Chapter Eight
Lucy
It’s the first morning of Lucy’s second chance. Fox Hill Lake knows, somehow, that it’s showtime. It throws down its very best: seventy-eight degrees with thick, fluffy clouds gliding majestically across a cerulean sky. She and Vivian hadn’t spoken much last night after they reached a tentative agreement. Lucy hadn’t wanted to push her luck, but these are the summer days she lives for. She invited Vivian to join her on an outing, and she was secretly delighted—and terrified and nauseated—when she said yes.
Lucy, dressed in a tank-style swimsuit with a loose pair of cutoffs on top, jumps on board with her armful of supplies: a Sox cap Caleb left here once, a can of seltzer, a towel, and Will You Maui Me? (Too high on adrenaline, she’d stayed up late to devour the rest of Sandals and Scandals in Santorini. The heart-wrenching romance was legitimately engrossing.) Vivian makes it down a minute later in bug-eyed sunglasses and a black bikini with a long, flimsy robe fluttering dramatically behind her. The daughter of Celeste Levy, no doubt.
They zip down the center of the lake, then make a smooth arc around the tip of Wilson Point, swinging toward the cove and back out again. Lucy presses her hat down tight as her hair whips her neck and cheeks.
Vivian slows to a stop on the southern side of the lake. “It’s a nice day.”
Lucy beams. “Isn’t it?”
“Okay there, don’t get too excited.”
She shimmies out of her ridiculous robe and rubs sunscreen over her face, arms, legs, and torso. “Would you mind doing my back?” she asks. She sounds casual, but as she turns and places her hands on her hips, she stiffens.
Lucy squirts the cream onto her fingers and smears it over Vivian’s shoulders and down her back. Dawn raised Lucy on pancake stacks and the promise that life is too short to worry about something as superficial as cellulite. But next to Vivian, who shares half her DNA, it’s tempting to wonder, Could I look like that if I tried?
Vivian offers to return the favor. Lucy keeps her shorts on.
There’s a ripple of awkwardness as they muddle through what comes next. Should they talk? Or is it better to give each other space? Lucy pulls her book from her bag. Vivian gawks at the cover.
“You’re actually reading that?”
Lucy blushes. “I figured I finally should.”
Vivian shakes her head. “Have fun.”
“You don’t like this one?”
“I haven’t read all of them.”
“Oh.”
Lucy can’t fathom growing up with Celeste Levy as a mother and not taking full advantage—although, on second thought, reading your mom’s steamy scenes featuring men who seem an awful lot like your dad is probably deeply uncomfortable.
“You know, you should invite her to the funeral.”
“Celebration of life,” Vivian corrects.
“Will you?”
Vivian sighs. “You really want to meet her?”
Lucy didn’t mean to come across like a pathetic groupie. “I don’t mean it like that. It’s just, she was his wife. Shouldn’t she come?”
“She hates it up here. Hasn’t been in fifteen, twenty years, probably.”
Lucy should let it go, but she wants to start planning the funeral. “I’ll invite mine if you invite yours.”
Vivian pushes her glasses up into her hair and squints. “You seriously think they want to spend a second together? On a boat ? We’ll be fishing at least one of them out of the water by the end of the night.”
Lucy had assumed Dawn would join them. She deserves closure, too.
“Just consider it, okay?”
The glasses snap down. “Fine.”
Vivian picks up her phone. Lucy opens her book, figuring the conversation is over. A minute later, though, Vivian pipes up.
“How did you find out he had two families?”
“My mom told me when I was nine. I was upset that he wouldn’t come to Fox Hill for my birthday, and she had to explain why he wasn’t always around.”
“He didn’t even tell you himself?”
“Not that I can remember. He didn’t like to talk about you two with me.”
“What about when you visited him in New York? How could he avoid it?”
“Well,” Lucy says slowly, “that never came up because he never invited me.” She’s ashamed to admit it. “When I was little, he told me his apartment was too small for guests. And when I got older, and I found out he was married—”
Lucy doesn’t want to unearth what happened next. It still hurts to think about, but maybe it’ll help Vivian see what Lucy lost because of Hank’s cruel arrangement—what Lucy is owed.
“I saw you once,” she admits. “In New York.”
Vivian startles. “Seriously? When?”
If there’s a dividing line in Lucy’s life, that day was it. “I auditioned for my middle school’s honors chorus because that class took an annual trip to the opera in New York City. I got in and I went. A few hours before the show, our group was visiting Central Park, and I realized how close I was to your apartment.”
