Mansion Beach

Nicola. 1

Three days after the moped ride and Jack Baker have drinks at the outside bar at Mahogany Shoals, in New Harbor. The

workday is over. ’s workday, that is. Jack doesn’t have a workday. How’s he fill his time? He says he’s mostly doing

physical therapy to rehab the Achilles. He tells her that he sometimes does odd jobs for David and Taylor in exchange for

their hospitality.

“What kind of odd jobs?” wants to know. (Hadn’t David said they had a handyman for odd jobs? Hadn’t she made fun of

him for having a handyman?)

He walks it back. “Well, maybe not exactly jobs ,” he concedes. “Not jobs so much as keeping them company. I’m very entertaining, Nicky.”

The night before, Jack texted and asked her to meet for a drink so he could tell her a story.

WHAT KIND OF STORY? she texted back, then, feeling sassy, she added, A BEDTIME STORY? She added this emoji, then deleted it. Too far.

NEXT TIME ON THE BEDTIME STORY , came the answer. STORY ABT YOUR NEIGHBOR.

All day an anticipatory sensation had traveled up and down ’s spine, keeping her company while she cleaned out the touch tanks and greeted visitors. Already life on Block Island is more interesting than life in Providence. Earlier in the week a dead humpback whale washed up on the west side of the island, and tomorrow a group from the Institute is going out to see it.

Not only that, though. She’s been to a party with influencers! She’s having drinks outside! Somebody (somebody hot) is going

to tell her a story!

“It was New York City, almost five years ago—” begins Jack, when they’re settled at the bar. Payne’s Dock reaches out into

Great Salt Pond, and along it are dozens of boats.

The bartender approaches, and Jack tells , “To be continued.” The bartender has leathery skin and bright blond hair

and a line of earrings marching up both her ears. “I’ll have the usual,” Jack tells the bartender with a wink (he looks like

the emoji she didn’t use, but hotter) and she nods and looks at . says she needs a minute.

When the bartender has moved away says, “You have a usual drink? So not your first time here?”

“It’s not even my first time here today ,” he admits. “I’m trying to make this my summer version of a local pub.”

“Okay,” she says. “Living the dream, are you?”

“A version of the dream,” he says.

When looks across the pond she can see Juliana’s massive home with her own (Taylor’s) small cottage beside it. Her

cottage looks like a toddler sitting next to its mother, waiting for instruction. When she swivels her head in the other direction

she can see, in the great distance, what she thinks is the dock at David and Taylor’s house, though the house itself is obscured

by the curve of the land. She faces front once again and studies the menu, hanging over the bar.

The bartender returns and puts a drink in front of Jack. “One Dark ‘N’ Stormy for my favorite golfer,” she says.

“Why, thank you,” he says flirtily.

She rolls her eyes at as if to say, This guy! “One for you?”

“What else is good?”

“Get the Mudslide,” Jack tells her. “They’re famous for their Mudslides here.”

“Yeah? Okay. Sure, why not. I’ll have a Mudslide.” The bartender nods and gets to work. A catalog-ready family with two blond

adults and two blond children, one boy and one girl, step off a yacht. Anyway, thinks it’s a yacht. Truly she doesn’t

know the difference between a yacht and a very big boat. Three young adults dock a motorboat and somebody whoops. A twentysomething

in shorts and a bright pink bikini top cheers them on from land, taking pictures with an iPhone. A couple around ’s

parents’ age sit on one of the benches, watching all of this go on. She notices the way their fingers intertwine between them,

and the way they aren’t talking but they don’t seem bored with each other either. She feels a pinprick in her heart, and that

pinprick is the loss of Zachary. Is she allowed to feel the pinprick, when it was her decision to go? She hates that thoughts

of Zachary have the nerve to pop up like this, unwelcome, making her feel things . Interlopers in her mind.

She’s got to get out of her own head. So she tilts it toward the boat-maybe-yacht and asks, “Who lives like this?” Rhetorical

question mostly, but seriously, who lives like this?

“Lots of people.” Casually, as though he’s petting a dog that happened to sit down near him, Jack traces the inside of ’s

elbow with his fingers, and the sensation of pleasure she feels is almost violent. She shivers and tries not to look too closely

at his lips. He has really good lips: full but not too full. Well moisturized. “Someday I’ll buy you one of those, and we’ll

go off in it together.” He says this affably, nonchalantly, like he’s saying someday he’ll take her to the driving range.

“Stop,” she says, when what she really means is please keep going.

