The air is cool, the heat of the day diffusing into the canopy of trees overhead. A breeze drifts in from off the river, ruffling the leaves of the quaking aspen that ring the campsite. Jack is stomping through the low bushes in the distance, his arms full of sticks for kindling. He drops the pile next to the fire pit and brushes the dirt from his shorts. His t-shirt is a soft faded navy with the words CHARLIE DON’T SURF emblazoned across the back. (Because she’s never been a fifteen year old boy, she doesn’t get the reference to Apocalypse Now.)
The campsite is situated on a small spit of land that juts out into the Ogunquit river. The water edges the campsite in a horseshoe shape, frothing over boulders. Where it turns, the river whorls and eddies into deep pools where the surface of the water shimmies only slightly, like it’s pausing to take a breath before rushing onwards.
Jack brought a friend with him, whom she’s never met before. He’s incredibly tall and broad-shouldered with the long, tapered muscles of a swimmer. (Later Jack tells her he rowed at Harvard, which explains the sheer, arresting size of him.)
Sophie’s cousin, a stocky guy named Peter with shaggy sandy blond hair, is in charge of cooking. Pete is the sous chef at the Honey Paw (he’s responsible for their wildly popular lobster toast, the fried spoonbread that crunches obediently under a pat of melting uni butter, and their vinyl record collection).
Pete is busying himself with the prep when Sophie calls over. “We’re taking a swim! Come!”
He’s kneeling down over a stump where he’s propped a cutting board as a makeshift workstation. “You guys go! I’ll meet you when I finish.”
They start to wander down to the river for a swim, Ellie holding a pile of towels in one hand. Sophie is explaining to Jack about Pete’s campfire potatoes, which are a tradition in their family. “We always do this campfire the night before Thanksgiving, I don’t even know why it started. But he makes these crispy potatoes that get kind of charred on the outside and fluffy on the inside, and they’re all salty and cheesy and basically addictive.”
In addition to the potatoes (which are tiny new potatoes tossed in a mix of Worcestershire, miso, and butter with a little cayenne, then wrapped in foil with shredded cheese—the secret is a tiny drizzle of honey), Pete brought cold sesame soba noodles with slivers of crunchy bell pepper and cucumber and everything to make his version of s’mores: homemade graham cracker cake, which he froze in thin slivers, a bag of marshmallows, and a mason jar of his own fudge sauce, which is thick enough that it barely drips from the spoon. By the time they eat, the cake is thawed enough to bite, but cold against the toasted marshmallow, all of which is drizzled in fudge.
It proves to be, without a doubt, the best dessert she can remember tasting—ever.
The s’mores. The cold river water. The hazy drifts of smoke from the campfire spiraling up into the night sky, the pattern of the tree leaves stenciled like lace against the darkness. The many sips from the thermoses of negronis that Kennedy brought. All of it combines to make her drowsy but deeply content, happy to lean against the rough bark of the log they’re using as a dinner bench and listen to the sounds of conversation pop and hum around her.
Later, she’ll look back at this night—over and over again—and think about how she was poised on the edge of a precipice from which she’d never recover. About how close his knee was to her shoulder, but she didn’t know then that it was his knee—a body which would soon electrify her by its mere presence. About how he’d looked when he pulled himself up from the river, dripping and shaking the water from his hair. About how he’d looked at her, somehow like he already knew her, and she couldn’t shake the feeling she needed to know him back.
Ellie was the one who’d invited her on the camping trip: an annual tradition with her camp friends and whoever else they invited along. She didn’t met Ellie until college, when they sat together in the front row of the world’s most dull economics lecture, a class which they would both certainly have failed if not for each other and the nights they spent eating yogurt-covered pretzels and tag-teaming each problem set. They remained inseparable from that point onwards, their lives intertwining more as the years passed.
Ellie’s parents—Buff and Laurel Cunningham—live in Darien but spend holidays and long weekends at their house in Oguinquit. Ellie spent her summers sailing Laser Pico dinghies off the sandy beaches and hauling canoes around Sebago Lake. She ate lobster rolls the way most kids ate grilled cheeses: regularly, and with gusto.
She’d driven up a week earlier to stay at Ellie’s parents’ house before the trip. They stayed up late the first night, drinking vodka and grapefruit juice from mismatched jelly jars with Ellie’s parents and her dad’s two younger brothers, who reminded her of overgrown frat boys: handsome and rowdy with mischievous senses of humor. Her uncles teased the girls mercilessly over a game of Oh Hell!, the Cunninghams’ card game of choice, which is played at all family gatherings and treated as a near competitive sport.
