Would you consider coming to Nantucket this weekend? Please, Caroline. I’ve done something.
Caroline hates that Hollis has reached out now, when she is at her most vulnerable. She takes a deep breath—the city air is redolent of exhaust, sweat, and trash—and calls her mother.
Hollis answers on the first ring. If she hadn’t, Caroline might have hung up.
“Darling?” Hollis says.
“Yes,” Caroline says.
Neither of them speaks for a moment. Caroline breaks first, mostly out of impatience. “You said you’ve done something. What have you done?” She braces herself for the worst.
“Well,” Hollis says, “I’ve decided to host something called a Five-Star Weekend, and I was hoping you could help.”
All Caroline hears is host and five-star, and she thinks, Of course she’s hosting something fancy. Can Caroline end the call? She sort of wants to, but she’s surprised by how much she’s missed her mother’s voice.
Hollis goes on to explain: four friends, one from each phase of Hollis’s life, coming to stay at the house on Nantucket.
To Caroline, the Five-Star Weekend sounds like some kind of internet challenge for boomers. “What sort of help do you want from me?”
“I’d like you to come to Nantucket and film it,” Hollis says. “The original woman who did it, Moira, took pictures and made a Shutterfly album. But I thought, since you’re a filmmaker”—I’m a college student, Caroline thinks, who, until today, was sleeping with a filmmaker—“you could document our adventures.”
Adventures? Caroline thinks. Like a trip to the needlepoint store? Or ordering a kombucha at Lemon Press instead of a latte? Caroline pictures a glass of chardonnay on a porch railing with beach dunes in the background as Bonnie Tyler sings “Holding Out for a Hero.”
Absolutely not, Caroline thinks. But before she can decline, Hollis says, “I’ll pay you twenty-five hundred dollars. How does that sound?”
It sounds as good as a hot stone massage, a chilled raspberry White Claw, and a sneaky link with Jacob Elordi. Caroline’s pockets are hurting, but she saw the hypocrisy in asking her mother for spending money when she had basically slammed the door in her face.
“Fine, I’ll do it,” she says. Caroline needs funds, but also, thanks to Sofia’s imminent return, she wants to get out of the city. “When do you want me there?”
“Friday morning,” Hollis says. “I’m sorry, I know it means missing work—”
“That won’t be a problem,” Caroline says.
The next day, Caroline shows up at Isaac’s loft wearing black to mark the death of their romance. Caroline can tell by the serene energy in the loft that Sofia isn’t back yet.
“She lands at five,” Isaac says. They gaze at each other with longing and Caroline thinks, One more time? But Isaac slices the air between them with his hand. “We must get back to business.”
Caroline nods. “I’ll be taking tomorrow and Monday off.” She knows she can ask for whatever she wants now.
Isaac frowns, then grasps Caroline’s chin in his fingers so that she has no choice but to look into his brown eyes. Sofia Desmione is not worthy of those eyes, Caroline thinks. “You need time away?” he says. “Where will you go?”
“To Nantucket to see my mother,” Caroline says. “She’s hosting a weekend for her… friends.” After Caroline hung up with Hollis yesterday, she realized she’d forgotten to ask the most important question. She’d texted Hollis: Wait—who did you invite to this thing?
Three dots rose on Caroline’s phone, then disappeared, then rose again, then disappeared again.
Finally, a text came in: Tatum.
Okay… Caroline thought. She hadn’t realized her mother and Tatum were friends anymore.
Dru-Ann.
Of course, Caroline thought.
Brooke.
Eye-roll emoji, Caroline thought.
There was a pause and Caroline thought, That’s it? I thought there were supposed to be four friends, but then another text arrived.
Gigi Ling.
Who is that? Caroline had never heard of Gigi Ling. She texted: ?????
Her mother responded: I met her through the website.
Caroline groaned. The Hungry with Hollis community worshipped her mother, and one of Caroline’s major beefs was how much Hollis seemed to relish their adoration.
It was very alarming that Hollis had invited one of these people to the Five-Star Weekend.