“How did you—”
“I found the address on a piece of mail he sent to my mom—our monthly check. When the chaperones weren’t paying attention, I snuck away.”
It had been her first—maybe only—act of rebellion.
“I just wanted to see the apartment. I thought…I don’t know, that it would help me come to terms with everything, maybe? It doesn’t make sense now. I was just a kid.”
Maybe thirteen isn’t young for a New Yorker to be wandering the streets of Manhattan alone, but Lucy had never felt smaller. The skyscrapers were so tall, she got dizzy looking up. She’d expected to see cramped apartments, not brownstones the size of mansions. The sight of a homeless man on Broadway broke her heart; she gave him half her lunch money, not realizing she’d encounter another in fifty feet, and another after that. As she made her way toward West 77th Street, guilt nagged at her. She would’ve gone back if she weren’t already so close.
“I found where you lived and I stood across the street, just looking. But then the door opened, and you all came out. You, Dad, your mom.”
Hank and Vivian walked side by side, with Celeste a few steps behind them. Lucy hid behind a car to watch. It was cold enough that she could see her breath, and she shivered as they ambled down the sidewalk. A perfect little trio.
“You said something—I don’t know what, I couldn’t hear—and Dad laughed and put his arm around you. He ruffled up your hair and hugged you; you got annoyed and pushed him away.” A familiar sadness hangs heavy in her chest. “I couldn’t believe that you were lucky enough to have a family together like that all the time and took it for granted.”
“You didn’t say anything? You didn’t want to catch up to us?” Vivian asks incredulously.
Lucy had been frozen to the spot, stricken with shock. “No.”
“I must’ve seemed like a brat.”
Lucy nods. “Yeah, kind of. I was jealous.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“I know you didn’t.”
Vivian is lost in thought. “He slipped up once. I overheard him on the phone with you.”
Lucy’s jaw goes slack. “Seriously?”
“I was fourteen. You were on speaker. I heard him talking about ‘Mom,’ but it didn’t sound like you were talking about mine. He tried explaining it away, but his answers didn’t add up. I didn’t know your name or anything, but…I knew something was up.”
Despite the warm day, a chill runs through Lucy. “When did he tell you the truth?”
Vivian looks uncomfortable. “He never did.”
It feels like a gut punch. Vivian was worth shielding from this whole mess, but Lucy wasn’t?
“I kept trying to get him to come clean. The more I dug in, the more suspicious he acted. Something just felt very…off. The day he died, I asked him about it point-blank, and he denied it.”
“He was that ashamed of me?” The second Lucy asks the question, she regrets sounding so weak in front of Vivian.
“Ashamed of himself, probably.”
Maybe. But it hurts nonetheless.
Examining a lock of hair for split ends, Vivian says, “I tried to look you up. I didn’t have anything to go on, I didn’t even know if you were real, but I wanted to see if I could find you. And not just to prove he was hiding something.”
It’s earthshaking to know that Lucy’s stalking wasn’t one-sided. At seventeen, when she was skimming through Calhoun kids’ Facebook albums titled “muploads” or “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” for a familiar face, Vivian could’ve been snooping through their dad’s emails. A few years ago, when Lucy treated herself to a 23andMe kit for her birthday on the off chance that her half-sister would be notified of a genetic match, was Vivian pressing the cute bartender at Foxy Roxy’s for information? She could’ve. Lucy had fantasized endlessly about stepping into each other’s lives. What if they could’ve been college roommates, making up for childhood bedrooms three hundred miles apart? Vivian could’ve been her maid of honor. Every happy milestone was shadowed by absence. She could’ve reached out, but she was afraid of the potential rejection.
Vivian hadn’t really needed anything in life—she had the luxe apartment, the expensive education, sleepaway camp, once-in-a-lifetime trips every Christmas break—and yet she’d still wanted something: Lucy.
“Why did you lie to me?” Lucy asks.
Vivian’s eyebrows shoot up. “Lie?”
“You pretended you had no idea who I was.”
From the moment she arrived, Vivian’s outraged bewilderment made Lucy feel like her years of longing for this exact encounter were pathetic. It didn’t have to be that way.
“I guessed there might be a version of you. I didn’t know anything about you , specifically.”
“That’s semantics. You know what I mean.”
“I was caught off guard. I needed a minute to wrap my head around all of this.”
