“Definitely. Don’t want to keep you. Just wanted to invite you over for dinner tonight. I have a great view from the widow’s walk.”

“Um, I don’t know . . .”

“It’s just dinner,” he said. “You have to eat, right?”

She didn’t need a man in order to eat, she thought with irritation. But maybe she needed a man to get over another man. Maybe a no-strings summer fling was just what she needed. If she could shape metal to her will, surely she could control her emotions.

“Sure,” she said. “Dinner sounds great.”

Elodie never realized how much time she spent at the office until she found a way to manage her workload outside of it. Somehow, between email and video conferencing, she was keeping all the balls in the air. What had she actually been doing in the office for twelve hours a day?

She adjusted the deck chair and clicked on the PDF invoices sent by her assistant for signature. A few days ago, she’d asked Lidia if she had a printer, prompting her landlady to retrieve a model from the attic that was so old it was practically dot matrix. But it got the job done. Lidia kindly set it up in the kitchen for her because the bedrooms didn’t have enough outlets to accommodate anything more than a reading lamp.

“Marco has a more state-of-the-art printer at his place,” Lidia said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you used his office.” Apparently, Lidia and Manny still managed their boating business with handwritten bookkeeping.

Elodie carried her laptop into the house and plugged it into the printer. (It took two adapters from Lands End Marine Supply to make this possible.) As the machine chug-chugged out her paperwork, her phone rang. Sloan Pierce.

Elodie hesitated but knew she couldn’t send the calls to voicemail forever.

“Sloan, hello,” she said, modulating her voice to sound welcoming—or, at the very least, non-evasive. “I was just about to call you.”

“You’ve been a difficult woman to get ahold of,” Sloan said.

A siren blared in the background and Elodie felt a pang of homesickness for the city. She’d been on this spit of land for weeks and was no closer to having the signatures she needed. Again, she wondered: Why had the three-signature stipulation been put in place? And what else could she do to get them?

She knew her sister wanted to avoid drama at all costs. Always had. But her niece? If her only ask was that ring, which was never going to happen, she had to figure out another angle.

“Are you free for a drink tonight? The Carlyle?”

Elodie looked out the kitchen window at the bay. “I’m not in town at the moment.”

“Oh? Hamptons?”

“No. Cape Cod.”

“I adore Cape Cod. Nantucket?”

“Provincetown, actually.”

“Of course. Where your sister lives.”