Thomas and Perry, the uncles, had loudly extolled the virtues of the cocktail. “See,” Thomas said as he uncapped the vodka, “most people know about the Greyhound, which is grapefruit juice and vodka.” “But it’s all about the salt,” Perry interrupted. “So you take the best part of the margarita which is the salted rim and add it to a Greyhound, and then it’s called a Salty Dog.”
Buff called in from the porch, his hands around his mouth in a mock megaphone gesture. “The best part of a margarita is the tequila!”
Even though Ellie grew up in Connecticut, her camp friends are her closest friends. “Summer friends,” she calls them. “The best kind of friends.”
One is Frances Covington, who goes by Covie to anyone who knows her. The others are Sophie Epps, Madeline Lattimore, Kennedy Farrington, and Jack Mayhew.
Meeting them now as adults, she can rewind the tape and see them as a boisterous gang of kids, their bodies a constellation of summertime: mosquito bites and skinned knees, sunburned noses and flip-flop tan lines, dirt caked underneath their fingernails, t-shirts stained with popsicle juice.
Covie is her favorite. With an unruly tangle of light brown curls streaked with blond, the flyaway wisps tinged golden like a frizzy halo, she has the look of someone perpetually about to burst into laughter. One cheek has a deep dimple and her eyes are some curious combination of hazel and green.
Jack is everyone else’s favorite. It’s impossible not to like him. He’s easygoing and attractive and moves through the world with the relaxed confidence of someone with no reason to expect things to go wrong. Jack has two older brothers and a younger sister named Willa, all of whom share his blue-eyed, long-lashed good looks. The Mayhews are a source of great fascination for her because when Jack was in third grade, they took their kids out of school and sailed around the world for a year on a Beneteau 57 sailboat.
They stopped in Panama, French Polynesia, the Pitcairn Islands, and Cape Town. There’s a photo hanging in the Mayhew’s dining room of Jack celebrating his ninth birthday on a beach in Tahiti, his hair bleached blond from the sun. (All of the Mayhews seem more intriguing because of this bit of their history: Willa, now eighteen years old, has the outline of Palawan Island—her favorite stop on the journey—tattooed on her hip.)
Kennedy is brash and outsized, in every sense. She has a thick, sturdy physique which she carefully dresses in perfectly tailored, expensive clothes. She’s mellowed—slightly—over the years, according to Ellie, but the vestiges of her bossy ten-year-old self remain. She’s the loudest in any room, and has a puffed-up, self-important manner that’s deeply unlikeable. Ellie swears that she’s fun, and she is, but you have to work through her caustic outer layers first.
Kennedy grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and has the polished, glossy veneer of a wealthy city kid. Before she met Kennedy, she thought the upper crust suburbs of Chevy Chase and Greenwich and New Canaan, with their uniform of polo shirts and Tory Burch flats, were the highest social echelon.
But the world Kennedy inhabits is a different stratum. Even in a purely sartorial sense, the stakes are raised in New York City: There, essential style means designer everything, from Prada handbags and La Ligne tees to Avec les Filles coats and Marc Jacobs wallets.
Kennedy tosses on Stella McCartney sneakers with running shorts like they’re a pair of Keds. Her weekend duffel is a Louis Vuitton monogrammed keepall, and her wrist jangles with three Cartier love bracelets. Her parents own a house big enough that it really can only be called a compound in Kennebunk, proximity further solidifying her friendship with Ellie over the years.
Two days earlier, she’d shown up at Ellie’s house to meet them for a sail. She slammed the door shut behind her and called out a hello before finding them sitting at the kitchen table drinking iced tea with the uncles, working on a thousand-piece puzzle of the Norwegian fjords.
“Kennedy!” Ellie jumped up to hug her. “We’re puzzling. But we’re leaving in ten, as soon as Dad gets back with sandwiches.”
“The Greenery?” Kennedy asks hopefully. Her voracious appetite is her most redeeming quality. She’s never picky, brings the best beach snacks, and considers traveling for food absolutely worthwhile, which has sparked many an adventure, like driving all the way to Brunswick for the roast pork buns at ZaoZe. Kennedy’s know-it-all-ness is a plus when it comes to eating: It’s because of her that they’ve all ordered the secret off-menu Boston cream pie shake at Red’s Eats in Wiscasset (chocolate malt plus vanilla soft serve topped with hot fudge), or that they know the best sandwich in Portland is the Foodworks tarragon chicken salad on anadama bread and the second best is the tuna melt at the Palace Diner.
