The Perfect Couple

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Greer stops herself from knocking just in time. Thomas and Featherleigh? Thomas? Featherleigh is fifteen years his senior. Surely that can’t be right?

  “I told you, I broke it off,” Thomas says. “I broke it off for good in May, as soon as we found out about the baby.”

  Wait! Greer thinks. Featherleigh told Greer that she had broken up with a married man in May.

  It’s a disheartening discovery indeed that Thomas seems to have inherited Tag’s questionable morals, setting Abby up to be just like Greer, a generation later.

  Thank God Benji is a Garrison, through and through.

  “There is no breaking it off for good when it comes to you and Featherleigh,” Abby says. “Look at last night! I saw you with her under the tent. I saw you! And I knew what was going to happen. You were going to appease me by coming upstairs, and then as soon as I was asleep, you were going to screw her in the pool house!”

  “You’re crazy,” Thomas says. “I came upstairs and Featherleigh left, Abby. She left for her inn or her guesthouse. I don’t even know where she was staying, that’s how little I cared—”

  “She did not leave!” Abby says. “I sneaked downstairs while you were in the bathroom brushing your teeth and I heard her in the powder room humming ‘The Lady in Red.’ She wasn’t going anywhere. She was lying in wait for you.”

  At that instant, Greer figures it out.

  She hurries back down to her bedroom and finds her cell phone.

  She sends a text to both Thomas and Abby. It says: Lower your voices. Everyone can hear you.

  Thomas has been having a years-long affair with Featherleigh, and Elida found the pillbox in Thomas’s bedroom. In the trash.

  Well.

  Tag is the plotter, not Greer, but after twenty-one murder mysteries, she has learned a thing or two about motivation. Greer saw Abby last night when she went to the kitchen to pour herself the final glass of Veuve and left her pills on the counter. Abby had either snatched the pills up then or noted their existence. Much later, she went down to see if Featherleigh had left. She overheard Featherleigh humming in the powder room and must have decided to put the old girl to sleep… to keep her from fooling around with Thomas.

  And who could blame her?

  Abby dropped a pill in Featherleigh’s drink, only the drink had gone to the wrong person. It had somehow gone to Merritt.

  The police have ruled Merritt’s death accidental—and an accident it indeed was. Abby may not even realize she’s to blame, and Thomas will never put two and two together. The secret resides with Greer, and with Greer it will remain until her death.

  The future of the Winbury family depends on it.

  Sunday, July 8, 2018, 2:47 a.m.

  NANTUCKET

  Nantucket Island holds her people’s secrets.

  When Merritt Monaco and Tag Winbury get back from the kayak ride, Merritt is soaking wet and crying. Tag is a man struggling with both fury and feelings of tenderness. Merritt staggers off down the beach, and Tag kicks over the kayak, bringing up a spray of wet sand. He considers going after Merritt but instead heads up to the house. She can’t be reasoned with right now; he’ll have to postpone further talks until after the wedding.

  Merritt turns her face just enough to see Tag scurry for the safety of his home base. She can’t believe how craven and heartless he has turned out to be. Only a few weeks ago, she found him standing outside her apartment building like a lovesick teenager; now, he is someone else entirely.

  Merritt wrenches the silver ring off her thumb and throws it into the water, then immediately regrets it. This is another childish gesture on her part. The first was jumping off the kayak when they were hundreds of yards offshore. Merritt was like any other woman who went to desperate measures to gain her lover’s attention.

  There had been one moment when Merritt had believed she would drown. She was so tired, so lethargic, her limbs were too leaden to swim, and she’d nearly sunk to the harbor floor like a stone.

  Tag had grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her back up onto the kayak. He had been even angrier then than he was when they started out.

  It was a fling, he said, for fun, for a release, for escape. Nothing more, Merritt. Nothing more!

  You were obsessed with me, she said, but her words had been garbled and he didn’t understand her. If he had understood her, he would have denied it, but Merritt knows he was obsessed, captivated, enraptured. For hours, days, weeks, he thought of nothing but her.

  The problem is it didn’t last. The obsession, such as it was, vanished as capriciously as it had arrived. Merritt longs to inspire a more substantial feeling, a real feeling—like what Benji and Celeste feel for each other.

  Benji and Celeste are the perfect couple. Merritt wants what they have more than she wants anything else in this world.

  It’s very late, and Merritt can barely keep her eyes open. She could lie down on the beach right now and sleep until morning, but if she does that, she is sure to wake up to Greer standing over her with a disapproving glare.

  Merritt stumbles back up toward the flagstone path that leads around the house to the second cottage. She indulges in a fantasy that Tag is waiting inside the cottage for her or that he has left a note or a rose cut from the garden on her pillow. Anything.

  Merritt cries out. There is a rude, sharp pain. She lifts her foot and pulls a shard of glass from her soft instep. She’s at the edge of the lawn, where the cute young girl dropped the tray of champagne flutes.

  There is blood everywhere. Merritt stumbles back into the sand. Now there’s sand in the cut. She will have to rinse it and hop back up to the path.

  Salt water is supposed to cure everything, but Merritt doesn’t expect the sting. She looks down to see a plume of blood rise and she cries fresh tears. That girl, the niece of the Nantucket police chief, had gazed at Merritt with such wide-eyed awe; she had no idea what kind of mess Merritt had made of her life.

  She’s pregnant. And alone.

  It’s okay, Merritt thinks. She will raise the child by herself; she will hardly be the first woman to do so. Maybe she will write a blog: Millennial Influencer Turned Unwed Mother. Merritt’s eyes drift close. Rousing herself feels like pulling on a rope to get out of a deep, dark hole—but she does it. When she opens her eyes, she sees a glint of silver on the ocean floor a few yards away.