“It would’ve meant a lot to me, feeling recognized,” Lucy says, embarrassed. “Like you cared.”
“I did care about meeting you,” Vivian insists.
“You’re that good of a liar? Guess I missed the family gene.”
Lucy doesn’t fight like this with anyone else, flinging off barbs without caring if they hurt. Even during the most excruciating moments of the day Patrick left, she didn’t lash out—she wilted. Maybe the words slip out like that because that’s her best shot at breaking through Vivian’s cold, hard surface. Or maybe this is just how siblings fight.
Vivian closes her eyes. “I—I’m sorry. I should’ve been more up front with you.”
Lucy sits with that for a moment. “Thank you.”
“Sometimes, it’s just easier to…” Vivian’s lips are a tight line, her hands ball into fists. “To just not get into stuff.”
“Dad would agree.”
Vivian rubs her hand over her face. “Ugh, God. Yeah.”
In the silence that follows, waves ripple by. A cotton ball puff of a cloud floats by, revealing the sun’s warmth once again. Its glow shines down on Lucy, reading Will You Maui Me? , and Vivian, peering out at the lake, seemingly lost in thought. Everything melts: Sweat slicks Lucy’s skin, condensation drips down her seltzer can, and the tense mood glides away. When she reaches the end of a chapter, Lucy closes the book.
Sensing a shift, Vivian looks up. Maybe Lucy’s imagining it, but a nervous tension crackles between them, like they both want to move past their fight. She aims for a light topic, the kind of thing a pair of sisters would idly discuss on a leisurely afternoon like this.
“So, I met a guy at the library the other day.”
The corner of Vivian’s mouth quirks up. “Like, met a guy?”
“Mhm.” A little shyly, she recounts what happened.
“An honest-to-God meet-cute. Adorable.” Vivian grimaces, deadpan.
“We had dinner and—”
Vivian lifts her sunglasses. “Hold on, you already went out with him?”
It shouldn’t feel this good to impress Vivian, but it does. Lucy wishes she could tamp down her swell of pride.
“Last night, actually.” She hesitates, not wanting to bring up a sore subject. “But there was a lot going on.”
“Mmm.” Vivian peers over her sunglasses. “Well, go on. Tell me about him.”
“He’s from Portland. He’s a lawyer. He reads. Um…what else…”
Vivian’s eyes narrow. “What kind of law does he practice?”
“He didn’t say, actually.”
Lucy feels embarrassingly self-centered for not digging more into his career. She adds Ask the right questions to her list of reminders: Smile, don’t cry, make sure there’s nothing in your teeth.
“If we go out again, I’ll ask.”
“You’re on the fence?”
Lucy shifts uncomfortably. Of course Vivian would assume he’d automatically want a second date. She doesn’t want to describe the way the mood swung in the parking lot.
“I’m still married.”
“Technically.”
“I still feel married.”
Pity flits across Vivian’s face. “Oh.”
She hears herself, how hopelessly hung up she sounds. “I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Vivian
If today was a preview of how the rest of Vivian’s summer with Lucy will go, she doesn’t hate it. Sure, it’s rocky. They aren’t exactly braiding each other’s hair. Lucy is sensitive and self-righteous, but Vivian is also fascinated by her. Nobody else will ever precisely understand the impact and insanity of their dad’s choices. Lucy holds the missing pieces to the puzzle Vivian has fixated on for so long. It’s clear that Lucy inherited his love of the outdoors, his sentimental side, his innate connection to this place—which prompts the question, what did he pass down to Vivian? She doesn’t like the answer. She’s guarded, evasive, good at cleaving her personal life into two neat compartments. Spending time with Lucy isn’t comfortable, but it might be the most meaningful interaction she’s had with—family?—in a long time.
That night, they cast around for a movie they can agree on. The ancient TV doesn’t have Netflix or Hulu, but they can prop up a laptop on an ottoman and call it a day. Lucy flicks through their digital options, while Vivian blows dust off a box of VHS tapes.
“What do you think of this one?” she asks, holding up the Lindsay Lohan version of The Parent Trap .
“Will that be too weird?”
Identical twins separated at birth and raised on different continents meet as preteens at a lakeside summer camp; hijinks ensue.
“Probably. But it’s also perfect.”
“Does the tape still even work? I can’t tell you how many times I watched it as a kid.”
“Let’s see. But first, snacks.”
Vivian makes microwave popcorn sprinkled with crumbled Reese’s peanut butter cups, the snack Hank used to make for her when Celeste wasn’t around. The salty-sweet combo tastes like her childhood, before everything unraveled.
