Page 89 of These Summer Storms

“How do you know that?”

“Because you’re not as fucking special as you think you are. You’re all just assholes and idiots, like everyone else. And you’ll choose the money, just like everyone else. You’ll stay quiet when you have to, and get that stupid bell working, and Greta will choose your mother over Tony, and Emily and Claudia will do nothing and get everything just like usual, and your mom will tell you whatever she has to in order to make sure everyone gets their cash, because she’s a shitty mother, but she knows the job.”

Jesus. She’d thought it all through. And she was right.

“And you will get your head out of your ass and do what you need to do to get your cut, and then I will get my cut. And everyone will live happily ever after.”

“That’s my family, Sila.” The only one he had. The only one his kids had.

“Your family,” she emphasized, the words punctuated by the fog bell clanging in the distance. “They don’t like me and I don’t like them, and I have smiled and sucked it up foryears. So yes. I am making sure that we win this time.”

“I win, you mean.”

“What?”

“The inheritance. It’s mine. He was my father.” He waved a hand toward Saoirse and Oliver, who were hanging off a low branch on Franklin’s tree, legs swinging over Elisabeth and Emily, who were now lying flat on their backs and staring up through the canopy.

The kids didn’t seem fazed, even though Elisabeth wasn’t the kind of grandmother who lingered under the canopy of a tree. But they were young enough and open enough to accept this strange new grandma and their fun aunt in a tableau from an old-timey lemonade ad. If old-timey lemonade were made with psychedelics.

“Their grandfather,” Sam added.

“Fine. Then get it for them.”

She didn’t care what his reasons were, as long as she got what she wanted. And she would get it. Greta would choose to make their mother happy, as she always did. Emily and Elisabeth would fall in line and make sure everything turned out right.

Alice…she was the only one who might need a nudge in the right direction. The only one who had nothing on the line. The only one who had proved she could survive without the money. The only one who could survive without the Storms.

What a skill.

“If you fuck this up, Sam—” Sila said, deploying her final weapon. “The kids come with me. And not just because they have no idea who you are without this place, and everything that comes with it.”

Sam didn’t misunderstand. There was no saving the marriage—it had likely been doomed from the start. But with the inheritance…he’d see his kids. That was her offer.

Turning away from his wife, he started back up the long slope toward the house, along the centuries-old stone wall to his father’s tree, where his mother and his kids and his sister giggled and ate bananas.

Sila didn’t follow.

The only thing that followed him was the sound of the fog bell, loud enough to be heard by boats all around the island, every fifteen seconds, warning the entire Bay of coming storms.

Chapter

13

It was a beautifulday for afuneralcelebration.

Their mother had pulled it off. Between the gorgeous blue sky, the calm waters of the Bay, the collection of crisp white canvas canopies artfully arranged across the great lawn on the southern slope of the island, designed to provide shade but not shelter (it was a party, not a camping excursion), and the string quartet at the far corner, there wasn’t a whiff of grief to be found.

Elisabeth had vetoed anything that might even remotely be referred to as funereal, so there were no photographs, no programs, no speeches planned—a late-hour decision that obviously hadn’t been passed on to the numerous dignitaries who were in attendance (two former United States presidents, three former and two current prime ministers from members of the G7, the first gentleman of the United States, and a pair of European princes from the same royal house who, if the tabloids were to be believed, did not speak, though Alice was planning on asking Roxanne to confirm that rumor when she arrived).

And then there were the others—standing out from the crowd—a handful of locals, Charlie and Lorraine, the owner of Skipping StoneFarm. Two members of the Wickford town council. The septic guy, literally feet away from the president of France.

Funerals were weird.

Alice slipped on the Wayfarers she’d raided from her mother’s beach tote that morning and joined her siblings against the low stone wall that marked the northern boundary of the lawn. “Should we know all these people?”

“I know all of them,” Sam said, all bluster. “Dad expected me to.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Right. Tell me, Sam, how are you going to CEO all over this place during odd-numbered hours?”