“Stop talking? Or stop this?” He lifts his finger. She doesn’t answer and he continues tracing. Her drink arrives. The Mudslide is perfection in a disposable cup: cold and just sweet enough, with the tang of the vodka hitting the back of her throat. Almost instantly, she feels a little woozy. Lunch was a Clif Bar.

“Okay. Now, the story I’m about to tell you is what Juliana talked to me about the other night at the party.”

“The night you deserted me in the library for like an hour?” She’s teasing, a little, but she’s also still stung by the abandonment,

and her third sip of Mudslide has loosened her tongue. What a lightweight she is.

He puts a finger to her lips and holds it there for an instant. (Can he just do that? Can he just put his finger on her lips without permission?) “Yes,” he says. “And you know it wasn’t an hour.”

“Fine,” she concedes. “Go on.”

“It was September, almost five years ago. Tiger Woods was recovering from knee surgery. Justin Thomas won the BMW Championship,

but then Rory McIlroy won the Tour Championship in Atlanta. The next month, the Nationals were going to beat the Astros in

the World Series.”

“That’s a lot of sports context,” says. She squints into the middle distance and thinks back to almost five years ago.

She was in law school. She knew Zachary, but they weren’t dating yet. If she was being honest she’d say she was trying to

get his attention, because at the time she thought his opacity was mysterious and sexy.

Jack continues, “LookBook was a few years old then, gaining traction. David and Taylor were engaged. David was living with

me in New York City, in an apartment owned but not occupied by my parents.”

“Sorry, I have to interrupt,” says . “Your parents just had an extra Manhattan apartment lying around?”

“Well, it wasn’t lying around. It was sitting. Sitting empty. They bought it as an investment.” He smiles. “And they decided to invest in me.” He picks up her hand and traces the inside of her palm, delivering a wicked grin at the same time. “You’ll see, Nicky. I’m worth investing in.”

Flustered, she tries to keep them on track. “David and Taylor didn’t live together?” Taylor and David had met freshman year

of college, and they’d been almost inseparable since.

“Not yet. They were renovating that brownstone in Back Bay to move into after the wedding. Taylor’s dad wanted her in the

Boston office, but at that time she was still in New York. She was off and running with her career.”

“What about our David?”

Jack shakes his head regretfully. “Our David was at loose ends. His degree was in sociology, but, shocker, nobody was hiring

sociologists with no experience.”

“Was anyone hiring sociologists with experience?” asks , and Jack hoots.

Even if they were, explains Jack, Taylor and David were soon moving to Boston, so what was the point of trying to get a job?

“What was your degree in?” asks.

“Golf.”

“No, seriously.”

“I’m being completely serious.” Jack grins again, to show her that he really isn’t, but he doesn’t answer the question.

“My theory,” says Jack, maybe reading her mind, drawing out the word theory like he’s getting paid for extra syllables, “is that everything I’m about to tell you has to do with race cars.”

does a spit take. “ What ?”

“You know about David’s race car thing,” Jack says. He looks at sideways, in a way that suggests he’s going to share

a tremendous secret.

“Of course ,” says , pinched by the tiniest, most unobtrusive irritation. “Of course I know about David’s race car thing.” They had talked about this at dinner, didn’t he remember? “I know David better than

you do!”

Jack arches a single sexy eyebrow and says, “Do you?”

“Well, I used to know him better. I used to know him better than anyone did.” David was the brother never had, her

teacher, protector, sometimes enabler. You don’t spend every holiday, a bunch of weekends, and most of the summer with someone

without getting to know them as well as you know your own siblings. David taught her to drive, taught her to drink (not at

the same time), taught her how to throw a football and catch a baseball and survive the scary Spanish teacher at the high

school who refused to speak in English even to the beginner-level classes.

She slurps down the rest of her Mudslide and doesn’t object when Jack orders another round. “So you know about the state fair,”

says Jack. He presses his elbow to hers, almost indecently.

reclaims her elbow and says, “Yes, Jack. I know about the fair.” In 2002, the day before school started, both families,

hers and David’s, all eleven of them, took a family trip to the Minnesota State Fair. “I was at the fair. I was at the race when Gary St. Amant won the 300 after seventeen years of not winning.”

“Look who has the sports knowledge now,” says Jack, impressed.

“I have a lot of knowledge,” says , secretly proud of herself. “Want me to tell you about it?”

“Of course I do.”

“So we’re at the fair, trooping around, doing all the fair things. It started off as just this experience we were going to

have as a family, watch a NASCAR race, you know, something different to do before we went off to get the fried dough—”

“But something changed in David when he watched that race,” says Jack, and now is impressed, because that’s exactly

how she would have put it.

“Exactly. Something changed in David.”

