The Island

by Elin Hilderbrand

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Birdie Cousins has thrown herself into the details of her daughter Chess’ lavish wedding, from the floating dance floor in her Connecticut backyard to the color of the cocktail napkins. Like any mother of a bride to be, she is weathering the storms of excitement and chaos, tears and joy. But Birdie, a woman who prides herself on preparing for every possibility, could never have predicted the late night phone call from Chess, abruptly announcing that she’s cancelled her engagement.

It’s only the first hint of what will be a summer of upheavals and revelations. Before the dust has even begun to settle, far worse news arrives, sending Chess into a tailspin of despair. Reluctantly taking a break from the first new romance she’s embarked on since the recent end of her thirty year marriage, Birdie circles the wagons and enlists the help of her younger daughter, Tate, and her own sister, India. Soon all four are headed for beautiful, rustic Tuckernuck Island, off the coast of Nantucket, where their family has summered for generations. No phones, no television, no grocery store—a place without distractions where they can escape their troubles.

But throw sisters, daughters, ex-lovers, and long kept secrets onto a remote island, and what might sound like a peaceful getaway becomes much more. Before summer has ended, dramatic truths are uncovered, old loves are rekindled, and new loves make themselves known. It’s a summertime story only Elin Hilderbrand can tell, filled with the heartache, laughter, and surprises that have made her bestselling novels as much a part of summer as a long afternoon on a sunny beach.

Release date: June 18, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 496

Sample

It had sat abandoned for thirteen years. This had happened without warning.


It was a summer house, a cottage, though it had been built well, with high-quality lumber and square-headed steel nails. This
was back in 1935, during the Depression. The carpenters had been eager for work; they were careful when aligning the shingles,
they sanded, swept, then sanded again with high-grit paper. The banister was as smooth as a satin dress. The carpenters—brought
in from Fall River—stood at the upstairs windows and whistled at the views: one bedroom looked out over the mighty ocean,
and one bedroom looked out over the bucolic pastures and wide ponds of this, Tuckernuck Island.


The house was occupied only in July and sometimes August. In the other months, there was a caretaker—poking his head in, checking
that the windows were tight, removing the small brown carcasses from the mousetraps.


The house had been witness to a wide range of behavior from the members of the family that owned it. They ate and they slept
like everyone else; they drank and they danced to music picked up off the shortwave radio. They made love and they fought
(yes, the Tates were screamers, one and all; it must have been genetic). They got pregnant and they gave birth; there were children in the house, crying and laughing, drawing on the plaster with crayons,
chipping a shingle with a well-hit croquet ball, extinguishing a sneaked cigarette on the railing of the deck.


The house had never caught fire, thank God.

And then, for thirteen years, nobody came. But that wasn’t entirely true. There were field mice and an army of daddy longlegs.
There were three bats that flew in through the open attic window, which the family had forgotten to close when they left and
which the caretaker had overlooked. The window faced southwest so it deflected the worst of the wind and the rain; it served
as an aperture that allowed the house to breathe.


A quartet of mischievous kids broke in through the weak door on the screened-in porch, and for a moment, the house felt optimistic.
Humans! Youngsters! But these were trespassers. Though not, thankfully, vandals. They hunted around—finding no food except
one can of pork and beans and a cylindrical carton of Quaker oats, rife with weevils (which frightened the girl holding the
carton so badly that she dropped it and the oats scattered across the linoleum floor). The kids prodded one another to venture
upstairs. Around the island, word was the house was haunted.


Nobody here but me, the house would have said if the house could talk. Well, me and the bats. And the mice. And the spiders!

In one of the bedrooms, the kids found a foot-high sculpture of a man, made from driftwood and shells and beach glass. The
man had seaweed hair.


Cool! one of the kids, a boy with red hair and freckles, said. I’m taking this!

That’s stealing, the girl who had dropped the oatmeal said.


The boy set the sculpture down. It’s stupid anyway. Let’s get out of here.

The others agreed. They left, finding nothing more of interest. The toilet didn’t even have water in it.

Again, silence. Emptiness.


Until one day the caretaker used his old key and the front door swung open, groaning on its hinges. It wasn’t the caretaker,
but the caretaker’s son, grown up now. He inhaled—the house knew it couldn’t smell terribly good—and patted the door frame
with affection.