  Her ring.

  Yes, she thinks. She should get the ring. It’s the only present Tag will ever give her. She will save it for her baby. The baby will no doubt be a girl, and long after Merritt has moved on to the next man and the man after that, she will whisper to her daughter, This is a ring your father gave me. Your real father.

  Merritt wades in and bends down to grab the ring but she kicks it accidentally and she has to wait for the sand to settle before she can find it again. She is unreasonably sleepy, too sleepy to stand, and so she spreads her arms and legs out and she floats. She opens her eyes underwater.

  Where is the ring?

  There it is. She sees it.

  Like love, she thinks, it is just beyond her reach.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to start by thanking Detective Sergeant Tom Clinger of the Nantucket Police Department for meeting with me to run through procedure. Because of the nature of the novel and its timetable, I had to make changes that would not happen in a real investigation. Rest assured, Tom gave me good information. His mother, Marie, should be quite proud!

  Thank you to my brother, the NOAA/NWS meteorologist Douglas Hilderbrand, who explained in detail how fog happens. He also advocates for people being “weather ready”—and after this past year, I’m with him.

  Cindy Auris: You get all credit for introducing me to Meat Loaf back in the 1970s. I’ve been trying to get “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” into a novel for eighteen years and I’ve finally done it!

  My editor, Reagan Arthur, yet again edited this book with sheer brilliance. I tell you the woman is always right, and she is always right
. For any aspiring writers out there who think a novel like this comes easily and on the first try, I am here to tell you it is hard work, mind-bending work, that requires revision after revision after revision. I am fortunate to have an incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, and clear-eyed sensibility like Reagan’s to guide me to my final draft.

  To my agents, Michael Carlisle and David Forrer of Inkwell Management: I love you both beyond words. You are my people.

  To my publicist, Katharine Myers: You are a kind, gentle, and patient woman, the calm eye in the hurricane of my public life, and I want to say, in equal parts, thank you for all you do and I’m sorry for the chaos and the “enormous changes at the last minute” that are my trademark.

  To Tayler Kent: Thank you for continuing in the tradition of great nannies for the Cunningham children. I couldn’t have written this novel without you doing the things I was too busy to do and doing it with style, a sense of fun, and unwavering competence.

  To my friends, the women in my barre class at Go Figure, and the parents I have sat next to in the football stadium, on the basketball court, by the baseball diamond: Thank you for giving me a community worth bragging about. Special thanks to Rebecca Bartlett, Debbie Briggs, Wendy Hudson, Wendy Rouillard, Elizabeth and Beau Almodobar, Chuck and Margie Marino, John and Martha Sargent, Heidi and Fred Holdgate (Fred was a huge help with all details Nantucket airport–related), Evelyn and Matthew MacEachern, Mark and Gwenn Snider and the entire staff at the Nantucket Hotel, Dan and Kristen Holdgate, Melissa and Angus MacVicar, Jana and Nicky Duarte, Linda Holliday and Dr. Sue Decoste, Paul and Ginna Kogler, the Timothy Fields big and small, Manda Riggs, David Rattner and Andrew Law, West Riggs (who helped me choose the Winburys’ boats), Helaina Jones, Marty and Holly McGowan, Scott and Logan O’Connor, Liza and Jeff Ottani (parents of my favorite child Kai), Sheila and Kevin Carroll (parents of my other favorite child Liam), Carolyn Durand of Lee Real Estate, who showed me one of her gorgeous properties in Monomoy so I could better describe the Winburys’ home. Thank you to Cam Jones for the inside intel on St. George’s School, and to Julia Asphar, about Miami of Ohio.

  Thank you to my mother, Sally Hilderbrand; to my siblings, especially my stepsister Heather Osteen Thorpe, the very best friend I have in this world; and to Judith and Duane Thurman, who have been second parents to me for more than thirty years.

  Always, at the end of this page, I thank my children. It is such a bittersweet year for me as my eldest, Maxwell, heads off to college in the fall. I sold my first novel, The Beach Club, in the spring of 1999 when I was pregnant with Maxx, and so his life and my career have run parallel. Maxx Cunningham: I am so proud of you and all you’ve accomplished, but let me tell you, the best is yet to come, and I can’t wait to see it. To Dawson: You are my well-adjusted middle child, possibly the most beloved person on the entire island of Nantucket, and, yes, you do take up 90 percent of my parenting energy but I wouldn’t change a thing about you (this might be hyperbole… look it up). To Shelby: You are my hero—at age twelve, already a “strong and independent woman”—and I strive every day to be even half the mother that you deserve.

  In closing, I want to acknowledge and send love, strength, and clarity to each and every breast cancer survivor who reads this book. Thank you to the hardworking wonder-folks at the Breast Cancer Research Fund and to my medical oncologist, Dr. Steven Isakoff, who continues to keep me healthy, four years after my initial diagnosis. It’s a journey or it’s a battle—you pick what you want to call it—but someday soon, we are going to triumph. We are all going to call ourselves survivors.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Elin Hilderbrand is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has lived on Nantucket for more than twenty-five years and is the mother of three teenagers. The Perfect Couple is her twenty-first novel.

  ALSO BY ELIN HILDERBRAND

  The Beach Club

  Nantucket Nights

  Summer People

  The Blue Bistro

  The Love Season

  Barefoot

  A Summer Affair

  The Castaways

  The Island

  Silver Girl

  Summerland

  Beautiful Day

  The Matchmaker

  Winter Street

  The Rumor

  Winter Stroll

  Here’s to Us

  Winter Storms

  The Identicals

  Winter Solstice