It’s the hottest day of the summer so far. It’s so hot that the surface of the pool is turning warm, the first few inches as tepid as bathwater. She doesn’t have the energy to get up and dive into the cool depths of the deep end, but instead stretches out on a chair, her entire body limp from the heat. She can almost feel the sunburn prickling across her skin. Later that night, she’ll step into the outdoor shower and gasp when the water hits her back, as sharp as needles against the angry pink flush of her shoulders where she was too lazy to reapply sunscreen more than twice.
Despite the discomfort, she stays in the shower for twenty minutes, luxuriating in the sensation of showering in the open air. A spray of cerulean blue hydrangeas is visible through the slats of the shower. Five years ago Finley hired Jamie Leifer, the best contractor on the island, to rip out the old outdoor shower with its ancient rusted showerhead and worn wooden beams and replace it with a new one.
The new shower has a slatted teak floor, white wooden doors, and a wall of blue and white zellige tiles. Instead of the tiny triangular ledge crowded with half-empty shampoo bottles and a single sliver of Dove soap which seemed to never get smaller, a wrought iron caddy hangs from one wall with three matching bottles of OUAI body wash, conditioner, and shampoo: a Finley touch if there ever was one. Everything Finley owns is chic and carefully considered. (Hadley once overheard her mother snidely refer to Finley as Finely, which she finds funnier with every passing year.)
The rest of the house is a melange of old and new. Finley appreciated the artistry of the original building: the narrow back staircase, the vaulted kitchen ceiling with its thick pine beams, the black-paned transom windows on the second floor bathrooms, the pocket doors separating the living and dining rooms, the worn brass door knocker in the shape of a whale. The character and history is half the reason she convinced George to buy the property to begin with.
But the house also boasted a slew of unpleasant qualities that time only rendered less practical and more inconvenient. The ceilings in the third floor barely cleared six feet, meaning half the visitors had to crouch and do an awkward sideways shuffle to get around. The Dutch doors, while charming, were forever getting stuck half-open. The root cellar sat abandoned and musty, full of the smell of damp and dark.
Finley navigated the balance between old and new with characteristic aplomb, attacking the project with the same organized zeal she brought to everything in her life. The root cellar was fully refinished as a wine cellar, now boasting a barrel-vaulted ceiling inlaid with Italian tile, sleek padauk wood shelving, and a bottle-green Kota limestone floor. Jamie Leifer spent three months bumping up the attic to raise the third floor ceilings.
Now, instead of two cramped, stooped rooms with twin beds covered in fusty crocheted blankets, there’s one spacious loft with vaulted ceilings and wide plank floors, all whitewashed to create an airy, cloudlike appearance. Finley ordered four sets of bunk beds, each one made up neatly with a pillowy navy-and-white-striped comforter.
Rather than use tile for the entryway, Finley had commissioned an artist in Brooklyn to hand-paint the washed oak floor in a whimsical pattern inspired by a vintage Americana quilt: subtle bursts of peony-like blooms and splashes of blue and red that reminded her of fireworks. The floor is finished in a custom glaze that gives it the glassy, aqueous appearance of a watercolor.
The artist—a tall, tautly muscled man named Edris Kincaid—had stayed on-island, living in the beach cottage at the back of Finley’s house, while doing the work. Since he was staying for a month already, she had him paint a series of wooden screens that hang in the hallway between the butler’s pantry and the kitchen: abstract renderings of pop art-esque foods including an oversized powdered sugar doughnut oozing with raspberry jam, a canary yellow lemon wedge, a stack of pancakes slumped under a pat of melting butter.
During those weeks, Finley would trot Edris around with her to dinners at Atria and live music at the PAC. You’d see them together eating stuffed quahogs at Larsen’s, or standing in line with him at Back Door Donuts for fresh apple fritters, or as her plus-one at Madison Mathers’ annual beach clambake. (Madison Mathers’ parties were legendary: Every New Year’s Eve she threw a dinner which started with a cocktail called the Ball Drop—tequila, strawberry-lime syrup, and fresh grapefruit juice topped with Champagne—and ended with caviar-filled tater tots and at least one person dancing on the patio table).
Edris lived in the same uniform of paint-spattered Carhatts and cotton t-shirts so worn they appeared silky, clinging suggestively to his long, angular torso. Regardless of the context, he’d slip on his old leather Birkenstocks and perhaps deign to run a hand through the rough waves of his dark hair (Edris’ mother was Egyptian; his father Portuguese, a combination which bestowed upon him his dark honeyed skin and mellifluous accented English). Edris was unphased by standing out in the sea of Brooks Brothers’ navy blazers, pressed Oxford shirts, and Stubbs & Wooten loafers that characterized any summer party.