“They’re coming back,” he said. “They’re coming back.”

Plans for the vacation changed, and then changed again.


Back in March, when arrangements for Chess’s wedding were falling into place as neatly as bricks in a garden path, an idea
came to Birdie: a week for just the two of them in the house on Tuckernuck Island. As recently as three years earlier, such
an idea would have been unthinkable; ever since Chess was a little girl, she and Birdie had clashed. They didn’t “get along.”
(Which meant that Chess didn’t get along with Birdie, right? Birdie had tried everything in her power to gain her daughter’s
good graces, and yet she was perpetually held in contempt. She said the wrong thing, she did the wrong thing.) But lately,
things between mother and daughter had improved—enough for Birdie to suggest a week of bonding in the family cottage before
Chess embarked on the rest of her life with Michael Morgan.


Birdie had phoned Chess at work to see if the idea would fly.

“I have to call you back,” Chess said in the tight voice that meant Birdie should have waited and called Chess at home. Chess
was the food editor of Glamorous Home magazine. She was the youngest editor on the magazine’s staff; she was the youngest editor working for the Diamond Publishing
Group, and she worked extra hard to prove herself. Chess’s job was one Birdie secretly coveted, being an enthusiastic and accomplished at-home gourmet
cook. She was so, so proud of Chess, and envious of her, too.


“Okay, honey!” Birdie said. “But just put this in your stew pot: you and me in the house on Tuckernuck the week of Fourth
of July.”


“You and me?” Chess said. “And who else?”

“Just us,” Birdie said.

“The whole week?” Chess said.

“Can you?” Birdie asked. Chess’s job had seasonal flexibility. The summer was slow; the holidays were insanity. “Would you?”

“Let me think about it,” Chess said, and she hung up.

Birdie paced her house, agitated and tense. She felt like she had in 1972 when she was waiting to find out if she’d gotten
a bid from Alpha Phi. Would Chess consider this trip? If Chess said no, Birdie decided, she wouldn’t take it personally. Chess
was busy, and a week was a long time. Would Birdie have wanted to spend a week alone with her own mother? Probably not. Birdie
picked up her cup of tea, but it had gone cold. She put it in the microwave to reheat and sat down at her computer, which
she kept in the kitchen, where she could get the news and recipes. She checked her e-mail. Her younger daughter, Tate, was
a computer wizard and sent Birdie at least one e-mail each day, though it was sometimes a forwarded joke, or a chain letter,
which Birdie deleted without reading. Today, her in-box was empty. Birdie chastised herself. Chess would never want to spend
a week with her alone. She shouldn’t have asked.


But then, just as she was about to sink into the self-doubt that plagued nearly every interaction with Chess (why was her
relationship with her elder daughter so fraught? What had Birdie done wrong?), the phone rang. Birdie snapped it up. It was
Chess.


“July first through seventh?” Chess said. “You and me?”

“You’ll do it?” Birdie said.

“Absolutely,” Chess said. “It sounds great. Thanks, Bird!”

Birdie sighed—relief, happiness, elation! A week on Tuckernuck did sound great. One of the benefits of being divorced now, after three decades of being married, was that Birdie could do whatever
she damn well pleased. The house on Tuckernuck had been in the Tate family for seventy-five years—her family, not Grant’s family. Whereas Birdie had grown up with memories of simple, carefree summer days on Tuckernuck, Grant
had not. He had pretended to like Tuckernuck for the two summers of their courtship, but once they were married and had children,
he revealed his disdain. He loathed the place—the house was too primitive, the generator unreliable. He wasn’t a pioneer;
he didn’t want to work a pump by hand for water that was then heated over a fire for his bath. He didn’t like mice or mosquitoes
or bats hanging from the rafters. He didn’t like to be without a television or a phone. He was lawyer to half of Wall Street.
How could Birdie reasonably expect him to live without a phone?


Grant had suffered through two weeks a summer in the house on Tuckernuck until Tate was a senior in high school, and then
he put his foot down: no more.


Birdie hadn’t been to Tuckernuck in thirteen years. It was time she returned.