Kennedy is the friend you call when you find yourself in a new city and don’t know where to get a good breakfast sandwich in San Francisco (“Egg and cheddar on dill swiss biscuit at Kahnfections,” she’ll say definitively) or which bar to go to for a drink with an ex-boyfriend that feels fancy but not like a date when you’re on a work trip in Chicago (“Estereo, absolutely—excellent cocktails and always packed, but not too romantic. Do not go to Celeste even though everyone will tell you to because you’ll end up making out with him.”). Her recommendations come across as pronouncements, which is irritating because she happens to always be right.
“Of course,” Ellie says, as she fits two edge pieces together. “Have you ever seen him eat a different sandwich?” Buff is slavish in his devotion to the turkey sandwich with gravy and cranberry sauce from the Greenery, a lunch which he pairs with Cape Cod potato chips and icy lemonade, regardless of the time of year.
Kennedy works for a public relations firm in Tribeca, a fact which she manages to work into most conversations at least once. She and Madeline and Jack all live in the city: Madeline in a studio on the Upper West Side and Jack in a gorgeous rent-controlled apartment owned by his aunt (a journalist who spends most of her time in Paris and Los Angeles, leaving the apartment largely unoccupied) on East Seventy-Third Street.
Madeline and Kennedy see each other regularly, meeting for the swordfish and fennel spaghetti at il Buco or maple syrup-drenched pancakes at Chez Ma Tante for Sunday brunch or grabbing drinks at a revolving door of sleek, dark, subterranean bars that Kennedy always swears is “the next Death & Company.”
Jack’s job in consulting requires him to travel most of the time—when he is in the city, he works brutally long hours except for the nights when he’s at client events: dinners at Peter Luger, drinks at the Raines Law Room, trips to the driving range at Chelsea Piers, box seats at the Barclays Center.
She assumed that all three of them hung out, but when she asked Madeline one time how often she and Kennedy saw Jack, Madeline had said vaguely, “Um, rarely? He’s busy.”
Madeline is a cellist. After studying at Carnegie Mellon and Julliard, Madeline joined the New York Philharmonic as one of its youngest musicians. This fact—in addition to her being incredibly beautiful—has made her a media darling and near celebrity in the world of the performing arts, although you’d never know it to talk to her.
Madeline is nice, in a simple and uncomplicated way. She’s sweetly good to her core, although in unexpected contrast to her goodness, she has a wicked sense of humor and is also the most adventurous of all five.
Her nickname at camp was Hots, a name they all still call her today (she didn’t actually learn Madeline’s real name until the third time they met because no one ever uses it), because she would douse all of her meals in sriracha and once won fifty dollars when a table of boys bet her that she couldn’t eat a raw habanero pepper. (She had done it in a single bite, and then calmly proceeded to drink three glasses of milk.)
Madeline has been dating the same person since sophomore year of high school: a quiet and lanky boy named Alexander Lyons. Alex is getting his PhD in biochemistry and structural biology at Cornell. His thesis work has something to do with brain tumors and polymer-based nanoparticles—if someone is going to save the world, or at least fix a broken part of it, it would be Alex. Madeline is forever pressuring him, gently, to apply to be a contestant on Jeopardy! because he knows so much about…everything.
Once, during dinner with Madeline on the back patio at Hudson Clearwater, he identified a bird as an ash-throated flycatcher by sound alone.
“Seriously,” Madeline said in an awed tone when she retold the story. “We were just sitting there eating linguine with clams and as I was asking the waiter for a side of the fried artichoke hearts—”
“Ooh I love those!” Ellie broke in enthusiastically. “What’s on them? Soy sauce?”
Madeline gives her a look, then continues. “His eyes lit up a little and he goes, ‘Do you hear that?’ and then told me what bird it was. I couldn’t even tell you what a pigeon sounds like! And all I could hear were cabs honking on Morton Street.”
“And the thing is,” she barrels on hotly, gesticulating enthusiastically (Madeline only ever got this animated when she was drinking, and during this story she was on her third glass of Chianti), “the thing is that that isn’t unusual at all! He knows everything. He fixed the spark plugs on my dad’s car when they broke and he can name every single world capital and he’s the only person I know who’s actually read War and Peace.”
“He’s sort of brilliant,” she finishes morosely, tipping the stem of her wine glass so the last sip of liquid tilts dangerously towards the rim.
“What’s wrong with that?” Ellie asks. “Isn’t that an ideal quality in a boyfriend?”
“Yeah,” Madeline says glumly. “In theory. But truly it makes me feel like I should sit around reading Wikipedia at night, or a book at the very least, when actually I just end up watching old episodes of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and then I feel judged for it. And he isn’t judging me! He’s too nice for that! It’s just exhausting.”