Please tell me you’ve met this woman in person, Caroline texted.
Three dots rose, then disappeared.
This, Caroline thought, means no.
Caroline mentally composed a response to her mother: I can’t believe you’re inviting someone you’ve never met IRL to the Five-Star Weekend. It’s probably some scary dude living in his mother’s basement who’s going to murder you all. Or she’s a scam artist, a predator, or, at the very least, someone so needy and friendless that she’s going to a girls’ weekend with complete strangers. Really, Mom, what are you thinking?
Now Caroline tells Isaac, “She wants me to film it.”
“Mon Dieu,” he says. His expression is dubious.
“One of the women my mother invited is someone she’s never met,” Caroline says. “It’s someone from her, you know, foodie website.”
Isaac’s beautiful eyes widen. “So bizarre. This will be a funny little project for you. And maybe not a complete waste? You can practice shooting landscape.”
There was one afternoon in Isaac’s bed when Caroline described Nantucket to him: the stretches of pristine golden beach, the moors dotted with green ponds, the peppermint stick of the Sankaty lighthouse.
“May I please borrow a camera?” Caroline asks. “Either the Red or the Alexa? And one of your Sachtler tripods?”
She watches doubt flicker across Isaac’s face—he never lends his equipment.
“Of course, mon petit chou. And you should take my drone.”
His drone? Whoa. Maybe he thinks Caroline can get some good footage of the island, or maybe he’s patronizing her. Probably a bit of both. It will be a “funny little project,” and Caroline will return to New York twenty-five hundred dollars richer.
On Caroline’s first day at the loft, Isaac had told her that the most challenging part of documentary filmmaking was finding a worthy subject. Look for a chink in the armor, he said, where you can penetrate the surface and discover a hidden truth.
As Caroline packs up Isaac’s precious equipment, she laughs to herself. There won’t be any hidden truths behind a bunch of olds eating lobster rolls, wearing capri pants, and quoting Sixteen Candles.
That much is for sure.
4. First Light I
Because it faces northeast, Squam is the best place on the island to watch the sunrise. Hollis carries her coffee out to the deck with Henrietta at her heels, and together they feast on the view—the pond, the footbridge, the sandy path that leads through the dunes to the navy-blue stripe of the Atlantic Ocean.
She and Matthew named the house First Light.
What are Hollis’s favorite things about the house? The slender windows flanking the front door are inlaid with pieces of actual sea glass in every shade of blue and green. The cathedral-ceilinged great room is white and bright with blond wood beams and trim, but there are surprises too—the blue-moon couch, a comfy semicircle of deep cerulean suede, between shamrock-green lounging chairs that face the glass doors. Leather stools surround the kitchen island—there’s plenty of room for Hollis to cook while entertaining—and over the island hangs a chandelier made from vintage Coca-Cola bottles. A chaise upholstered in the palest blue silk is positioned in front of the white brick fireplace. Mom’s throne, Caroline calls it, because that’s where Hollis would spend every waking moment if she could—on the chaise with a book (though recently, book has meant “laptop”). In the summer, she keeps the front and back doors open so the breeze can blow through the house, and in the fall and winter, the fire is always lit. Coffee on the side table in the mornings; a glass of cold, crisp sauvignon blanc in the evenings.
Hollis and Matthew turned the original cottage into a charming guesthouse decked out with curvy, colorful midcentury furnishings. They named the cottage the Twist. (The observant guests figure out why.)
Next to the Twist is a two-car garage that shelters Hollis’s Volvo and Matthew’s “baby,” a strawberry-red 1971 convertible Bronco that’s perennially filled with sand no matter how often Hollis vacuums it.
Hollis decides to put Tatum in the Fifty Shades of White suite across the hall from her room and next to Caroline’s. She’ll put Brooke in the Board Room and Gigi in her favorite space in the house, Hibiscus Heaven—both of these suites are on the far side of the living area. Dru-Ann can have the Twist to herself.
“This is happening, girlfriend,” Hollis says to Henrietta. “Everyone arrives tomorrow.”