The idea took root. I was good at organizing. I’d been on every committee there was. Being Juliet’s mother still carried cachet in this town; everyone loved her (and Sadie, too, just not as much . . . she’d left Stoningham years before, after all, impatient to shake the small-town dust from her shoes).

I won in a landslide. John had the nerve to be surprised on election night. “Well, holy crap, Barb. Who could’ve called that?” he said right there in the school gym, loud enough to be overheard. I saw a few people give him a strange look. An angry flush crept up my chest. Where had he been all these years we’d lived in Stoningham? Didn’t he know how hard I worked, how many people respected me, how much I’d given to this community? How dare he be surprised by my success?

Then he took to calling me Queen Bee at home. “Please stop,” I said. “It’s really not funny, and it’s sexist besides.”

“Oh, it’s a little funny,” he said. “And it’s not sexist in the least. The queen bee is the most important—”

I stopped listening. He loved those nature documentaries that never ended, some British man extolling the virtues of ant colonies or monkey dexterity.

Divorce. I’d give it a year, and then we’d move on. Shouldn’t your husband be the one who truly believed in you? We’d be fine financially, now that I was working, and I’d save every penny of my salary this year. I could probably get the house, and even if I didn’t, well. I’d cross that bridge.

A year. I threw myself into the town. Applied for grants. Talked to almost every single year-round resident about their concerns. I did get the old school approved for a community center, and I didn’t even have to raise taxes to do it, thanks to a hefty state grant and what Juliet called my velvet glove approach with the summer people, asking them to donate in a way they couldn’t refuse.

Not only that, we bought Sheerwater, that magnificent old house on Bleak Point, after Genevieve London died, got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places and got the land approved as a park, the house available for weddings and reunions and other functions. I was on a roll. I worked with the chamber of commerce to increase our tourism outreach, catching some of the casino crowd on their way to the casinos, rather than on the way back, when they were broke. We got rid of the stoplight that wasn’t needed and drove everyone crazy and wooed a salmon fishery to open on the old paper mill site. Clean energy, ecologically responsible and employing seventeen full-time people.