“And then it became an obsession.”

“Obsession is an understatement,” says . “Like calling a sperm whale a moderate-sized creature.” Immediately, an inconvenient,

telling warmth floods her cheeks. So many whales to choose from, and she chose the sperm whale. Then: Grow up, she tells herself sternly. You are an almost-thirty-year-old woman, not a fifth-grade boy. You can say sperm in the context of a whale. You can say sperm in any context! She hurries on with her thoughts, to move the conversation forward. “But if NASCAR opened the door,” she says, “sports car

racing ushered him over the threshold.”

“Gorgeous metaphor,” says Jack. “If I were wearing a hat right now, I’d tip it.”

After that, David was a lost cause. All his energy went into thinking about cars; every penny he made at their fathers’ furniture

store went into his car fund, until he had enough to buy an old Mazda Miata. Once he had it, all he did in his free time was

tinker with it, modify it, make it into the closest thing to a sports racing car he could.

“When we were in college, he used to talk about missing that Miata like some guys in college talked about missing their high

school girlfriends,” says Jack.

“He loved that car,” says . “I remember he was always talking about the holy trinity of sports cars. Bigger wheels,

bigger engine, closer to the ground.”

She heard enough about it back then to know the deal. If NASCAR is the Country Cousin of motorsports, sports car racing is

a two-olive martini, elegant, elevated, with turns and curves and straightaways. Racing sports cars became what David thought

about, what he wanted to do. All he wanted to do. He did a track day with his car when he was seventeen, and after that he was officially a lost cause. He

wrote his college essay—this is the one that got him into Yale—on coming from behind in his first race. “It was called ‘The

Power of the Underdog,’ and it was published in some anthology,” she tells Jack.

(David going to college on the East Coast, by the way, paved the way for to make her pitch for attending the University of Rhode Island; she had a visceral desire to put herself near the ocean, even if it took her an undergrad degree in poli-sci, a law school degree, and a failed relationship to allow her to find her path.)

But, but, but. Racing is not like soccer; you don’t grab a ball and a pair of cleats and go for it. You need time, and you

need money, and in an ideal world you need a parent who’s willing to support you in your quest. David didn’t have any of these.

The Furniture Brothers work at the store on holidays and weekends, even now. There are four girls in ’s family and three

boys in David’s: there was never room for one child out of seven to retain an expensive, time-consuming hobby. When David

went east to college, most people assumed his dream had remained behind. Still, the flame burned strong and bright all those

years. knows it did.

“But what,” she asks, “does any of this have to do with Juliana?”

“Let’s go back to 2019,” Jack says. Taylor was going gangbusters working for Brice Buchanan, learning the ropes so fast it

was almost like she’d made the ropes herself. Jack was on the Tour and was gone a lot. And David was going any chance he got

up to Monticello Motor Club, in the Catskills.

“To drive cars?”

“Noooo,” says Jack. “The people who drive cars there are gazillionaires. The Buchanans are mere millionaires. He had a job

there.”

“A job? Doing what?” How did she not know about this? There was a time when she knew everything about David!

“I don’t know, changing tires and stuff. Pit work. Sometimes he got to take a car around the track, to test it or whatever.

Basically he did all the work he did for those rare moments of driving. But here’s the thing. Taylor had just asked him to

stop doing it.”

“Why?”

“Depends what you believe. It’s far from the city. The trip could take two hours each way. And David didn’t have a car. He had to take one of the Buchanans’ cars. He wanted them to plan an occasional vacation to a big race. But Taylor didn’t want any part of that. It wasn’t a shared interest, blah blah.”

“What do you mean, ‘depends what you believe’? It wasn’t that?”

“That’s not what I think. What I think is that she didn’t want to be engaged to someone who was working as a mechanic. When

they first met, she thought it was cute and wholesome. But as time went on, not so much. Taylor felt that every little boy

needs to move out of his race car bed and into a real one eventually.”

“David never had a race car bed.”

Jack laughs. “Metaphorically speaking, then. Anyway. On the day in question, I was home. I wasn’t playing again until Sanderson.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Doesn’t matter. I had just started dating this model”—he says this so casually, like someone like would say, I was eating this grilled cheese sandwich —“and it was Fashion Week, you know, so there were events going on everywhere, not just the shows but all kinds of networking

stuff, and parties, and whatever. She got me an invite to one of these parties, and I needed a date, so I brought David as

my plus-one.”

“What about the model?”

“Oh, we were over by then.”

“That was quick.”

“Yeah,” he says ruefully, rubbing his chin. “Yeah. Short but sweet.”