When people raised an eyebrow, asking who he was (since he was certainly not George), Finley would airily throw out that he was an artist “in residence” with her for the month. Her compulsion to show off was one of Finley’s least attractive qualities.
George was generous about it—he attributed Finley’s pretension to an underlying insecurity. Finley grew up in Los Altos Hills, in an enclave dripping with so much Silicon Valley wealth that it made East Coast old money look like small change. So it wasn’t a discomfiture with money—far from it. Finley is clever enough to recognize that money only gets you through the door, but it doesn’t get you invited back.
To be part of the club, of the social fabric, of the insiders, your blood had to run blue: There was no true replacement for generations of social standing. That knowledge is what kept her endlessly striving. It was exhausting, George thought. If only she could settle into her own skin, or see that what thrilled him about her was her very otherness, the frown lines etching themselves slowly into her forehead might soften slightly.
George and Finley were married on the later side: She was thirty-five and he was forty. Whether they’ll have children is a subject of great speculation amongst George’s family, a topic that comes up regularly, flowing more freely whenever the cocktails do.
Even years into their marriage, gossip followed, as it’s wont to do with this particular clan, known for being snappily judgemental and viciously territorial of their circle of influence.
Just last night, over drinks out on George and Finley’s expansive back lawn, she’d heard the murmurs again the moment Finley slipped inside to reprimand the caterers for adding too much dill to the lemon tartar sauce for the salmon cakes.
“She won’t, of course not,” George’s mother stage-whispered to her cousin Hardie, the third glass of Chablis beginning to slur her words delicately. “Babies don’t match her wallpaper scheme. And they certainly don’t help you get invited to chair the annual Garden Club Gala.”
Hardie ducked her head and giggled, and then replied, “Knowing her, they’d come out of the womb fully dressed in Bonpoint smocked dresses.”
It was funny to listen to their gossip, but she felt a twinge of guilt at sitting silently. Finley had her tough qualities, but her outstandingly good nature and witty sense of humor far diminished them. She had more spark in the crook of her pinky finger than most of the women who gossiped about her. But just when you thought you’d decided to love her, she’d do something odious and act entirely oblivious to anyone’s reaction.
Earlier that day, she and Hadley had stopped by on their way back from picking up braised short rib sandwiches at Tigerhawk to take to the beach for the afternoon. Hadley had pulled the car over at a farm stand for peaches and two bottles of cold lemonade.
There were bouquets of dahlias at the cash register, spilling over out of the tin buckets in a riot of pinks and fuschias. Hadley selected an armful the color of bubblegum. As she slid into the drivers’ side seat, she said, “I’ll just drop them off for Finley since she’s hosting dinner again tonight and she loves fresh flowers. We’re going right by the house anyway.”
They parked the car in the crushed shell driveway and walked up the flagstone steps. No one answered when Hadley rapped sharply on the door, but they could hear splashes and laughter from somewhere on the back lawn. They walked around the house where a sleek black wire gate was set into a high, clipped boxwood hedge. It swung shut with a satisfying click behind them.
Finley was sitting on one of the outdoor sofas on the patio that connected the house to the pool. The entire backyard was a lush portrait of summer: the green grass, the bright shimmering pool, the sofa upholstered in silky navy stripes, the cobalt glazed ceramic end tables, the jaunty white umbrellas.
“We brought flowers for tonight,” Hadley called out. Finley reached for them, turning them around with the seriousness of a thoroughbred trainer eyeing a new horse.
“Pink,” she said. “Cute. We’re doing all white tonight for flowers so I’ll just leave these in the guest room.” This was pitch-perfect Finley: unintentionally dismissive in service of her own worldview.
George was in the pool, floating in a comically oversized inflatable raft shaped like a unicorn. (This was very un-Finley, but George’s nephews had brought it over on Memorial Day weekend with three six-packs of Tree House IPA and Finley had had three beers and decided she actually loved the raft, spending the entire afternoon tipsily lounging in the sun in a white crocheted Tory Burch bikini.)
There’s a tall, broad-shouldered man standing at the far end of the pool. Before she can nudge Hadley to ask who he is, he runs and does a spectacularly ungraceful cannonball into the deep end, upending George’s raft and sending a shower of water onto the clematis and wisteria climbing up the trellis above Finley’s chair.