“You watch the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills? That’s the worst one of the entire franchise,” Kennedy says authoritatively.
“Kennedy! Not the point!” Madeline snaps.
That was the first time she saw any frailty in Madeline and Alex’s relationship—the weak spot materializing briefly like the crest of a whitecap against the otherwise placid sea of their compatibility.
It’s three months after the camping trip, in August, when she witnesses something that makes her wonder if the weakness is less of a spot and more of a crack. She’s at Ellie’s house in Maine for Laurel and Buff’s annual into-the-swing-of-summer party, which is allegedly a “casual affair” for close summer friends, but always ends up swelling to over fifty people.
She’s gone every year since she met Ellie and never has the party been anything less than meticulously planned and expertly executed, each evening culminating with Laurel’s famous coconut cupcakes filled with homemade gin-infused lime curd.
(These cupcakes are rivaled only by Laurel’s version of morning glory muffins, which she makes for anyone lucky enough to be invited for brunch or to stay the weekend. The muffins are the size of a child’s fist: small and unassumingly humble-looking and packed with carrots and golden raisins. The interior is so moist and tender that the tops leave a sticky imprint on your fingertips. Laurel makes them with molasses and buttermilk and handfuls of shredded coconut.)
She’s just finished showering and getting dressed in Ellie’s room which smells, as always, like a mix of Pantene Pro-V shampoo and Daisy by Marc Jacobs perfume. As she left, Ellie was standing in front of the full-length mirror, frowning slightly as she held up a white eyelet dress.
“Is this too high school graduation?” she asked.
“No. Yes? No. It’s not, if you wear those bright yellow espadrilles, the ones that lace up your ankles. Then it’s cute.” Ellie didn’t respond, but kept frowning, smoothing the front of the dress over the striped boxers she was wearing to put on her makeup.
“Okay, I’m going downstairs to see if your mom needs anything, don’t take forever or Perry will make me a cocktail and that’s never a smart way to start an evening.” She steps out into the hallway, the lilting babble of the party already underway floating up to greet her.
She descends the stairs, politely edging her way around a knot of three couples who are standing and chatting in the open foyer between the kitchen and the living room.
Laurel is making dinner—crispy mustard chicken with frisée and a cold couscous salad tossed with grilled asparagus, pine nuts, and mint, which is a dinner cribbed straight from a Barefoot Contessa episode. Ellie’s mother entertains exclusively by the word of the Barefoot Contessa, with the zeal of a devout Catholic obeying the Bible, right down to the flowers (green and white hydrangeas), the drinks (Buff is currently mixing a batch of whiskey sours at the sink), and her outfit (a crisp pale blue button-down—collar popped—and pearls).
“Can I help?” she asks, leaning her elbows on the worn butcher block island and popping a piece of asparagus in her mouth with her fingers.
“No sweetheart, I’m all set. I’m just bringing this out—oh, actually, can you take the baguette from the bottom oven?” Laurel’s kitchen is a chef’s dream: sleek wall ovens flank an eggshell blue La Cornue range, custom drawers pull out to reveal built-in bins for flour and sugar, nooks to hold small glass spice jars line the pantry door, and it boasts three sinks: a deep porcelain farmhouse sink, a second stainless steel sink for washing vegetables, and a third for washing hands just near the door.
She reaches for a potholder and pulls the bread from the drawer, wincing briefly as the steam rises and hits her skin. She looks around for somewhere to put it; Laurel gestures over at a clear space on the counter.
“Just leave it there, I’ll slice it and pop it in a basket. Now go!” Laurel makes a shooing motion with both hands.
She steps out of the kitchen into the hallway with its herringbone plank floor (antique French oak) and slub silk de Gourney wallpaper. On one wall Laurel has hung her collection of postcards from places she and Buff have traveled, all framed in polished Brazilian kingwood. She could stand here for hours, gazing at the names of hotels—the Post Ranch Inn; the Hôtel de Crillon, Paris; Kona Village; the Auberge Santorini—and towns: Cornwall, Taos, Palm Beach, Copenhagen, Philadelphia, Aspen.
Buff and Laurel’s neighbors, the Ebersols, are blocking her view of the Villa d’Este, so she ducks past into the doorway and surveys the room.
Madeline is leaning against the bookshelf in the living room. The glass of wine in her hand catches the evening sun that sifts in through the oversized windows, making it glow a warm ruby red.