“So how did you get into the party if you and the model were over?”

“I was on the list. And I thought, Why the hell not? Anyway. We go to this party at Chelsea Piers, David and I. Juliana was

there too, networking for LookBook. Something to do with her next round of funding. Who knows. The details aren’t important.

What’s important is—” Jack takes a long, dramatic breath. “What’s important is, David and Juliana met at that party.”

The puzzle pieces begin to slot into place. David hasn’t just heard of LookBook—David knows Juliana. She remembers Juliana’s enigmatic smile, her mention of a favor. David is hiding something from . What is it?

“When I was ready to go—the party was so boring , by the way; Fashion Week is so much hype”— doesn’t try to hide her eye roll—“I went to find David. He was standing where

he’d been standing all night, right near the oysters, talking to the same person I’d seen him talking to every time I glanced

over. And that person was Juliana.”

“So you met her too. You both know her.”

Jack tents his fingers. “I met her briefly.”

“And what’d you think?”

“What I thought was—well, this is going to sound really weird, but it’s the only way I can describe it. What I thought was,

This is a big party, but I feel like I just walked in on two people alone in a room.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I got out of there. And then, when all the model-y and fashion people went off to do whatever they do, Juliana and David

went on a walk.” Jack pauses again, as if allowing the import of this to sink in.

“Okay,” says . “A walk. What’s the rest of the story?”

“That’s it. The walk is the story.”

David and Juliana talked long into the night, the way you do, Jack explained, when one conversation with one person can make

you remember that there’s a whole world of people out there you haven’t yet met, a buffet of personalities and backstories

yet to sample.

“Are you saying David cheated on Taylor?” David had always been, to the dismay of many (just ask the female half of his high school class), hopelessly monogamous.

Jack shakes his head. “I don’t think he technically cheated on Taylor.” figures she must look dubious because he says,

“I’m not even talking about sex, see.” tries really hard to look away when he says sex because she’s still feeling his hand tracing her el bow, his finger on her lips. “I’m talking about talking , you know? The way you do when you have all the time in the world.” For a moment he looks pensive, almost sad, so doesn’t

point out that he still very much presents as someone who has all the time in the world. “They had this connection, according

to David, this really deep, instant connection.”

“From talking one night?”

“From talking all night ,” Jack said. “As in, they walked around the city until dawn. They saw the sunrise from the High Line. They were like Ethan

Hawke and that French girl in that movie, you know?”

does know that movie. She and her roommates watched it one drunken night in college. “ Before Sunrise .”

“Exactly,” he says.

understands that you can have a night like this in New York in a way you cannot have in most parts of Minnesota, because

New York is lousy with all-night diners and all-night bars and lights that don’t go out. “The city that never sleeps,” she

says.

“Never sleeps,” concurs Jack. “Never ever.” His palm is on the back of her neck for an instant, then not.

What transpired between Juliana and David on that one night in New York City? Nobody knows. The machinations of the human

heart are mysterious, enigmatic, utterly personal.

“What I gather,” he says, “is that David understood parts of Juliana that nobody had bothered to understand before. And vice

versa, with David. Especially the race cars, this crucial part of David’s DNA that Taylor never cared about.”

“And Juliana did? From one night?”

“It only takes one night,” says Jack. “In the right circumstances.” He fixes her with a gaze. She tries to look away but can’t.

“Or the wrong circumstances,” she says.

A tip of Jack’s head concedes this point. “Also that.” He goes on: “Juliana could see it coiled inside of him, all that desire. Taylor was dating a Yale graduate, acceptable husband material, not an aspiring race car driver. Definitely not a mechanic. She had other things in mind for David.”

“Eye Candy.”

“Mr. Mom.”

Jack snorts.

“But wait, then what?” asks. “What happened after that one night?”

“Well, I was a good boy, asleep by midnight. But the next day, when I saw David? I swear I’ve never seen him that way. It was like

he was high, but he wasn’t high. David doesn’t get high.”

“He drinks,” says loyally.

“He definitely drinks. But this was not Drunk David. I’ve seen a lot of Drunk David. He was—I don’t know how to describe it. I mean, I guess

the easiest way to describe it was he was acting like someone in love.”

“And then what?”

“And then nothing.” He shrugs. “Taylor came home from wherever she was, and life went on, and the next year they got married,

and the rest is history.”

“But what about Juliana?”

“Well, nothing ,” Jack says slowly, “until the wedding.”