“I know it sounds weird, but it’s actually great,” she says.
Lucy looks up in surprise. “Oh, I know. I taught him that. Paige’s mom used to make it for us.”
Vivian can’t hide her sliver of disappointment. “He made it sound like our special thing.”
As a kid, Vivian didn’t mind being an only child. Her roster of playdates and, later, piles of homework and after-school activities kept her too busy to be lonely. Her parents had tried to get pregnant again, but Celeste had had a string of miscarriages.
After Vivian suspected she potentially had a sister somewhere out there, she became enthralled by her friends’ relationships with theirs. She watched them crowding in front of the bathroom mirror to dab on concealer from the same tube, bringing each other the right emergency snacks on bad cramp days, and cramming into a single twin bed during long weekend visits to each other’s colleges. She was intrigued by it all, jealous she’d been robbed of this. Not every family was that close, she knew that, but she understood that if you got lucky, a sibling could feel like another limb.
Even if she and Lucy can make peace with the wild disparities of their upbringings and forge a relationship—which still seems doubtful—they won’t ever achieve that instinctual ease. That kind of bond is soldered at birth, and they’d never been given the chance. The Parent Trap twins might know a thing or two about that.
She hits play. As the on-screen twins clash, she thinks, I get it , empathizing hard with both. She’s drawn to Hallie Parker, who grew up on a vineyard in Napa, for obvious reasons. Lucy would probably cast Vivian as Annie James, the rich city girl with the glamorous mother, and, well, she wouldn’t be wrong. Her empathy runs dry, however, when the girls are stuck living together and piece together that they’re twins. They fling themselves into a hug as the music swells. If only it were that simple.
In another scene, Annie complains to her mother about living apart from Hallie, pouting, “No offense, Mom, but this arrangement really sucks.”
“It could be so much worse,” Vivian says.
Lucy shoots her a small, nervous smile.
In the week since Vivian officially agreed to stay in Maine for the summer, she’s settled into something of a routine: Wake up, read the pleading texts Oscar sent her between midnight and three a.m., ignore them, brush her teeth. Coffee on the front porch in the mornings, happy hour at sunset on the back deck. In between, she lies out on the boat, rotating every twenty minutes for an even tan, then retreating to the hammock in the shade.
She even takes up painting again, picking up a watercolor paint set, an easel, and some canvases. As a kid, she adored capturing Fox Hill Lake’s ever-changing landscape: bright blue afternoons, golden evenings, white skies on wet mornings. The summer she was ten, she proudly presented Hank with a whole month’s worth of work across the kitchen table. He studied them carefully, then chose just one to frame for his office. She doesn’t know what happened to the rest.
She and Lucy tentatively find a rhythm of their own—not as friends, but more like a pair of college freshmen randomly assigned to share a dorm room. They make their own meals and do their own laundry. Sometimes, they’ll watch a movie together before bed, but only if one explicitly invites the other to join. Otherwise, Lucy will read on the armchair in the living room and Vivian will take a glass of wine into the bathtub and listen to breakup songs: Frank Ocean for wistful reminiscing, Adele to coax out the tears, Amy Winehouse to keep her head up. Some of the more fervently obsessive cork dorks back in the city would have a conniption if they saw her drinking in the tub. The bathroom’s humidity destroys the wine’s structure, overemphasizing the tannins and lending the flavor an astringent tang. They may be technically right, but they’re total killjoys.
It takes every ounce of her strength to refrain from texting Oscar or, worse, driving back to the city and doing something stupid, like reprimanding him—or kissing him—right in the middle of Della’s dining room. On more than one evening, Vivian lies in the bath, googling first-trimester symptoms and child support statutes until her fingers prune. Meanwhile, Carla’s fetus grows from the size of a chickpea to the size of a kumquat.
It’s the carelessness that Vivian can’t get over. She spent two years of her life meticulously strategizing their affair. Her browser history was filled with dense explanations of New York State divorce law and reviews of good restaurants she’d like to try in Oscar’s neighborhood, the ones they were never careless enough to visit together. She stopped spritzing on her favorite Tom Ford Black Orchid perfume in case it clung to his clothes. It was her idea for Oscar to gift Carla a weeklong yoga retreat for her birthday, leaving him and Vivian with precious time alone. Whenever they traveled to vineyards together, she booked two hotel rooms on her corporate card, even if they only stayed in one. She cared enough to make sure the accounting looked clean; she knew a good divorce attorney could comb through Oscar’s expenses and piece together evidence of an affair. They were so close to being free together. Life was about to be so good. And then he ruined it.