The living room is the crown jewel in the Ogunquit house. A full wall of French doors separates the house from the garden, drenching the room with light. The doors are flanked by gauzy cotton drapes patterned in bright fuschia polka dots. Laurel ordered the drapes from England, where they’re block printed by hand.
The room famously “designed itself,” as Laurel puts it, around the chandelier which she found on a trip to Italy when Ellie was four. They were wandering Venice after a lazy lunch of squid ink risotto and plenty of cold white wine when they wandered into a glassware shop. Laurel took one look at the Seguro glass chandelier hanging in the center of the shop and begged Buff to buy it.
The chandelier is jaw-droppingly beautiful, with six asymmetrical tiers of delicate blown Murano glass spheres in candy pink and hydrangea blue. “Everything else just appeared around it,” Laurel says, explaining how she picked the low-slung couches upholstered in a pale green striped Lee Jofa fabric, or the vintage brass Chivari chairs.
She’s about to walk over to Madeline, hoping to make a beeline past the fireplace and avoid getting trapped in conversation with Braddock Egan, one of Buff’s golf partners and a truly dull human being, when she notices Madeline straighten slightly and smile at something across the room: Jack is standing in the opposite doorway.
She moves to cross the room and just as she does she feels a warmth on her shoulder: the meaty weight of Braddock’s hand. “Darlin’!” he drawls in his slow, overdone Southern accent. Braddock moved to New England from Kentucky fifteen years earlier but his accent is only getting thicker with time. His chest strains at the confines of his pink Oxford, the pocket of which holds a folded linen handkerchief he uses to perpetually mop the dampness of his brow.
It’s impossible to avoid responding unless she chooses to be rude, which she is not. For a few minutes, she makes polite conversation, which largely requires her to hmm at intervals while Braddock recounts a long story about a brouhaha with the Ogunquit golf club junior membership tournament. When he pauses to take a long sip of his whiskey sour, she rushes to excuse herself.
She starts to continue making her way towards Madeline when she sees that Jack is now standing beside her, both of them off to the side from the rest of the room. He leans in to say something and as he does, he reaches down and brushes his fingers against hers for an instant. It passes so quickly—a flash of understanding, a spark so subtle you’d miss it if you blinked.
A second later, Ellie rushes over to them, and the moment dissipates like smoke. She shakes her head, trying to pin down the exact memory of what she had just seen, because it already seems like a figment of her imagination.
“What are you looking at?” Covie stage-whispers in her ear, making her jump.
“Don’t do that!” she admonishes. “I almost dropped my drink.”
Covie laughs. “No but seriously, what are you staring at? Don’t tell me you’ve developed a crush on Braddock Egan’s slicked back hair. Unclear if that’s hair product or grease.”
She mimes vomiting in response. Before she has a chance to bring it up with Covie, Laurel taps her glass for dinner and everyone begins to make their way into the dining room, where the food is set up on the De Coene Frères sideboard. Laurel prefers to entertain outside in the summer—the doors to the back patio are thrown open, and everyone will mill about with their drinks and plates, sitting side-by-side on one of the teak chaise lounges or perching on the Serena and Lily rattan benches that are bookended by oversized slate pots of herbs: basil, rosemary, sage.
The evening is as good as it gets, the air still slightly warm from the heat of the afternoon, a few clouds scudding along in pillowy drifts as pink streaks begin to appear in the sky, bathing everything in a honeyed light.
She’s just taken a seat next to Covie in a trio of Adirondack chairs out on the lawn when she senses something as clear as a bell—a disturbance as real and tangible to her as the dinging of a bell or the slamming of a car door—and looks up. It isn’t a noise at all. Instead, she sees Jack’s friend, whom she last saw when they packed the cars after the camping trip, crossing the patio and shaking Buff’s hand.
Laurel’s Morning Glory-Ish Muffins
Makes 12 small muffins
180g (1 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour
89g (1 cup) oats
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cardamom
106g (1/2 cup) brown sugar
1 tablespoon molasses
113g (1/2 cup) buttermilk
1 egg
66g (1/3 cup) vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
100g (1 cup) peeled, grated carrots
85g (1/2 cup) golden raisins
25g (1/2 cup) unsweetened shredded coconut
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners, or grease the wells.
Whisk together the flour, oats, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and cardamom.
In separate bowl, whisk together the brown sugar, molasses, buttermilk, egg, oil, and vanilla.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet and fold/stir gently until just combined.
Fold in the carrots, raisins, and coconut.
Divide the batter evenly between the wells of the muffin tin (the batter should come almost to the top).
Bake the muffins for 5 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees F and bake for an additional 20 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Don’t overbake; you want these to be moist and tender.