“What happened at the wedding?” Taylor and David had been married at OceanCliff, the most spectacular of the spectacular places

to get married in Newport. “Besides the fact that my mom almost had a panic attack.” While a lot of the world had been canceling

weddings that fall, David and Taylor’s had managed to go on. Taylor wasn’t about to be undone by a pandemic. Aside from that,

David’s new financial status unnerved ’s mom. To see this child whose diapers she’d changed, whose Easter eggs she’d

hidden and night terrors she’d banished (their parents traded kids back and forth like baseball cards), surrounded by such

opulence—it didn’t sit right with her.

(The fact that Taylor’s mother was absent for so much of her life didn’t sit right with any of the Carrs. Not that that was Taylor’s fault. Of course it wasn’t. But the Minnesota Carrs wondered: Wouldn’t a motherless childhood manifest itself in some ways that nobody could

predict? The fact that Taylor’s mother appeared at the wedding with a man nearly two decades her junior and did not seem even

to have the good grace to feel sheepish about it—that must signify something too, although none of the Carrs could say what.)

“Not at the wedding. The night before,” explains Jack. He relates the rest of the story. He bought a good bottle of bourbon and he

brought it to the hotel room after the rehearsal dinner. As David’s best man he was going to stay with the groom-to-be, while

Taylor and her maid of honor slept in the bridal suite. Taylor wanted the traditional no-seeing-each-other-before-the-ceremony

wedding eve. The rest of the wedding party and any guests who had traveled were scattered elsewhere throughout the same hotel

or in other hotels in Newport.

“We were at the Howard Johnson,” says . “Most of Newport was beyond our budget.”

“Well, no wonder.” Jack restarts the infuriatingly hot tracing of her elbow. “I would have remembered you if we’d been at

the same hotel.”

The idea of bringing back the bourbon was that David and Jack would have a toast, hang out a little, get to bed. David was

happy with an early night. He wanted his beauty sleep, he said.

So Jack poured them each a drink and they settled back, David on one of the beds in the suite, Jack stretched out on one of

the two couches. It was a big suite. They turned on the TV and watched whatever movie came on. One of the Bourne movies, Jack

thought, though he couldn’t remember for sure which one. David was half watching and half scrolling through his phone. Mindlessly

at first, then suddenly he sat up and made a little strangled noise.

“What’s going on, buddy?” Jack asked. “Everything okay?”

David didn’t answer; his gaze was glued to the phone. He reached over to the nightstand, where the bottle of bourbon sat. He poured, filling his glass nearly to the brim. He drank.

“Whoa,” said Jack. “You’ve gone beyond fingers now. You’re looking at an entire hand. You want to slow down? You’ve got kind

of a big day coming up tomorrow.”

David shook his head and drank more, and after a while he said, “I can’t do it. We should call someone.” His movements had

become erratic, unconsidered. He reached for the hotel phone as if to put the receiver to his ear but instead knocked it off

its base. “Who should we call?” David asked Jack, the night before his wedding in his suite at the OceanCliff.

“Call someone why?” Jack asked.

“To tell them the wedding is off.” David was slurring by then.

“Come on,” said Jack. “That’s just the alcohol talking. You don’t want to do that.” He looked carefully at David and watched

a variety of emotions cross his face: bewilderment, discord, maybe even a flash of grief. He looked, Jack tells , like

a little boy who’d lost his mother at the shopping mall. Full of consternation and angst.

“Did he show you what was on his phone?” is trying to square this backstory with the fairy-tale wedding she’d attended

the next day.

“He didn’t.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Then what?” is nearly breathless. Here are David and Taylor, married all this time, and here is Felicity, proof of

their union. knows the end of the story. But she doesn’t know the middle.

Then, Jack tells her, David flopped back against the pillow, his arm covering his eyes, and the next thing Jack knew David

was sleeping deeply. Snoring.

“Well, did you look at his phone after he was asleep? To see what was going on?”

“!” Jack fixes her with a stern look, or maybe a fake-stern look. “Does the word privacy mean anything to you?” She’s momentarily flustered until he grins and says, “Obviously I tried, but it was passcode protected.”

“What do you think it was?”

“The passcode?”

“The thing on his phone!”

“I know what it was, now.” He pauses, maybe for dramatic effect. It works. It’s very effective.

“Well...?”

“It was an email from Juliana George. She’d seen the announcement somewhere—this is Taylor Buchanan, you know, so this wedding

was a Big Deal. The wedding had its own Instagram account.”

“And what was in the email?”

“What was in the email was Juliana asking David not to marry Taylor.”

whistles. Well, she can’t actually whistle, so she makes sort of a puffing sound, and she says, “This is what she told

you at her party?”

He nods. “This is what she told me.”

