“Hey,” Iris said back. Merit walked over to the table and took a seat. Iris wriggled out of my embrace and whispered, “I think I’m going to like it here,” as she walked to take the seat beside him.

As we all made our way to the table, Alice introduced me to Julie’s three precious girls, Brenna, Jamie, and Audrey, and Grace introduced me to Merit’s sister, Emma. She was in seventh grade, just two years younger than Iris, and I hoped they would get along well. Again, I was planning for this to be a very, very impermanent situation.

As everyone sat down, Alice said, “I thought this might be the right time for us to go over the beach house rules.” I sat up a little straighter at that. The beach house rules? Well, okay. I guessed it made sense for a house to have rules. If I was going to be living here, I should know how things worked.

“Since you call your mom ‘Mom,’ Iris, you can call me ‘Mama Grace,’ and Julie prefers ‘Mommy,’ ” Grace said.

My stomach lurched. Iris’s face, now locked on mine, was white. But before I could get myself too worked up, Merit burst out laughing, and Alice, Grace, and Julie followed suit.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he said. “I couldn’t keep it in any longer.” He pointed at Iris. “Your face!”

My heart was returning to a normal beat.

“She’s just teasing you,” Alice confirmed. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing weird!”

“There’s one that’s a little weird,” Julie said under her breath, as she helped herself to a large portion of risotto and scooped smaller portions onto her daughters’ plates. Those babies are going to eat risotto? I thought. But there was no whining, no fussing, no complaining. Wow. Maybe these house rules worked.

“A little weird?” Iris asked.

“It’s not weird, and it’s really not hard at all once you get used to it,” Alice said, which was when the hair on the back of my neck stood up. “But at dinnertime we all put our cell phones over on the front hall table at the charging station.”

“That’s great,” I said, feeling relieved. “Then dinnertime is sacred, and no one is tempted to look at his or her phone.”

“She isn’t finished,” Merit said.

“We don’t retrieve our phones until the next morning,” Alice added.

“What?” Iris practically spat. “But that’s when everything happens! My Snap is fire at night. That’s, like, half my social life. I can’t just ignore it.”