Again, Will couldn’t help himself. He laughed. Not a funny laugh, but a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me laugh. This creaky old house? Old, yes, but it was a mansion. With a tennis court. And a pool. And a first edition of A Farewell to Arms. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place you were stuck in. It was the kind of place that, if you got it, you stuck to it with all of your might. Christ, it had air-conditioning! That alone made it the ideal summer house, as far as Will was concerned.

He didn’t need to be worried about being overheard this time. Dom was laughing as well, also in a way that implied he didn’t think it was very funny. Then he sighed. “Lindsay,” he said, “you know there is nowhere I would rather be than drinking wine with you as the sun sets over Mykonos. But this just isn’t the time. The whole real estate market has gone to hell. Houses are sitting, already built, empty. There’s a whole condo project in Miami that I may have to foreclose on. I’m laying off project managers and sales teams. The Brooklyn project is in jeopardy. There are crews of construction workers that I may not have work for until six months from now. Maybe longer. I don’t know. And on top of all that, my son has just been arrested for trashing someone’s house. It’s in the papers, Lindsay. Think about the optics. How does it look right now if I fuck off to Greece for a month to work on my tan?”

There was a long silence. Will felt his face growing warm. He was thinking about his mom, sitting at the kitchen table in their cramped kitchen, shuffling through the bills as if she might be able to perform a magic card trick and make a few disappear.

Lindsay sighed. “How about the Hamptons? It’s no farther from Manhattan than we are here. You can tramp up and down the filthy Brooklyn waterfront as much as you like. I don’t care. But I’m not spending August here.”

“Done,” Dom said, as if he was closing a deal. “But that filthy Brooklyn waterfront is going to make us a mint. See if you can find a last-minute rental on the beach. Any house you want, I don’t care what it costs. But Hunter is coming with us.”

“Fine,” Lindsay said, the negotiation finished.