And so, in addition to planning Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan, Birdie also planned a week’s vacation on Tuckernuck. She
called their caretaker, Chuck Lee. As she dialed the number—long forgotten and yet familiar—she found herself singing with
nerves. Chuck’s wife, Eleanor, answered the phone. Birdie had never laid eyes on Eleanor, much less had a conversation with
her, though Birdie was aware of Eleanor’s existence and she was sure that Eleanor was aware of hers. Birdie decided not to
identify herself to Eleanor now; it would be easier that way.


She said, “I’m looking for Chuck Lee, please. Is he available?”

“Not at the moment,” Eleanor said. “May I take a message?”

“I have a caretaking question,” Birdie said.

“Chuck doesn’t do caretaking anymore,” Eleanor said. The woman had a pleasant enough demeanor, Birdie thought. In Birdie’s
younger imagination, Eleanor had weighed four hundred pounds and had skin the texture of a squid and a faint mustache.


“Oh,” Birdie said. She wondered if Chuck and Eleanor’s phone had caller ID, but decided not. Chuck was a man firmly embedded
in 1974 and always had been.


“My son Barrett has taken over the business,” Eleanor said. “Would you like his number?”

After Birdie hung up, she had to sit down and take a moment. How mercilessly the years flew by! Birdie had known Barrett Lee
all his life. She remembered him at five years old, a towhead in an orange life preserver sitting beside his father on the
Boston Whaler that picked up Birdie and Grant and the kids from Madaket Harbor on Nantucket and delivered them to the slice
of beach, as white and soft as breadcrumbs, that fronted their property on the tiny neighboring island of Tuckernuck. Was
Barrett Lee old enough to take over a business? In age, he had fallen somewhere between Chess and Tate, who were thirty-two
and thirty respectively, making Barrett thirty-one or so. And Chuck had retired like a normal sixty-five-year-old man, whereas
Grant still rode the train into the city every morning and, for all Birdie knew, still took clients to Gallagher’s for martinis
and sirloins after work.


Birdie called Barrett Lee’s cell phone, and sure enough, a man answered.

“Barrett?” Birdie said. “This is Birdie Cousins calling. I own the Tate house on Tuckernuck?”

“Hey, Mrs. Cousins,” Barrett Lee said casually, as though they had spoken only the week before. “How’s it going?”

Birdie tried to remember the last time she had seen Barrett Lee. She had a vague memory of him as a teenager. He had been
quite handsome, like his father. He played football for the Nantucket Whalers; he had broad shoulders and that white-blond
hair. He had come out on his father’s boat alone early one morning to take one of the girls fishing. And then another time he had taken one of the girls on a picnic lunch. For the life of her, Birdie
couldn’t remember if he had taken Chess or Tate.


How’s it going? How was she supposed to answer that? Grant and I divorced two years ago. He lives in a “loft” apartment in Norwalk and dates women he calls “cougars,” while I
bounce off the walls of the family homestead in New Canaan, six thousand square feet filled with rugs and antiques and framed
photographs documenting a life now gone. I cook an elaborate meal on Monday and eat it all week long. I still belong to the
garden club. I go to a book group once a month and frequently I’m the only one who’s read the selection; the rest of the women
are just there for the wine and the gossip. Chess and Tate are grown up, with lives of their own. I wish I had a job. I spend
more time than I should feeling angry at Grant for never encouraging me to work outside the home. Because now, here I am,
fifty-seven years old, divorced, becoming the kind of woman who inflicts herself on her children.

“It goes well,” Birdie said. “I’m sure hearing from me is something of a shock.”

“A shock,” Barrett confirmed.

“How is your father?” Birdie asked. “He’s retired?”

“Retired,” Barrett said. “He had a stroke just before Thanksgiving. He’s fine, but it slowed him way down.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Birdie said. This also gave her pause. Chuck Lee had had a stroke? Chuck Lee with his military buzz
cut, and the cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth, and his biceps bulging as he pulled the ropes of the anchor off
the ocean floor? He was slow moving now? Birdie imagined a land turtle, bald and lumbering, then quickly erased it from her
mind. “Listen, Chess and I are going to spend the week of the Fourth of July in the house. Can you get it ready?”


“Well,” Barrett said.

“Well, what?”

