“Tell him we need it. I’ll bunk there, and Donna can have my place. She’ll probably only be here a couple of nights. Especially once she hears the incessant noise that you guys make all day.”

“Okay,” Kevin said, then glanced around again. “This place might pass her inspection.”

“Good grief. How fussy is she?” Annie knew that before Donna had retired, she’d owned a high-end antiques shop in Boston’s sought-after Back Bay neighborhood.

“She knows what she likes in life. Her clothes. Her material stuff. You know?”

The first time Annie had met Donna, the woman had been stylishly dressed, as if she were in Manhattan and not on Chappaquiddick off season. Sliding the pizza into the oven, Annie wondered if getting to know her birth mother better was going to be, in reality, such a great idea after all.

* * *

Bang. Bang. Whirr. Whirr.

Annie woke up the next morning to sounds of construction puncturing her ears, and a headache squeezing her temples. She closed her eyes again. How would Donna deal with the commotion? Annie supposed it depended on exactly how fussy the woman was. Just because Annie looked like her birth mother—the same long-legged body, the same careful stride, identical hazel eyes (same as Kevin’s)—didn’t mean they’d actually be anything like each other. “Nurture over nature,” her dad had often joked whenever Annie mimicked something he had done. But which had shaped her more?

She surveyed her bedroom. Aside from the construction dust that she hadn’t yet had time to clean, the room gave her the same warm feeling that she’d had in her little childhood nest in Bob and Ellen Sutton’s modest home, the room they’d chosen just for her, the way she’d been chosen for them. But would Donna be comfortable there? If Annie had still lived in Boston she’d run out and buy new pillows, linens, everything. But, of course, there was no Bed, Bath & Beyond on Martha’s Vineyard. No chain stores except two supermarkets, a convenience store, a few gas stations. And the Edgartown Dairy Queen, though that was only open in season.

What about the rest of the cottage? Would Donna be shocked that her daughter hand-washed dishes, stoked a woodstove for heat, and had a braided rug on the living room floor? In her antiques business, Donna had no doubt dealt with items from places like Sotheby’s and Christie’s, not dug out of an attic. Perhaps the women would have been more compatible if they’d met when Annie was still married to Mark, back when she’d pretended that pretty things could compensate for what her life was lacking, the kind of love she’d shared with her first husband, Brian, until his life was cut short by a drunk driver.