The pull of the water was much greater once she had stripped down. The sun was brazen-suddenly, real August heat, the first she'd felt here. Rose didn't know too much about seas and tides, but even she could tell there was a big difference between low tide and high. It took her just a couple of paces or more to reach the water's edge. Her feet came into contact with much alien flora and surely some fauna. Deadly slippery green slime, sharp-edged rocks glittering with something that begins with an M, the name of which eluded her. A bird that sounded like a car alarm called out. Branch-long fronds of seaweed with stems as thick as a garden hose sometimes blocked her way. By the time she waded ankle-deep into the soft waves and belatedly registered their icy cold with a shock, she realized she was freezing.

On an island I live within the weather; I do not battle it.

It was a good thought, and it made Rose happy as she picked her way-more nimbly now-back to her fleece. It was there as she'd left it, only she wasn't cold anymore. She climbed up a bank of imposing boulders. How old can these be? she thought. What a history in their past. Each one had its own pattern of stripes or cast of glittering sparkles (she must look it up; Fred would know it). Some were smooth as a baby's behind-giant versions of her sweet twins' bottoms, when they were tiny-and who cared if her metaphors were mixed? No one, not a soul, was in sight. Rose was sweating now from the sun and the exertion and she knew she had to get into the shade or she'd be slathering on the aloe.

But first.

She wanted to lie down on the rocks but there was not a single one that could accommodate her without her having to drape herself at a terribly awkward angle. Instead she sat down on one warm stone and rested her back against another. The tank top was suddenly ridiculous, so she slipped it off. The shorts will stay on, she thought; it's more respectable to be topless than to be nude as a renter on a Maine island. Or is it vice versa?

It made her smile that she was even thinking about this. She lazily moved her head from side to side and still saw no one. A loon called out its crazy cry. What a loon, she thought. The waves lapped at the shore not far below. The buoy bell tolled far in the distance. The earth breathed, and so did Rose.

And not five minutes later, when a lobster boat loudly putt-putted into her consciousness and she opened her eyes to see the lobstermen barely fifty feet away, calling and waving, she waved back.

Maybe she would call Fred.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

Beverly could not believe his ears. He was unhappy enough being with these two provoking women, and the silent Dester as well, but if the women were inviting men-overbearing, dreary boyfriends with no manners, he was sure-it was a different proposition altogether. Women, however shrill, at least made soft cooing noises when they heard about Possum (and even more when they heard about Gorsch). It was what he needed, what he deserved right now. Men would be stupid and obtuse. They'd make him feel foolish for putting out fresh water every day, hoping that the cat he'd heard near the osprey nest would stop by. Not that he wanted another cat. It was far too soon for that. But everyone deserves fresh water. Except these boyfriends.

The more he thought about it the more he was certain that nothing had been said in the e-mails about men invading the place; if there had been he would have declined to come.

"What is his name, Lottie?" asked Beverly abruptly.

She turned to him with a slight surprise. Beverly realized it was the first time he had addressed her directly. "Jon," she said. "Jon Mellish."

"Mellish?"

"Yes."

"A friend?"

"In a way."

"A boyfriend, then."

"Not at all. A relative."

"A blood relative?"

"Not blood. A husband."

God, this woman was exasperating. "A husband." Suggesting one of many. What a way to talk. Always that faux-naive twist to everything. Or was she genuinely a naif? Why couldn't she say "my husband"? The straights took so much for granted.

Besides, Beverly had assumed Rose and Lottie were not married at all. That they were two more of those careerist women who couldn't attract a man. There had been an absence of mention of husbands in the e-mails, which would not be natural if such persons did, after all, exist. And if a husband was not a relative, who was? Gorsch had died after same-sex marriage became legal but before he and Beverly had gotten around to being legally wed. Of course, he'd often called himself the unofficial Mrs. Samuel Gorsch, a joke that Gorsch, to his credit, never ceased to be amused by-to cherish, even. What if they had made it legal? What a grand time Possum would have had at the wedding. Beverly felt his eyes burn. A relative; not blood, she'd said? What did she know?

Beverly was not going to have the place overrun by people with whom he had no acquaintance. "This is unheard of," he said. "To invite guests to a summer cottage." Even as the words came out of his mouth he knew they were ridiculous.

"That's ridiculous," said Caroline, radiant from something she'd been up to that afternoon. He'd heard footsteps on the floor above him and large objects being moved around while he was napping. Doubtless she'd had a tryst with a tennis-playing islander or that handsome young Max, the caretaker. At least she was fairly discreet about it. No doubt Lottie and this Mellish would bang on the walls all night and there'd be no peace.

"It's only for the weekend," said Rose. "He'll have to leave on the Sunday late-afternoon ferry. Or Monday morning, latest. And we don't even know he's coming for sure."

"You see," said Lottie, leaning across toward Caroline, "we arranged, didn't we, in New York that if any of us wanted to we could each invite one guest. So now I'm doing it."

"I don't remember that," said Beverly, his eyes on his plate. The chowder could have stood some fresh parsley but of course the women had forgotten to pick it, as he'd asked, from the pots on the dock.

"Oh yes, we did-didn't we, Rose?"

"Yes-I remember," said Caroline. "Only it seemed so incredible that we'd ever want to. The whole idea was to get away from our friends."

"And our husbands."

"And family affection," said Caroline.

"Or lack of family affection," said Rose. Her voice was quiet, but not too quiet for his failing ears to hear.

"Here's the thing," said Caroline. "Jon Mellish might be coming up. The place is big. I've actually found a room I'd rather stay in, on the third floor, so I'll go up there and then Lottie can have the turret room, which is what she wanted in the first place."

Rose flushed even deeper.

"Oh, but Caroline, it's Rose who'd like that room. It's rose-colored, like Rose herself. And don't say you wouldn't know, Beverly, because you're color-blind; we already know you wouldn't know. But even you can see the roses in those prints on the walls, regardless of what color they are." Beverly noticed that Caroline was still enjoying Lottie's bluntness. "If you've really found a room you'd like better, then by all means move in. But I love my little nook downstairs, and I think Jon will love it too, once he realizes that he's meant to be here. Rose, you take the turret. That will be the perfect place for you and Fred when he comes up."

"When Fred comes up?" said Rose. "Fred is not coming up."

"Not yet, but he will. Fred is Rose's beloved husband," Lottie explained. "He looks like a young Franz Kafka, according to Rose."

"Hot," said Caroline. It did not go over well.

"And Beverly, you'll be away from us all in the other tower, which should make you perfectly happy."

"What will make me perfectly happy," said Beverly, "is having a friend of my own come up to the cottage. In fact, I've already mentioned the idea to Kenneth Lumley, an acquaintance of long duration." Of course, he had done nothing of the kind. "He will be my guest. And I will choose his room."

Beverly had not spoken with Kenneth Lumley since Gorsch's memorial, and even then they'd only exchanged a few words. Before that, it had been years since they'd met. He couldn't even have said where Kenneth lived these days. Or if Kenneth lived these days. But he'd be damned if these women could have friends come up and he not a soul.

"Wow, it's a friends contest," said Caroline. "I'm sure I could scare up a few thousand people who'd like to spend the weekend here. Not a husband, though." Her voice, always thrilling, had just the right note of sadness for that little speech, Beverly thought. She should have won that Oscar.