“It’s going to need work,” Barrett said. “I stopped by there back in September and the place is falling down on itself. It needs to be reshingled and it probably needs a new roof. You’ll need
a new generator. And the stairs down to the beach have rotted. Now, I didn’t go inside, but…”


“Can you take care of it?” Birdie asked. “I want it to be usable. Can you buy a good generator and fix the rest of the house
up? I’ll send a check tomorrow. Five thousand? Ten thousand?” In the divorce, Birdie had gotten the house and a generous monthly
stipend. Grant had also promised that if she had larger expenses, he would cover them, as long as he deemed them “reasonable.”
Grant hated the Tuckernuck house; Birdie had no idea if he would deem the cost of fixing it up reasonable or not. She smelled
a possible battleground, but she couldn’t let the Tuckernuck house fall to pieces after seventy-five years, could she?


“Ten thousand to start,” Barrett said. “I’m sorry to tell you that…”

“No, don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault…”

“But if you want the house back to where it was…”

“We have no choice!” Birdie said. “It was my grandmother’s house.”

“You’d like it ready by July first?”

“July first,” Birdie said. “It’s just going to be Chess and me for one last hurrah. She’s getting married in September.”

“Married?” Barrett said. He paused, and Birdie realized that it must have been Chess that he’d taken on the picnic.

“On September twenty-fifth,” Birdie said proudly.

“Wow,” Barrett said.

By the middle of April, tax time, every last detail of Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan had been tended to—including the
dress for the flower girl, the catering menu, and the selection of hymns at the church. Birdie called Chess at work much more
frequently to get her opinion and her approval. Most of the time what Chess said was, “Yes, Birdie, fine. Whatever you think.”
Birdie had been both surprised and flattered when Chess had asked her for help with the wedding. She had essentially dropped the thing in
Birdie’s lap, saying matter-of-factly, “You have exquisite taste.” Birdie happened to believe this was true; her good taste
was a fact, like her green eyes or her attached earlobes. But to have Chess’s confidence was gratifying.


Three hundred people would be invited to the wedding; the service would be held at Trinity Episcopal, with Benjamin Denton,
the pastor of Chess’s youth, presiding. The ceremony would be followed by a tented reception in Birdie’s backyard. The landscapers
had started working the previous September. The pièce de résistance, in Birdie’s opinion, was a floating island that would
be placed in Birdie’s pond, where the couple would take their first dance.


Grant had called only once to complain about cost, and that was in regard to the twenty thousand dollars for the engineering
and manufacturing of the floating island. Birdie had patiently explained the concept to him over the phone, but he either
didn’t get it or didn’t like it.


“Are we or are we not paying for a regular dance floor?”

“We are,” Birdie said. “This is a special thing, for the first dances. Chess dancing with Michael, Chess dancing with you,
you dancing with me.”


“Me dancing with you?”

Birdie cleared her throat. “Emily Post says that if neither of the divorced spouses is remarried, then… yes, Grant, you’re
going to have to dance with me. Sorry about that.”


“Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money, Bird.”

It took a phone call from Chess to convince him. God only knows what she said, but Grant wrote the check.

At the end of April, Birdie went on her first date since the divorce. The date had been set up by Birdie’s sister, India,
who was a curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Center City, Philadelphia. India had been married to the sculptor Bill Bishop and had raised three sons while Bill traveled the globe,
gaining notoriety. In 1995, Bill shot himself in the head in a hotel in Bangkok, and the suicide had devastated India. For
a while there, Birdie had feared India wouldn’t recover. She would end up as a bag lady in Rittenhouse Square, or as a recluse,
keeping cats and polishing Bill’s portrait in its frame. But India had somehow risen from the ashes, putting her master’s
degree in art history to use and becoming a curator. Unlike Birdie, India was cutting edge and chic. She wore Catherine Malandrino
dresses, four-inch heels, and Bill Bishop’s reading glasses on a chain around her neck. India dated all kinds of men—older
men, younger men, married men—and the man she set Birdie up with was one of her castoffs. He was too old. How old was too
old? Sixty-five, which was Grant’s age.


His name was Hank Dunlap. Hank was the retired headmaster of an elite private school in Manhattan. His wife, Caroline, was
independently wealthy. The wife sat on the board of trustees at the Guggenheim Museum; India had met Hank and Caroline at
a Guggenheim benefit years earlier.


“What happened to Caroline?” Birdie asked. “Did they get divorced? Did she die?”

“Neither,” India said. “She has Alzheimer’s. She’s in a facility upstate.”

