“Oh, nothing,” said Lu. The lie slipped out easily. “Just getting some ideas for dinner.” It wasn’t that Jeremy didn’t want Lu to be working—but, well. When you got right down to it, Jeremy didn’t want Lu to be working. He loved having her home with the boys, giving them her full concentration, while he sailed off to the oncology wards, battling the cancerous demons, all courage and energy, in the freshly laundered scrubs for which she was responsible.

That wasn’t fair, Lu told herself. She picked up Sebastian’s toy tow truck from where he’d left it the night before, on the floor. She put it on the counter and pulled at the boom. She tried not to look at the clock.

Jeremy leaned toward the window, sighing happily. “Smell that sea air?”

“I do,” said Lu. “I love it.” (She did.)

Jeremy’s parents had been coming to Block Island for ages and ages—they’d bought the house on Cooneymus Road back in the seventies, and Lu had visited many times when she and Jeremy were courting. Courting was what Jeremy’s mother called it—an anachronism wrapped in an old shawl from the attic. Lu used it whenever she could, for kicks.

This was the first time the elder Trusdales had been able to convince Jeremy to bring his family along to Block Island for the whole summer, although they’d been asking and asking since Chase was tiny. At first Lu had resisted the idea with absolute conviction, like a union worker challenging a pay cut, because she couldn’t imagine sharing a summer (and she definitely couldn’t imagine sharing a kitchen) with her mother-in-law, but when she found out that they wouldn’t be sharing the elder Trusdales’ house but residing on the eastern side of the island, on Corn Neck Road, she’d eventually acquiesced.

“Our treat,” Nancy said smoothly, back in April. “Though I know you’ll miss your friends, of course.”

Lu, who kept to herself and her computer when the boys were at school, and who did not currently have many friends, had nodded regretfully and said, “I suppose I will.”

It wasn’t so bad. Jeremy would be gone more, of course, because now his commute to the hospital involved a ferry ride, and he’d have to stay overnight when he had a few shifts in a row. But there was a day camp on the island the boys could attend, and a gym that she herself could pretend to attend while the boys were at the camp. Their own Connecticut suburb was not coastal, and Lu, a native daughter of landlocked (often dreary) central Pennsylvania, was looking forward to an island summer. Plus, the boys went to bed early enough that with Jeremy gone she could do some work at night.

“Don’t make anything too good while I’m gone, okay?” Jeremy added now. “You know how I hate to miss your cooking.”

“Of course not!” said Lu pleasantly.

“And I’m not sure what time I’ll get back on Thursday, I’m in the OR.”