If Oscar were as laser-focused on a future with Vivian as she was with him, he wouldn’t have risked getting Carla pregnant. He threw their future into jeopardy—and for what?
Her music cuts out suddenly. Her mother is calling, even though Vivian had finally spoken to her yesterday.
“Hello?”
“There you are, hi! Did you see my Instagram post?”
“I did.”
She’d posted screenshots of the New York Times story with the caption: “Praise from the paper of record runs in the family! I’m so proud of my daughter Vivian for her spectacular work directing the wine program at Della.”
Vivian can practically hear Celeste frown. “But you didn’t leave a comment. I thought I tagged you?”
She’d tagged Oscar, too. Fabulous.
“You did.”
“Why didn’t you comment and like it?”
“Because we already talked about the article yesterday.”
“Yes, but the internet doesn’t know that. It looks like you’re ignoring me.”
Exasperated, she says, “I promise you, nobody cares.”
“But—”
“Look, I’m writing something right now,” Vivian says, liking the post and commenting a single red heart emoji. “There.”
There’s a pause while Celeste confirms Vivian’s work. “Good. That wasn’t so hard.”
“Is there something you’re calling about?” Vivian asks.
She could be nicer, but it’s a miracle she’s this nice at all, considering the level of emotional intelligence she was exposed to as a child.
“No, I just wanted to check in, see how you’re doing.” Her tone shifts, like she’s just humoring Vivian. “Because I know you want that.” Then, enunciating clearly, she asks, “How are you?”
Vivian sighs. “Fine. How are you?”
“Well, I got through another day. I was wondering—how are things going with the sale? How much is it on the market for? I couldn’t find it online yet.”
Vivian had actually stayed true to her word with Lucy. She’d told the realty team that she was putting the project on pause. Another thing she’d rather not tell her mother.
“Well, the Realtor is still doing comp research.”
“Still?”
“His office has apparently been slammed.” The lie comes too easily.
“Is that girl still hanging around?”
“Lucy. And yeah, she is. Reading your books, too.”
“Sweet,” Celeste deadpans, though Vivian knows she’s probably pleased.
“By the way, there’s this thing she wants to do when we scatter his ashes. A ceremony, sort of. A celebration of life for Dad out on the boat at sunset on his birthday. She wants us to be there—both of us, and her mom, too.”
“You’re not actually humoring her with that, are you?”
“Actually, I’m going to do it. Please come?”
Why had she let Lucy talk her into this? Her mother is difficult enough over the phone—a visit won’t magically make her any better. Celeste said she wants to be better…in theory. If Vivian wants a chance at a smoother relationship, she needs to give her mother a chance.
“Come on, you know I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“All of us on that little boat…it’s like the one-bed trope,” she muses.
“The what?”
“In romance, when there’s plenty of tension between two characters, you throw them into a situation where—oh, no —they have to share a single bed. Small spaces and high stakes make wild things happen. Like in Jocelyn’s last book, An Ocean Apart. They were stuck in the tiny underbelly of a ship lost at sea.”
Jocelyn Bloomsbury-Jones has been her mother’s biggest competitor for decades. They were neck and neck on bestseller lists until Celeste slipped off them. She’s famously reclusive and maddeningly successful, living in some Vermont farmhouse with a pair of Great Danes. Unlike Celeste, she’s rarely seen at conferences or festivals. She does a single reading per year at an indie bookstore in a different state. People scalp tickets. If you miss it, you’re out of luck. Try again next year.
Vivian briefly imagines the chaos that could emerge from the four women on the boat: flung ashes; drinks toppling overboard; Vivian distracted at the wheel, crashing straight into the shoreline.
“Please,” she says, trying one more time, knowing she’ll get shot down anyway. “I don’t want to do this on my own. You might actually like Lucy.”
“I’ve been through enough already. You want me to hang out with my sister wife and her spawn, too?”
So much for being better.
“Mom,” Vivian groans.
“Okay,” Celeste says after a pause. “For you, I’ll be there.”
That brings Vivian up short. “Really? You’ll come up for his birthday?”
“I’ll figure out my travel plans and keep you posted. You’ll deep-clean the place, won’t you? The dust up there, it haunts my nightmares.”