She loves this pool. The bluestone terrace is framed by low walls of pietra d’Istria limestone. The property continues further, the smooth lawn giving way to garden beds dense with plants—snap peas, Swiss chard, rosemary, basil—and overflowing with flowers—foxglove, salvia, limelight hydrangeas. Hadley is only George’s second cousin, but they grew up nearly as close as siblings, spending their summers together on the island and their holidays dressed in matching outfits: red corduroy smocked with Christmas trees or blue seersucker for Easter. Now that the house renovation is finished with ample space for guests, they often stay here instead of at Hadley’s parents when it’s crowded with visitors.
George calls out a hello from the pool. “Are you guys staying? We’re debating margaritas!”
“No, we aren’t,” Finley says brusquely, standing up from the sofa and pulling her printed Poupette St Barth coverup down over her thighs. “If you guys start drinking now, you’ll be useless within an hour and I need your help moving furniture for tonight. We’ll be eighteen, at least, so we need the chairs from the guest house, and to put the extra leaf in the dining table.”
George rolls his eyes and winks in their direction. “We’re at your beck and call Sunny.” (Sunny is his nickname for Finley, which she claims to hate: a reference to the fact that on their first date she confessed that her favorite drink in college was SunnyD mixed with Belvedere. George still thinks it’s hilarious, but whenever he explains it to someone, chortling over the words, “Seriously, who drinks SunnyD? It’s adorable,” Finley visibly tenses up—to her, it’s another reminder of her déclassé upbringing. Households in the Hamptons or Tribeca don’t serve SunnyD, they offer Orangina in squat glass jars or sparkling San Pellegrino lemonade with a striped paper straw.)
Little signs that she wasn’t born into the world she desperately wanted to inhabit would always crop up, like quiet reminders that this was not her birthright. Finley had to work at what came easily to everyone around her: what clothes to wear, what words to use, and so on. Even seemingly insignificant things, like what was considered an acceptable vacation destination was something she had to learn.
She treated it all like an exam for which she was studying, learning that Arizona was not the right answer unless it was Scottsdale for your husband’s golf tournament with a client or Sedona for a girls’ trip to buy art and go to a spa. Tucson was allowable if you were taking the kids to a luxury dude ranch for a week, and even then it was all done a little tongue in cheek, and much ado had to be made about where to buy custom Western boots and comparing car services to drive to and from the airport.
Every so often she’d forget to try so hard and would slip comfortably into her real, regular self. She’d laugh with her mouth wide open and wear faded checkered Vans with a Billabong t-shirt around the house, or dip her dry-aged prime sirloin in ketchup. This is Finley at her most likable: happy, a little too loud, unreserved and open. By nature, she is loosely colorful. But working so hard to impress keeps her rigid and antiseptic, and it’s exhausting to witness, like someone holding very tightly to a heavy load you wish they would just…drop.
She should be insufferable—pretentious at best, a social climber at worst—but she isn’t. Finley’s quirkiness and individuality (her brilliant eye for design, her devotion to George, her knowledge of art) keeps her in check, and she’s calculating enough to generally hide her efforts to fit in.
George’s friend climbs out of the pool and walks, dripping wet, over to pick up one of the plush striped towels folded on the chair next to Finley. He shakes his head, spraying water droplets at Finley, who squeals in protest. It’s only when he looks up with a grin that she realizes he isn’t a stranger at all, it’s Will Rutherford, George’s college roommate and closest friend. She didn’t recognize him at first because he looks…different. Wilder, somehow. The last time she saw him was at George and Finley’s wedding. Then, he’d looked polished and handsome with close-trimmed hair and tailored suit fitted perfectly to his frame, the navy material lustrous with the shine of expensive fabric.
She tries to remember what Will Rutherford does for a living. Something in finance? Consulting? Unlike George’s other five groomsmen (two college friends, his best friend from summer camp, a cousin, and Finley’s younger brother), Will Rutherford had left an impression. The other five were a guffawing, noisy frat pack—they moved as one with George, playing golf and crowding the bar at the rehearsal dinner and leaving crumbs all over the island in the morning at breakfast, stumbling downstairs in boxers, smelling like stale beer and sweat, their hair rumpled.
George’s mother Greer, who looked at them all indulgently as if they were still chubby-cheeked eight-year-olds rather than grown men who couldn’t remember to put their juice glasses in the sink, would pick up a dozen egg sandwiches from the Scottish Bakehouse, each one piled high with two fried eggs on an English muffin, cheese oozing from the edges. She’d set out two carafes of coffee (she was fiercely devoted to Ruby Coffee Roasters, from her hometown in Wisconsin, and refused to allow any other beans in the house) and fuss over George and “the boys,” as she called them, refilling their mugs and folding the hemstitched Sferra napkins they crumpled and dropped on the floor, spattered in hot sauce.