“So what happened between the email and the wedding?”

“Took me a while to get to sleep, is what happened.”

She rolls her eyes. “What happened with David?”

Jack put a tall glass of water and four Advil by the bed, and sometime in the night David must have gotten up, because by

the time Jack woke the glass was empty and the Advil were gone and David had changed from his rehearsal dinner clothes into

an ancient T-shirt that read TOM AND BILL: THE FURNITURE brOTHERS , with cartoon renderings of his dad and ’s dad on it.

( has the same shirt.)

“He was fresh as a daisy,” says Jack.

“And did you talk about the night before?”

“I brought it up.” He strokes his chin when he says this. Somehow this is at once an old-man gesture and also unbearably attractive. “But honestly, I’m not sure if he would have, on his own. He was acting like nothing had happened.”

“How’d you bring it up?”

“I just asked him. I said, ‘Do you love Taylor?’”

“Simple, yet direct,” says. “Approved. What’d he say?”

The bartender comes back and nods at Jack. “Another Dark ‘N’ Stormy?”

“Why not?” says Jack. “I’ve got nowhere to be.” It was true: he had nowhere to be that day, nor the next one, nor the next

one after that.

“You?” she says to . “Another Mudslide?”

She shakes her head. “Still working on this one.” Then, to Jack: “So what’d David say? When you asked him if he loved Taylor?”

“He said, ‘Of course I love her, you asshole. I’m marrying her, aren’t I?’”

sits with that for a moment, and then she asks, “Do you think he forgot, about the email and everything? Or do you

think he was pretending?”

Jack looks pensive. He narrows his eyes and looks skyward. “I’m not sure,” he says slowly. “It was a lot of bourbon.”

“Well, did you talk about it again?”

“Not a word. Never mentioned it, either of us. We had breakfast with the other groomsmen, as planned. Played nine holes of

golf—as planned.”

“Did you win?”

“Of course I won.”

“And then what?”

“At five that evening, David married Taylor.” That part remembers herself: she was there. “Next thing I knew I was

getting a baby announcement for little Felicity there,” says Jack. “And I didn’t give another thought to any of it until this

summer, when I made the connection between that person and the person throwing these parties everyone is talking about.”

remarks on the coincidence that Juliana ended up buying a house on the same small island where David and Taylor own a home. Jack nearly does a spit take. “Co in cidence?” he said. “It’s not a coincidence, my darling Nicky.”

Her mind is moving more slowly because of the heat of the late afternoon sun, and because of the liquor, and because of Jack’s

hand. “Wait. Are you saying Juliana bought a big house and started throwing parties to get David’s attention?”

Jack laughs and kisses on the nose. “You have the cutest nose. No. Juliana bought a big house because she’s a badass.”

“She is a badass,” agrees. She almost spills the beans about the IPO, but she remembers just in time that it’s not public knowledge.

“She’s throwing these parties for the business,” says Jack. “To drum up excitement with influencers and brands. CEOs do that

all the time. She thought David would come to at least one. But he hasn’t showed. And they haven’t casually bumped into each

other either, out getting an ice cream cone or, I don’t know, sunbathing.” can’t picture Juliana doing either of these

pedestrian summertime activities. “She’s been trying to figure out how to see him. At the party the other night she asked

me to ask you if you’ll have David over for drinks.”

Jack rests his hand on ’s thigh. Her shorts are short, more so because she’s sitting, so this hand of his, which strokes

the edge of the shorts, is pretty far up her leg. Like really far. She’s already tingling from the almost-two Mudslides; now,

she begins to tingle even more. She tries to focus on the story.

“What would my having David over for drinks do?”

He makes a motion like he’s knocking on ’s head. “She wants you to invite her too.”

“Ohhhh.” She takes this in. “But I’m confused. How did she know before I told her that David and I are cousins?”

He shrugs. “I’m assuming she did her research when you moved in. Or someone did it for her. Where there’s an assistant there’s

a way.”

snorts. “Okay. But why didn’t she ask me herself, when we went out on the mopeds?”

“She’d already asked me to ask you. She doesn’t really know you yet.” ( tries not to be offended at this statement; do a moped ride around the island and cocktails at Ballard’s mean nothing? )

“She hardly knows you .”

“True. But she met me at that party, and she must have figured when she sent that email that David would have his best man

with him the night before his wedding.”

“How’d she know you were David’s best man?” Is this how investigative reporters feel? She’ll have to ask Reina. Maybe

has chosen the wrong career pivot.

“How’s anyone know anything?”

“The assistant again?”

“Instagram. The wedding account.”

“Ah.”

