Page 21 of A Nantucket Wedding

And Alice had said,She’s so nice.

WasIngrid nice?

Noah hadn’t come to the phone to speak to her now. He must have heard the children talking about Ingrid. Was he afraid Felicity would ask him about her?

What should she do now? Should she call him back and demand to speak to him? Was she making something out of nothing?

“Filly?” Alison came into the bedroom. “Are you ready to go?”

“Um, sure.” Felicity forced herself to smile. “Totally.” She carried her backpack—she couldn’t wear it in a car—and hurried down the stairs.

“I thought we’d have a stroll around town, and then brunch at Cru. I bought you a plane ticket. You leave at one, Felicity.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“And my plane’s at two,” Jane said.

“The kids will be glad to see you,” Alison said to Felicity.

“I know,” Felicity agreed, and she felt warm all over at the thought. Then she realized that she didn’t know if Noah would be glad to see her. She wasn’t sure she’d be glad to see him. She wanted to know why Ingrid had come over last night, but she hated confrontations.

As she listened to Alison chatter, Felicity wondered if her mother had ever had this kind of problem with her marriage. Felicity’s father had been drop-dead handsome, and she wasn’t thinking this because he was her father. It was a fact. Alison had been beautiful, still was beautiful, for an older woman, but had she worried as she grew older and her husband continued his work as a pediatrician? Maybe she should have. After all, Alison had met Mark at his office when she took Jane in for a consultation. Alison had still been married to Jane’s father, Flint. Didn’t Alison worry as the years passed that some new yummy mummy might attract Mark, at least for a fling? After all, Alison grew older, but the mothers bringing in little children must have seemed endlessly young. Did her father ever have an affair?

Did her mother?

—

Scott offered to pick Jane up at JFK, but she insisted on taking a cab. She didn’t want to bother him when he was so busy, she said. What she didn’t say was that she wanted one more hour to organize her thoughts. Plan her attack, more specifically.

She leaned her head back on the seat. The cab went over the Queensboro Bridge and entered Manhattan. Was she being impulsive, wanting a child? She’d certainly been impulsive when she’d kissed Ethan. This morning, she’d exchanged cellphone numbers with Ethan and agreed, quietly, standing in the upstairs hall of the Nantucket house, to let each other know when they were able to go to the island again. They hadn’t touched, but the electric pull between them had seemed as powerful as the moon on the tides.

Later, as Jane, Felicity, and Alison left for brunch, Jane had given Ethan a quick hug, keeping her body slanted so that only her arms touched him.Virtue triumphs!Jane told herself. But at the airport, Alison had handed a small foil-wrapped parcel to Jane. “You forgot this, darling,” Alison said. “I know you’ll want to share some of this delicious bread with Scott.”

Now, as the tall buildings and congested traffic blocked Jane’s thoughts of the gorgeous island and dropped her back into her real life, she thought the bread in her bag was like a little lump of guilt. She wasn’t one hundred percent certain that her mother hadn’t noticed the intense attraction between Jane and Ethan.

And what did it all mean? She loved Scott, shedid.She trusted his love for her. She knew he’d never be unfaithful to her.

And until this weekend she’dknownshe’d never be unfaithful to Scott.

Well, she hadn’tbeenunfaithful! She had only wanted to be.

She needed to be brutally realistic. It had been only a moment’s magic. In the grand scheme of things, looking down on a kind of calendar of the days and weeks and months of her life, the time she’d spent with Ethan was so minuscule, so insignificant, it was like trying to find a pebble on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from a satellite in outer space. In the vast expanse of her life, the yearning, the desire, was only a speck, something no one else could see.

And yet.

Maybe, she thought, her longing for a child was causing her to be more sexually, sensually awake.

The cab stopped in front of their building. She swiped her credit card and tipped the driver and gathered her purse and her briefcase (which she hadn’t opened once this weekend) and her suitcase and stepped out onto the sunny street.

She paused for a moment. May in the city was such a great month. No bitter wind howling down the long avenues, no dirty slush to slip in on the sidewalks, instead trees and flowers blooming, the air mild and sweet…okay, not sweet exactly, she was getting carried away. But the summer heat hadn’t yet arrived to intensify the smells of gasoline and millions of overheated people and their dogs.

She entered the building and leaned against the elevator wall as she rode up to the fifteenth floor. She felt like she was being transported from one life to another, and she knew the moment those elevator doors opened that Nantucket magic would evaporate like a bubble.

She found her keys in her bag and undid the locks. She stepped into their apartment. She set her suitcase on the floor and dumped her keys in the bowl on the foyer table and laid her bag next to it.

“Scott? I’m back!”

“You’re early!” His voice came from the room they used as a joint office.

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