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Title Page

Dedication

To my summer “mommune”:

Jessica Wilder, Dorothy Coleman, Caroline Mooring, Heather Wiggins, and Megan Fader.

Raising our kids together has been the greatest joy.

PROLOGUE Charlotte The May Flower Moon

It was the cicadas that sold me. That, or maybe the May Flower Moon. The May Flower Moon. Has there ever been a more beautiful term? Even now, I can close my eyes and picture the otherworldly orangeness of it, the way it glistened on the surface of the ocean. I remember leaning my head on my husband Bill’s shoulder, watching our daughter, Iris, walk down the beach a few yards away with a neighbor girl.

Thinking of our friends back in New York City—the place I thought I would call mine forever—unable to leave their apartments, I felt guilty. I envisioned them finding scraps of joy by performing nightly singing and cheering rituals for the healthcare workers leaving the hospital, world-weary in their hazmat suits. It was a small dose of reality, of remembrance that what they were living was terrifying, that what we were facing, even down here, was unprecedented.

What had given us the foresight to escape to Bill’s stepmother’s house in Juniper Shores, North Carolina, while we still could, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that that apocalyptic scene felt a world away right now as the spring warmth wrapped around us, the cicadas singing their song in a way that, if you listened closely, felt in time with the ebb and flow of the tide, in rhythm with the croaking of the bullfrogs, in step with the sweet sound of crickets.

Iris hadn’t wanted to leave the city, of course. But even she—at the sometimes surly but often very sweet age of eleven—had managed to make new friends in this socially distanced world we had been dropped into. Everything was outdoors here anyway. Covid numbers were low. I knew how intensely lucky we were.

Lulled into contentment by the feel of Bill’s arms around me, the sand beneath my bare feet, that mesmerizing flower moon, I didn’t hesitate when Bill broke the silence. “Maybe I’m crazy, but, well, what would you think about building a house here, in Juniper Shores? With everything virtual, my work is online. I could fly back to the city some, maybe keep a smaller place there?”