“I guess she felt she could trust me to tell you the story, that I knew enough of it to do it justice, and then she didn’t

have to go through it herself with you. Who can say? Maybe she also knows that I’m not Taylor’s biggest fan.”

“You’re not?” leans in closer, very interested. “Why not?”

He doesn’t answer for a minute. “I don’t love the way she tries to un-David David. Like, all the things that make him David , his midwesternness, and his obsession with car racing, and the way he won’t throw away socks with holes in them...”

winces. “I think I’m with Taylor on that last one.”

“Okay, fair. But the rest of it, you know, that’s David . How much he loves his family—” can’t help but interject. “His family is pretty amazing.”

“I think Juliana really appreciates that part of him, where Taylor wants to strip him down and build him back up as a Buchanan.”

bristles because this hits home. “Criminal,” she says. “Do you know the one time they made it to the lake they stayed

in a hotel? And Felicity’s never even been out there!”

Jack whistles and shakes his head, either appropriately shocked or pretending to be. “And besides all that, I think Juliana talked to me because she’s terrified.”

raises her eyebrows. “Of what?”

“Of seeing David.” He pauses. “And of not seeing David. She considers me a buffer.” He takes a long sip of his drink and then

says, “I’m an amazing buffer, .”

Does this statement have a sexual connotation too? Does everything? takes a deep breath. She tries to square the person from the party with the person from lunch at Ballard’s with the

person Jack is describing. The many faces of Juliana George.

“Anyway, it doesn’t have to be a big deal. Just keep it simple. Drinks on your patio, that’s all she’s looking for. To see

if the spark is still there, I guess.”

“But David is married ! David and Taylor are your friends!”

“David is my friend,” corrects Jack. “Taylor is my friend’s wife.”

“Even so.” However moved is by the tale of true love between David and Juliana, of that single, romantic, cinematic

night walking around the city until the sun rose, she doesn’t think she wants to be a party to—nay, an enabler of—infidelity.

Especially when there’s a child involved.

“So what do you say?” prods Jack.

But then remembers the thing Taylor said about Country Cousins, and the way her lip curled up when she said it. Taylor

is a Mean Girl. Worse, she’s a rich, privileged Mean Girl, which is deadlier than your garden-variety Mean Girl.

“I don’t know...” The pendulum swings back again. Felicity is her first cousin once removed! Or her second cousin! She

can never remember which is which, but either way, shouldn’t she be protecting her? “I’m not a home-wrecker!” she says.

“Nobody’s asking you to wreck anything.”

“You’re asking me to be a party to it.”

“I’m just the messenger. And anyway, you know that having drinks with someone doesn’t constitute infidelity, right?”

“I guess so.” She thinks some more. “Well, will you come too? If I do it? As an icebreaker.”

“Of course I will.” Jack smiled. “My middle name is Icebreaker! I’ll even break the actual ice for the drinks, if you want.”

“Jack Icebreaker Baker. That has a nice ring to it, especially with the rhyme at the end.”

“It’s a great touch,” he agrees. He drains his glass. “My parents really thought it through. You want another, or should we

get out of here?”

“Let’s get out of here.” Around them there’s a steady stream of foot traffic to and from the boats. Everyone here seems content,

their worries and cares far from them, mitigated by the beauty of the day.

Jack slides a credit card, a black Amex, to the bartender and unleashes his smile on her. She smiles too, and at the same

time she points to the sign above the bar that says CASH ONLY . She slides the card back.

“You only take cash?” he says.

The bartender rolls her eyes. “You know that,” she says. “You’re here every day.” She fixes Jack with a stern look—she’s maybe

in her late forties or early fifties, so she can pull this off—but there is also the hint of a smile or a twinkle in her eyes.

She, like everyone else, is vulnerable to the charms of Jack Baker.

Jack lets a small chagrined puff of air out of his mouth. “I forgot,” he says.

“ATM over there.” The bartender tips her head in one direction.

“This isn’t a debit card,” he says. “Credit only.”

sighs, a little exasperated. “I’ve got cash,” she says, rummaging in the pocket of her shorts.

“I’ll make it up to you, promise.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

’s father once told her you could divide the very wealthy into two groups: those who are more careful with their money than the poorest, and those who are careless with their own money and by association careless with everyone else’s money too. The cost of five cocktails is a lot for that summer. Jack belongs to the second group.

Jack leans over and rests his head on ’s shoulder. She’s not quite sure what to do with this. Ignore it? Pat him on

the head?

“How about dinner on me?” says Jack.

“Tonight? Or a different night?”

“You pick.”