“So the wife is still alive, they’re still married, and you dated him? And now you want me to date him?”


“Get over yourself, Bird,” India said. “His wife is in another world and won’t be coming back. He wants companionship. He
is exactly your type.”


“He is?” Birdie said. What was her “type”? Someone like Grant? Grant was the devil’s attorney. He was all about single-malt whiskey and expensive cars with
leather interiors. He was not the kindly headmaster type, content with a salary in the low six figures. “Does he golf?”


“No.”

“Ah, then he is my type.” Birdie swore she would never again be romantically involved with a golfer.


“He’s cute,” India said, like they were talking about some sixteen-year-old. “You’ll like him.”

Surprise! Birdie liked him. She had decided to forgo all of the “I can’t believe I’m dating again at my age” worrywart nonsense
and just be a realist. She was dating again at her age, but instead of fretting, she got showered and dressed and made up as she would have if she and Grant
were going to the theater or to the country club with the Campbells. She wore a simple wrap dress and heels and some good
jewelry, including her diamond engagement ring (it had been her grandmother’s and would someday go to one of her grandchildren). Birdie sat on her garden bench in the mild spring evening with a glass of Sancerre and Mozart playing on
the outdoor speakers as she waited for old Hank to show up.


Her heartbeat seemed regular.

She heard a car in the driveway and proceeded inside, where she rinsed her wineglass, checked her lipstick in the mirror,
and fetched her spring coat. With a deep breath, she opened the door. And there stood old Hank, holding a bouquet of fragrant
purple hyacinths. He had salt-and-pepper hair and wore rimless glasses. He was, as India had promised, cute. Very cute. When
he saw Birdie, he smiled widely. He grinned. He was darling.


“You’re even prettier than your sister!” he said.

Birdie swooned. “God,” she said. “I love you already.”

And they laughed.

The evening had gone from good to better. Hank Dunlap was smart and informed, funny and engaging. He picked a new restaurant
on a trendy street in South Norwalk, among the art galleries and upscale boutiques. This faux Soho (they called it SoNo) was
where Grant now lived. Birdie wondered if he hung out on this trendy street (she had a hard time imagining it); she wondered
if she would see him, or if he would see her out on a date with cute, erudite Hank. It was warm enough to sit outside, and Birdie jumped at the chance.


The food at the new restaurant was extraordinary. Birdie loved good food and good wine, and as it turned out, so did Hank.
They tasted each other’s meals and decided to share a dessert. Birdie didn’t think, I can’t believe I’m dating again at my age. What she thought was that she was having fun, this was easy; it was easier, perhaps, to have dinner with this man she barely
knew than it had ever been to have dinner with Grant. (Beyond his penchant for aged beef, Grant didn’t care what he ate. He
ate only to stay alive.) In the last few years of their marriage, Birdie and Grant had barely spoken to each other when they
went to dinner. Or rather, Birdie had chirped away about the things that interested her, and Grant had nodded distractedly
as he watched the Yankees game over her shoulder or checked his BlackBerry for stock reports. As Birdie ate with Hank, she
marveled at how nice it was to spend time with someone who not only interested her but found her interesting. Who not only
talked but listened.


Birdie said, “I would run away and marry you tonight, but I understand you’re already married.”

Hank nodded and smiled sadly. “My wife, Caroline, is in a facility in Brewster. She doesn’t recognize me or the kids anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Birdie said.

“We had a good life together,” Hank said. “I’m sorry it’s going to end for her away from home, but I couldn’t take care of
her by myself. She’s better off where she is. I go to see her Thursday afternoons and every Sunday. I bring her chocolate-covered
caramels, and every week she thanks me like I’m a kind stranger, which I guess, to her, I am. But she loves them.”


Birdie felt tears rise. The waiter delivered their dessert—a passion fruit and coconut cream parfait. Hank dug in; Birdie
dabbed at her eyes. Her marriage had ended badly, though not as badly as some, and Hank’s marriage was also ending badly,
though not as badly as some. His wife no longer recognized him, but he brought her chocolate-covered caramels. This was the kindest gesture
Birdie could imagine. Had Grant ever done anything that kind for her? She couldn’t think of a thing.


Hank kissed Birdie good night at her front door, and that was the best part of the evening. The kiss was soft and deep, and
something long forgotten stirred inside Birdie. Desire. She and Grant had had sex right up to the bitter end with the help
of a pill—but desire for her husband’s body had evaporated by the time Tate went to grammar school.


