Page 17 of These Summer Storms

Enter the solution to their financial problems: Franklin Storm, full of youth, arrogance, and the certainty that the tens of millions burning a hole in his pocket were only the beginning. Storm Island was his destiny, he told Elisabeth as they stepped off the skiff onto the rickety dock for the first time. After all, it was already named for him.

Elisabeth wasn’t so sure, but Franklin was born with a unique skill—the ability to convince anyone in the vicinity that his desires were theirs as well. Over the years that skill had seen him labeled a genius, a charmer, a charlatan, and a mystic, depending upon who was doing the labeling…but to Elisabeth, he was Frank, the man she’d fallen in love with, for better or worse (in those days, it was still better).

Together, they’d made the house a project, rebuilding the island as a private sanctuary. While the Park Avenue penthouse and the Londonrowhouse and the ranch in Wyoming had all hosted politicians and power brokers, Storm Island was reserved for family and extremely close friends, exclusively. Franklin knew better than anyone that the way to keep things valuable was to keep them secret. Everyone loved the promise of a secret, after all.

Everyone loved to lie about knowing those secrets, too. In tech and New York society alike, there was always someone ready to regale dinner party guests with wild tales of the private playground of an eccentric billionaire. And because everyone lied, no one knew who was telling the truth, making the house the stuff of legend. In stories, it was full of excess and oddity, and Franklin delighted in confirming the outrageous descriptions that inevitably came back to him, printed in society pages and asked about in interviews.

Not one of them was accurate: not the expansive topiary garden (nor, sadly, the life-sized elephant within); not the outdoor swimming pool to rival Hearst Castle’s (impractical for New England winters and easily debunked by Google Earth); not the secret, underground lair, full of technological inventions in the vein of the Bat Cave (the place didn’t even have reliable Wi-Fi, by Franklin’s design).

What did exist was a house that smelled like history and Murphy’s oil soap and the hint of the YSL Opium perfume that Elisabeth had worn for as long as anyone had thought to notice, and teemed with memories that stung as much as they soothed as Alice climbed the stairs to her childhood bedroom—the best thing about Storm Manor.

By the time Alice was born, Franklin and Elisabeth had already assigned large bedrooms on the second floor to Greta, then seven, and Sam, a five-year-old boy king. With their parents having commandeered a large portion of the third floor for their primary suite, Alice was left to the tower—a small, circular turret that rose from the southwest corner of the house, accessible by a narrow staircase tucked behind a door at the far end of the third-floor hallway.

There was something to be said for the fact that the Storms assigned the child who’d been…not amistakeexactly, but absolutely asurprise,to the tower room like a lost princess in a fairy tale, but that wasbetween Alice and her therapist every other Friday at 10:15a.m.(therapy was another mark against her, if anyone was counting).

She made a mental note to move this week’s session as she tossed her bags onto the bed, still covered in the tufted turquoise bedspread that had been there for as long as she could remember. The room was a time capsule of faded photographs on the fireplace mantel, shells and stones from childhood beachcombing excursions, second-place ribbons from riding camp hanging on gilded mirrors harvested from wherever parents found furnishings for their third child’s second bedroom.

Elisabeth Storm had been born into New England money so old that it no longer existed, which meant a Puritanical loathing for trappings of overt wealth (private island aside), so it had not mattered that Franklin had been a self-made billionaire several times over when Alice arrived. There were very few things in the house that matched the chrome and steel and sapphire glass that had built the Storm name. Instead, it was filled with antiques collected from the Winslow branch of the family tree.

Alice made her way to the large windows inlaid in the curved wall and the breathtaking view she’d taken for granted before. Windows on three sides of the round space provided stunning views of the island: ancient trees, dominated by the enormous oak to the east; the small building that housed the fog bell on the southern tip, open ocean beyond; and to the west, the dock and boathouse that greeted those who came in by boat from Wickford, in the distance.

Morning flooded the room with golden light and something like magic, because the years were suddenly gone and she was a kid again, watching the water, her music loud enough to annoy the whole house, wondering if she could hitch a ride with Charlie back to the mainland so she could linger outside the ice-cream shop with the cute boy behind the counter.

The budding romance she’d dreamed of had never materialized. Once she’d lied to him about having a summer job at the diner where his aunt worked (terrible coincidence, that), everything went south. But Alice had her first taste of pretending to be someone else—someonewho hadn’t been sculpted by her parents—and that had been the beginning of the end.

Of course, the end had been a long time coming.

She lifted her fingers and set them to the glass, her gaze shifting to the water she’d crossed that morning, salty and crisp, already full of would-be captains sailing the last, lingering week of summer. In the distance, a handful of fishing boats were returning to Wickford Harbor, full of lobster and crab. A memory flashed, her father eating oysters on the docks at eight in the morning, bright-eyed and laughing with a group of fishermen as Alice stood at a distance.

This is the life.

Her throat grew tight. With sorrow, of course. But frustration, too, at the way it evokedwhat might have beenrather thanwhat actually was.

“Nope,” she whispered the answer. She was postponing therapy that week. In a healthy way.

Alice spun away from her window and made for her bags to retrieve the only distraction a thirty-three-year-old woman could find in her childhood bedroom while hiding from her family.

Her phone.

Connecting to Wi-Fi, she watched as the red bubbles she’d ignored on the train the night before became angrier: twenty-three voicemails, one hundred and forty new emails. Two hundred and thirteen new text messages. She started there, opening the app and scrolling, already exhausted.

Her boss. Eventually.

The neighbor across the hall. Later.

A reporter from theTimes. Absolutely not.

A few friends from high school she still kept in touch with. Unavoidable.

Griffin.She sucked in a breath at the bold name—one she’d worked hard to avoid since July Fourth, when he’d broken her heart and left her alone, with no good reason except…It doesn’t feel right anymore, babe.She hovered over his name, unable to avoid the text preview.Alleycat.She winced at the pet name. He’d been her partner for five years andplayed the role so well even she’d been fooled (he certainly wasn’t such a good actor on stage).I just saw the news and I don’t even know what to sa…

“Then don’t,” she whispered, exercising incredible strength (superhuman, really), swiping to delete the thread without opening it. Before she could change her mind.

Gabi.

Alice opened that thread, a string of unanswered texts populating the left side of the screen, increasingly urgent. Before she could read them all, the phone vibrated in her hand, her best friend’s face flashing beneath the incoming Wi-Fi call.

Alice put the phone to her ear and opened her suitcase. “I regret setting you up with read receipts.”

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