Page 10 of The Summer Guests

“Oh,” said Hannah. She must have realized she’d broached a sensitive subject, and for a moment she was silent. “Yes, it must be hard for him,” she said. “It’s hard being second in that family too. Always being compared to Colin.”

The golden boy.The son who only needed to point to his tailored suits and Upper West Side address as evidence he was the more successful brother. No wonder Ethan had avoided spending summers here with his family. Every time he looked at that maple tree in the yard, he’d remember the day he sat stranded up on the branch as his bigger, brawnier brother taunted him from below.Colin might be the family’s golden boy,she thought,but I married the kinder brother.

The better brother.

She found Ethan upstairs, sitting at the desk in their bedroom, so focused on his work that he didn’t even notice she’d walked in. He wouldn’t have heard her anyway, with the headphones clamped over his ears. She tapped him on the shoulder, and he sat up straight in surprise.

“Still at it?” she said.

He pulled off the headphones, and theStar Warssoundtrack boomed from the earpieces. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

“Well, no wonder, with that music blasting in your ears.” She glanced at the stack of handwritten pages on his desk. “Wow, you’ve been busy. Working upstairs, now?”

“Too many distractions downstairs. People walking in and out. And Brooke had the washing machine going ...” He shut off theStar Warsmusic. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Almost four o’clock. Is everyone else still out?”

“I haven’t been keeping track. I think my mom’s still with Arthur.”

“And Zoe?”

“She’s off with that local girl. The one she met this morning.”

Susan looked out the window but did not see the girls. In fact, she did not see anyone on the pond. “Do you know where they went?”

“Something about a cow,” he said, arranging his pages in a neat stack.

“What?”

“The girl has a cow and goats. That’s what Zoe told me. She was going over to the girl’s house to see the animals. She seemed pretty excited about it.”

A cow. Well,thatwas refreshingly wholesome, and not something Zoe was likely to see in Boston.

“As long as she’s back in time for dinner,” said Susan.

“You know how teenagers are,” said Arthur Fox as he dropped ice cubes into a glass, splashed in gin and tonic water, and added a slice of lime. “She’s probably having too good a time to come home yet.”

“And these summer days are so long,” added Elizabeth. “I’m sure Zoe has no idea how late it really is. She’ll probably show up at any minute.”

It was another calm summer evening on Maiden Pond, utterly windless, the water shimmering like liquid gold. Arthur and Hannah had once again joined the Conovers for cocktails and canapés, a summer ritual that last night Susan had found charming. This evening, it only irritated her. She looked around the living room at Brooke’s and Colin’s smiling faces, at Hannah pouring herself a second glass of wine. No one seemed at all concerned that it was seven o’clock and Zoe had not come home.

Susan frowned at her phone. “She’s usually good about letting me know if she’s going to be late.”

“How many bars do you have on your phone?” Brooke asked.

“One.”

“Well, that could be the problem. It’s like being in the wilderness here. She could be in a dead zone.”

Arthur snorted. “Half of Maine is a dead zone.”

“Remember that time Kit wandered off without telling anyone?” said Brooke. “I was so worried I called the police. Ten minutes later, Kit waltzed back into the house. What an embarrassment. He said he’d gone ‘exploring.’”

But he’s a boy,thought Susan. You worried more about girls because they were more vulnerable, more likely to catch a predator’s eye, and this town was unfamiliar to Zoe. In Boston, she and her friends could navigate the T from one end of the city to the other. They knew which neighborhoods were safe and which to avoid.

She glanced at her phone again, not really listening to the conversation. Not caring about the old stories now being trotted out, about capsized rowboats and the crashed floatplane and the year Arthur challenged Colin to a push-up contest, and Arthur won. She had no choice but to endure their stories, to keep nodding and smiling, as if she really cared.

There was still no text from Zoe.

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