“I’ll call you tomorrow at noon,” Hank said.

Birdie nodded. She was speechless. She stumbled inside and wandered around her kitchen, looking at it with new eyes. What
would Hank think of this kitchen? She was a big believer in small details: always fresh fruit, always fresh flowers, always
fresh-brewed coffee, real cream, fresh-squeezed juice, the morning newspaper delivered to the doorstep, classical music. Always
wine of a good vintage. Would Hank appreciate these things the way Birdie did?


She made herself a cup of tea and arranged the hyacinths he’d brought in one of her cut-glass vases. She was floating. The
perfect life, she decided, would be a life filled with first dates like this one. Each day would contain electric promise,
a spark, a connection, and desire.


God, desire. She had forgotten all about it.

She undressed and climbed into bed with her steaming mug of tea. She picked up the novel her book club was reading, then set
it down. She was levitating like a magician’s assistant. She closed her eyes.


The phone rang in the middle of the night. Three twenty, the clock said. Birdie sat straight up in bed. Her bedside light
was still on. The tea was cold on the nightstand. The phone? Who called at such an hour? Then Birdie remembered her date and she filled with warm, syrupy joy. It might be India calling to find out
how the date had gone. India kept ridiculous hours. Ever since Bill died, she had suffered from mind-blowing insomnia; she
occasionally went seventy-two hours without sleeping.


Or the call was from Hank, who had, perhaps, not been able to sleep.

Birdie grabbed the phone.

A woman, crying. Birdie knew immediately that it was Chess; a mother always knew the sound of her child crying, even when
her child was thirty-two years old. Birdie intuited the rest of it right away, without having to hear one lurid word. It crushed
her, but she knew.


“It’s over, Birdie.”

“Over?” Birdie said.

“Over.”

Birdie drew the covers up to her chin. This was one of her defining moments as a mother and she was determined to shine.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

Michael Morgan was six foot six, clean cut, and handsome. He had sandy hair, green eyes, and a smile that made others smile.
He had played lacrosse at Princeton, where he had graduated summa cum laude with a degree in sociology; he was a whiz at crossword
puzzles and loved black-and-white movies, which endeared him to people of Birdie’s generation. Instead of taking a job at
J.P. Morgan, where his father was managing partner, or going to Madison Avenue, where his mother oversaw the advertising accounts
for every smash hit on Broadway, Michael had taken out a staggering business loan and bought a failing head-hunting company.
In five years, he had turned a profit; he had placed 25 percent of the graduating class of Columbia Business School.


Chess had met Michael Morgan at a rock club downtown; Birdie couldn’t remember the name of the place. Chess had been at the bar with a girlfriend, and Michael had been there to see his brother, Nick, who was the lead singer in a band called
Diplomatic Immunity. This was how young people met each other; Birdie understood that. But unlike the other young men that
Chess met socially, she and Michael Morgan got serious right away.


The beginning of Chess’s relationship with Michael Morgan coincided with the end of Birdie and Grant’s marriage. When Birdie
and Grant met Michael Morgan for the first time, they were, technically, separated. (Grant was staying in a room at the Hyatt
in Stamford. This was before he rented and then purchased the loft in South Norwalk.) Chess knew her parents were separated,
but Chess wanted Birdie and Grant to meet Michael together as a unit. Birdie balked at this. It would be awkward; it would be what amounted to a date with Grant, whom she had so recently and
unequivocally asked to leave her life. But Chess insisted. She believed that her parents could be civil and congenial to each
other for one night on her behalf. Grant was open to the idea; he made a reservation for four at La Grenouille, their former
favorite restaurant. Grant and Birdie drove to the city together; it wouldn’t make sense not to. Grant smelled the same; he
was wearing his khaki suit and one of the Paul Stuart shirts that Birdie had bought for him, and the pink tie with the frogs
that he always wore when they went to La Grenouille. Birdie remembered having the reassuring yet sinking feeling that nothing
had changed. The maître d’ at La Grenouille, Donovan, greeted them as a married couple—he had no idea they’d split—and showed
them to the table they preferred. On the way to the restaurant from the parking garage, Birdie had filled Grant in on Michael
Morgan.