Page 54 of These Summer Storms

She ignored the warning in his tone. “I’m just saying, it seemed like Sila had something that might have needed…”

“Stop.”

“Fixing.”

The sigh he let out as he reached the bottom of the tower stairs was long and rewarding. She followed him up the narrow, dark space and through the door of her room feeling pretty proud of herself for that sigh.

He set the suitcase down just inside the door and turned to face her, ostensibly to leave, but instead coming face-to-face with her. “Your dad was right about you.”

She ignored the way her stomach dropped at the statement. The riot of possible answers to “How so?”

“You’re a pain in the ass.”

She exhaled at the dry words, undeniably her father’s, though warmer than he’d probably said them. Kinder. Almost like Jack liked her. (He didn’t. Clearly.) “A shock, I’m sure, considering what a delight he was.”

Jack didn’t laugh—she had trouble imagining him laughing—but his lips did curve in one of his small, spare smiles. “Yeah.”

Alice stepped aside, clearing his path to the door, knowing she shouldn’t keep him there. In that room. Where there was a bed. In which they’d both slept (separately, but still, it wasn’t good sense). “Whywereyou looking for me? In the kitchen?”

He stopped and looked over his shoulder, and she followed him to the door, setting one hand on the knob, meaning to tell him not to worry about it. To wave him out. To close it. Behind him. And yet.

He looked away, to the dim stairwell, as though it were an escape hatch, and she wondered if he’d just ignore her. It wouldn’t have been a surprise, honestly, considering his whole vibe was man of mystery—fullof secrets and a unique set of skills, like removing SD cards and pantry doors.

Skill at removing other things, too, if she was being honest. Like clothes. And good sense. And afterglow.

Close the door, Alice.

Before she could, he surprised her.

“Come sailing with me tomorrow.”

Chapter

9

Sailing with Jack wasa mistake.

The night before had been brutal, a dinner filled with long silences and strong drinks and ending with the Storms heading to their individual corners, leaving the common areas of the house empty to everyone but Charlie and Lorraine, who arrived nightly, like the fog, to tidy and clean and prepare the house for the next day, efficient and invisible (ensuring Elisabeth’s hardworking Puritan roots avoided interrogation).

Alice had lingered in the kitchen, despite Lorraine’s resistance to letting her help. She’d won the battle, drying enameled cast iron and ancient silverware, trading stories with the older woman whose thumbprint cookies were a staple of her childhood summers.

Maybe that was why she agreed to sailing. Maybe the memories lured her into it.

Or maybe it was curiosity that sent her stealing downstairs and out the kitchen door, into sunlight too young and golden to have burned the dew from wild thyme and clover and the little white puffs of funnelspider webs. Maybe she’d seen the invitation as an opportunity to better understand this man who held her family in such a chokehold.

Reconnaissance. That’s what she told herself she was doing.

It had been years since Alice had been onThe Lizzie—the thirty-foot yawl her father had named for her mother some twenty-five years earlier, an homage that, in hindsight, indicated that either Elisabeth had done something very right, or Franklin had done something very wrong.

The boat had been christened with a shower of Dom Pérignon and a chorus of delight that someone—possibly Greta, who’d been going through a black-and-white photography phase—had captured perfectly. The photo of Elisabeth and Franklin laughing together at the bulkhead of the sailboat had been framed and affixed to the wall of the helm, its sharp edges long faded to watercolor in salt and sun.

BeforeThe Lizzie,there’d been a different boat. A yacht, bigger and tackier and less nimble, designed to prove something in that way newly wealthy men believed rampant consumerism would—buying them respect from peers in their tax bracket (and old-money in-laws). And so, for a few years, Franklin had spent money, until he’d settled into his new role as the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent and realized that there was something more rewarding than membership at the Union Club—ubiquity.

Storm telephones and tablets made their way into the zeitgeist and Franklin’s obsession with approval had evolved into arrogant resistance of the old guard. He’d changed the world. Democratized it, he liked to say, placing information and access in the hands of everyone from world leaders and celebrities to landscapers and oystermen.

Franklin’s world wasn’t a democracy so much as a dictatorship, however. Freedom and equality—as long as everyone behaved as Franklin wished. Politicians, Wall Street, tech developers, engineers.

His children.