Will, however, had impeccable manners. He kissed Greer on the cheek whenever she entered a room and rinsed his plate before leaving the kitchen. He brought over flowers from Morning Glory Farm on their way back from surfing one morning, and offered to pick up Greer’s mother, who was ninety-eight, from the airport when she arrived from Wisconsin.
Will had a certain pull to him. When you walked into a room, your eye was drawn to him before anyone else, like some force around him hummed with intrigue. He had a rakish smile—this, combined with his prep school good looks, made him irresistible to women. All of the groomsmen had taken bets on which of the bridesmaids he’d sleep with before the weekend was over (some of the bets wagered on multiple).
But now, something has changed. He’s deeply tanned and is sporting something in between scruff and a beard. His dark hair is longer than usual and he’s leaner and more muscled than she remembers, making him look even taller. At dinner later that night, George tells her that Will had left his job at a boutique investment firm in San Francisco to join a very prestigious sustainable energy hedge fund with offices in London, Hong Kong, and New York. He took six months off between the two jobs and backpacked around Thailand, surfing in Koh Lanta, then sailing around the Mergui Archipelago.
“Okay, partly he took the trip because he had time off between the jobs, but the real reason he went kind of…off the reservation with the trip…is because he broke up with his girlfriend at the same time. Technically, she broke up with him actually, but only because he told her he was moving to Hong Kong for a year and didn’t exactly invite her along. Unfortunate, truly, because she is smoking hot. Marisa Meyer. Man,” George trails off, lost in an apparent reverie about Marisa Meyer’s unbelievably perfect body.
Interesting, she thinks. So Will Rutherford is an adventurer. That tracks, as Hadley would say. She knows plenty of moneyed guys who took their token travel months in the post-college years, something to reminiscence about when they’re holed up in their Greenwich six-bedroom two decades later, or a story to trot out over cocktails when someone mentions Australia or Croatia.
“Now he’s got this cool apartment in Red Hook,” George continues. “It has a massive kitchen. You’d like it, the stove takes up practically one entire wall. I guess he took some cooking classes in Thailand and now he’s like, the male Barefoot Contessa. He made these!” George gestures to the dinner roll in his hand.
They were soft and pillowy instead with a shiny crust, flecked with cornmeal and slightly sweet with the spicy, almost smoky taste of molasses. She’d already eaten two of them and was trying to resist a third—there was grilled strip steak and a farro salad tossed with avocado and roasted cherry tomatoes, and she had seen several blueberry pies on the counter in the kitchen. All of that, combined with the cheese straws and warm rosemary roasted nuts and dark rum sidecars during cocktail hour, were enough to make her more than full, but still, the rolls were almost impossible to stop eating.
“He bakes? And Finley actually let someone else touch the dinner menu?” She’s shocked, because Finley is notoriously uptight about the details when she entertains.
“She has a serious soft spot for Will,” George mumbles through a mouthful. “All women do. I’ve just accepted it.”
Will’s Cornmeal Molasses Rolls
2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast (1 package or 1/4 ounce)
283g (1 1/4 cup) boiling water
70g (1/2 cup) medium-ground cornmeal
185g (1/4 cup) molasses
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 egg
360g to 420g (3 to 3 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour
Grease a 9” round pan and set aside.
Pour the boiling water into a large bowl and slowly pour in the cornmeal, whisking as you pour to make sure there are no lumps.
Add the molasses, butter, and salt to the cornmeal mixture. Stir until the butter is melted.
Add the egg and whisk thoroughly.
Add the flour and the yeast. Stir with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for a few minutes. The dough will be on the stickier side, but it shouldn't completely stick to your hands: You should be able to knead it. If it's much too wet, add up to 1/2 cup more flour (just a bit at a time) until it's sticky but you can knead it.
Divide the dough into 16 equal pieces. I recommend using a digital scale for accuracy. Weigh the dough on a piece of wax paper, then divide by 16. Pinch off pieces and weigh each one to make sure they are the proper weight. This will ensure your rolls look beautiful and uniform but it's not mandatory!
With floured hands, roll each piece of dough into a ball and place it in the prepared pan.
Cover the pan loosely with plastic wrap or a damp tea towel and let rise in a warm place for 45 minutes.
Just before the end of the rise, preheat the oven to 375° F.
When the rolls have risen, bake them for about 30 minutes. They should be golden and sound hollow when you tap on the surface.
Remove the rolls from the oven. Brush lightly with melted butter if you'd like them to look nice and shiny.