For the love of Pete, Magda thinks. It’s her long shot. She has a hard time coming up with the boy’s name even though she spent all day with him, showing him how to vacuum in neat rows, how to scrub the oyster-shell tiles with an electric toothbrush. They’d covered a surprising amount of ground, though it was immediately clear the child had never so much as cleared his plate from the dinner table. They still have the laundry to tackle—folding a fitted sheet; will he ever master it? They also need time to go over the sensitive things maids come across—sex toys and props for role-playing, birth control pills, condoms, diaphragms, tubes of lubricant, falsies, and drugs and drug paraphernalia. She doesn’t want him to be shocked.
“Hello…” She can’t for the life of her remember his name. Did she use it today? She must have. Her mind grapples for it the way her hand feels around on her nightstand for her glasses in the dark of the early morning.
“Chad,” he says.
She starts giggling. She can’t help it. She bows her head and chortles into her cleavage, her body rocking with laughter. It’s so funny, not only her forgetting his name when she was with him all day but also the name itself, Chad, when he appears, outwardly anyway, to be precisely that Nantucket type. A Chad named Chad. Magda laughs so hard, her stomach muscles ache and tears leak out of the corners of her eyes. Chad is staring at her, as are a couple of other people in line, which begins to sober her, but then Magda catches a glimpse of Chad’s expression and it’s so befuddled that Magda doubles over again. She’s making a ticking noise that doesn’t even sound like laughter, but it’s all she can eke out. She’s probably thirty seconds away from someone calling an ambulance.
Now it’s Chad’s turn to step up to the counter and order. He asks for three Wagyu fillets, and although Magda has known the boy for less than twelve hours, this is exactly what she would have guessed his family eats for dinner. Magda is finally able to catch her breath and compose herself, though little bursts of laughter continue until Chad turns around with his wrapped parcel and smiles uncertainly at her. “See you tomorrow, Ms. English,” he says.
“See you tomorrow, Long Shot,” she says. His smile widens; he can take a little ribbing, and Magda feels a pulse of optimism. She wonders if her gamble might work out after all.
Edie steps out of the meeting and thinks, Is it just me or has this day been three weeks long? She checks her phone.
There’s a Venmo request for five hundred dollars from her ex-boyfriend.
No, Edie thinks.
This feels like a mistake or a joke, but a chill runs through her.
Graydon is out in the parched, cracked desert of Arizona; he accepted the job with Ritz-Carlton at its Dove Mountain property, the job they applied for together and planned to take together. But then things with Graydon got weird and awful and Edie changed her mind about the Ritz and decided to come home instead. Graydon, who by that point was obsessed with Edie, asked if he could come to Nantucket too—he said he would live with Edie and her mother, Love—but Edie said she didn’t think that was a good idea. What she meant was that she didn’t want Graydon on Nantucket. What she meant was that she wanted to break up. Edie had assumed she would work at the Beach Club like both her parents had, until her mother offhandedly mentioned that the Hotel Nantucket—which had been an eyesore and a blight throughout Edie’s childhood—was undergoing a rumored thirty-million-dollar renovation. Edie wanted to be part of a team restoring a historic hotel to its former glory. And she would be safe; the waters surrounding the island would be nearly amniotic, protecting her from Graydon.
Except that now, here he is in her Venmo requests.
A couple walks across the lobby, dressed for dinner. Edie has nearly forgotten that there are guests in the hotel other than Kimber Marsh, her children, and their pit bull. It’s the Katzens, Edie thinks, on their way to Cru; they wave as they head out the door. If Edie were playing her A-game, she would walk out with the Katzens, chat them up; after all, she had told Lizbet in her interview that the most important aspect of hospitality was making a connection with each and every guest at the hotel. But she does nothing and says nothing because she has a trash fire on her phone. Five hundred dollars!
She walks home to Sunset Hill, thinking there’s no way she’s going to let Graydon blackmail her. She deletes the Venmo request. He has some nerve!
A text comes in. Edie hopes it’s her mother saying the Tater Tot Hotdish is ready. But when Edie checks, she sees the text is from Graydon: an emoji of a movie camera.
She has to pay him.
But she can’t. She has a student-loan payment due on June 15 that’s nearly half of her first paycheck.
She won’t pay him! Who will he send the videos to? She’s not famous; the National Enquirer doesn’t care about her. And their mutual friends are woke enough that they’ll realize Graydon is using his white-male privilege to get back at Edie for breaking up with him. They’ll delete the videos without watching them (she hopes) and cancel Graydon.
But what if Graydon sends the videos to her mother? Can Edie risk that? Love had had Edie when she was forty. Now she’s sixty-two years old, and although she tries to stay current—she knows who Billie Eilish and Doja Cat are—she doesn’t quite understand the new sexual norms or the ways that Gen Z live their lives on their phones. Love probably doesn’t think that Edie’s still a virgin, but as close as they are, they never discuss sex. Nooooooo! (Edie binged the second season of Euphoria with her bedroom door not only closed but locked.) If Love saw Edie in the videos that Edie had allowed Graydon to take, she would die inside. Edie is Love’s pride and joy, her prize and treasure, and her obsession with Edie has grown only more intense since Vance died. The worst thing would be if Love blamed herself for those videos, thinking that she didn’t raise Edie right or set a good example.
Edie Venmos Graydon the five hundred dollars, which is most of what she has in her bank account—it’s her graduation money. She wants to scream into the beautiful June afternoon, but she’s afraid one of her neighbors on Sunset Hill will hear her.
She gets another text. From Graydon, of course. Ty! it says. With the thumbs-up emoji.
The last person to leave the break room is the one Grace most wants to see leave: Alessandra Powell. Grace hovers above as Alessandra drops four quarters into the jukebox (these are quarters that Grace watched Alessandra lift from petty cash) and picks songs—all of them the devil-worshipping heavy metal of the 1980s. Wow, Grace hasn’t missed this music at all. She tries to spook Alessandra, positioning herself so that her figure in the white robe and Minnesota Twins cap might be reflected in the Plexiglas of the pinball machine that Alessandra has started playing. Grace does a little headbanging dance to amuse herself and get Alessandra’s attention. Does Alessandra see her? No; she remains wholly focused on keeping the silver ball in play. Grace blows cold air down the back of Alessandra’s neck, but she doesn’t seem to notice that either. This can mean only one thing—the girl has demons inside her. Grace can practically hear their taunts: You can’t scare us! Nothing scares us!
A second later, Grace realizes she’s not the only one suspicious of Alessandra. There’s someone else lurking just inside the door.
Lizbet isn’t worried about the private life of Zeke or Adam or Chad or Edie, and she certainly isn’t worried about Magda.
Alessandra is another story.
Right before the staff meeting, Mack Petersen from the Nantucket Beach Club called to congratulate Lizbet on opening day and ask how things were going. Mack did this in good faith despite the fact that they’re direct competitors—Lizbet knows Mack from her days at the Deck. She couldn’t keep herself from bragging, “I have Sweet Edie on my desk.”
“You know I’m envious. She’s my godchild.”
“And I ended up hiring that woman Alessandra? The one who had been working in Italy?”
Mack said, “I’m not sure who you mean.”
“Wasn’t she supposed to interview with you? Alessandra Powell? For your front desk?”
Mack said, “I didn’t have any front-desk positions open this year. The only position I hired someone for was night bell. I got lucky and nearly my entire staff from last year returned.”
“Oh,” Lizbet said. She was stymied for a second. Hadn’t Alessandra said she was interviewing with Mack at the Beach Club? She had. She told Lizbet that Mack had basically offered her a position on the desk! “Well, let’s hope I get that lucky next year.”