“Different night.” She needs to be in early the next day, and the Mudslides have made her tired.

He lifts his head and delivers a look that figures, if she had been standing, would have made her weak in the knees.

“Drive me home?”

She laughs and reminds him that she doesn’t have a car.

“Walk me home, then.”

“I have my bike!” she protests.

His eyes stay on hers for an indecent amount of time. Then his lips land on her clavicle and an actual jolt goes through her.

Against her better judgment she says, “Anyway, shouldn’t you be walking me home?”

“Okay. I’ll walk you home, . Or I’ll jog gently beside you while you ride your bike.”

“What about your Achilles?”

He brushes that concern away with his hand. “My Achilles will be fine. But you might be sorry you asked. Because if we make

it to your place I might never leave.” His smile is so wide and so white and so beguiling she can see why the TV cameras love

him—she can see why everyone loves him.

He doesn’t jog; they both walk, the bike between them like a toddler. And once they get to her house, he doesn’t leave until

the next morning.

Forbes 30 Under 30 Alumni Profile

Juliana George: The Leader with a Future So Bright

When we included Juliana George in our 30 Under 30 Class of 2020, the founder of online fashion portal LookBook had built

the fledgling brand into something to, well, watch . Now, with an IPO rumored to be on the horizon, George stands to become a multimillionaire less than a decade after an angel

investor helped her get started with $500,000.

LookBook is an online retailer and fashion technology company that aggregates and metasearches discounted items from major

fashion brands as well as luxury discount retailers (think Rue La La or Revolve) and sorts curated products into “looks” that

customers search for, filtering by specific occasion, geographical region, size, season, and price range—ending up with the

perfect outfit for up to 80 percent off retail.

George first envisioned LookBook in use on college campuses after some of her own experiences as a scholarship student at

Boston College. “Low-income students can often feel socially excluded when they land at some of these prestigious institutions,”

she told us in 2020. “Maybe you need a dress or a suit to wear to a social occasion, and you don’t know where to start. Maybe

you have an interview for an internship, or you’re a first-generation student at a school where Greek life is important, and

you can’t even begin to prepare for rushing.” It has since expanded far beyond the campus. “I mean, resort wear? What does that mean to someone who’s never been to a resort but now has to dress for a work off-site? We take the shame out

of not being prepared.”

George’s entrepreneurial spirit was born out of necessity and fueled by her experiences. Before college, George was shuttled among various foster homes in her native Lawrence, Mass., a city twenty-five miles north of Boston in which residents live below the poverty line at almost twice the national rate. She watched one foster family go through a particularly tough time when both parents lost factory jobs simultaneously during the recession of 2007.

“Not all foster parents are good,” she says. “But these people were good people trying to do their best, trying to help me, and others like me, and their lives became more than they could handle. When you have control over your work life, control

over your income, you have control over your whole life.” At that moment she knew entrepreneurship was the path for her. “People

might outsmart me,” says George. “People might have better ideas. But nobody— nobody —is going to outwork me.”

After graduating summa cum laude with a degree from the prestigious Carroll School of Management at Boston College, George had a brief foray into management

consulting in New York City. There, working with apparel clients in the operations division, she saw how often major fashion

brands discount excess inventory but don’t use the power of merchandising they lavish on their full-priced items to make them

appealing to potential customers. Soon after launching LookBook, she discovered that customers were clamoring for the service

far outside the quad.

Without the full scholarship she received to college, George contends she’d be lucky to have a good job, never mind a thriving

business. “That scholarship changed everything for me,” she says. The same year Forbes chose George as one of its 30 Under 30 awardees she started a foundation, Girl/Power, to help low-income girls like herself. Each year, the foundation fully funds a four-year scholarship to a private or public college or university for a first-generation female college student who is interested in studying business. Along with the cost of tuition and room and board, the scholarship includes a generous stipend for living expenses. Girl/Power does not make this amount public, and according to a foundation spokesperson it varies based on the recipient’s particular circumstances. This add-on to tuition money, according to George, is almost as important as the tuition itself, and it serves the same goal as LookBook. “Money for dinner out with friends, Uber fare, a dress to wear to a formal: those things that seem like small extras to some people are a really big deal to others. We want to erase the shame that comes with not having.”

In addition, Girl/Power provides ten scholarships of $10,000 for first-generation students in the University of Massachusetts

system, earmarked for girls interested in becoming entrepreneurs.

“The thing I’m most proud of is my foundation,” says George. “Building a great business, seeing how LookBook has captured

so many imaginations, that’s amazing. But helping other girls from backgrounds like mine to reach for the stars? That’s everything

to me.”