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  “What?” They leaned forward.

  “One time my mother was quite angry at me and—”

  “That’s her usual state from what I’ve seen of her,” Lexie interrupted, her tone showing her disapproval.

  Toby continued, “One night after dinner, Mother wanted Dad and me to hurry up to go somewhere. She grabbed our half-full plates and put one on her forearm and one in her hand. It was very efficient. I said, ‘Mother, you do that like an experienced waitress.’ I wouldn’t have thought anything about it except that she immediately dropped the plates and stomped off—and my dad couldn’t stop laughing.”

  “Very interesting,” Lexie said. “That sounds like a mystery worth pursuing.”

  “Lexie loves mystery novels,” Toby said.

  Lexie grimaced. “In this mystery, the only man your mother would approve of for you is Prince Charming.”

  “Too late,” Alix said, her face serious. “I already got him.”

  Toby laughed and Lexie groaned.

  “We want to know about your mother,” Toby said. “What’s it like to live with someone who is as unique as she is?”

  “Unique?” Lexie said. “Toby is being polite. Victoria Madsen is an international sensation, beautiful, successful, and those books!”

  “You do know the Great Secret of the origin of them, don’t you?” Alix asked.

  “That they’re about my family?” Lexie said. “Of course. Everyone on Nantucket knows that.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “I know about my family. I want to know about yours.”

  “Well,” Alix said slowly, thinking how to explain her mother in a way that wouldn’t take hours. “She is a mix of practical and flamboyant, vain and selfless, naive and very sophisticated.”

  “That sounds either horrible or wonderful,” Lexie said. “But what we want to know is what it was like to be with her on a daily basis.”

  Alix thought for a moment. “All right, I’ll tell you a story that might illustrate my life with her, and I only know the details because years later so many people told me what happened. It was my fifth birthday, and Mom and I were living in an apartment on the sixteenth floor of a building way downtown in New York City. It was after her first book had been accepted for publication, but before it came out and hit the best-seller lists. But what was important to me was that my parents had recently separated and I was missing my dad a lot.”

  Alix looked away briefly. “Anyway, on the morning of my birthday, I woke up looking into the eyes of a real live pony.”

  Lexie smiled. “That’s nice. Your mother took you to a stable while you were asleep.”

  “No,” Alix said. “I was in my own bed in our apartment in New York. My mom had brought the pony up in the service elevator. She had so charmed the doorman—I think she even wept a bit at her failed marriage—that he’d looked the other way.”

  “I wonder what the neighbors thought,” Toby said.

  “You hit it there. My mother couldn’t have cared less that the floor was permanently damaged by the hooves, but when the neighbors complained about the noise, she had to do something.”

  “What did she do?” Lexie asked.

  “She turned it all into an impromptu party. She chose the ugliest little man there, who was standing silently by his angry wife, and asked him to go buy some booze. And of course my mother had no money so he paid. Then she got some big, good-looking teenage boy to make drinks for everyone who showed up to complain.”

  “I don’t think using an underage boy like that was legal,” Toby said.

  “My mother doesn’t believe that laws apply to her. When school let out, even more neighbors showed up with their kids and they rode the pony around inside the apartment.”

  “What about the mess?” Lexie asked.

  “My mother went to two teenage girls who couldn’t take their eyes off the boy at the bar and told them he wanted them to help out.”

  “They got the poop scoop detail?” Lexie asked, grinning.

  “Exactly,” Alix said. “And you know what? Years later my mother told me that one of those girls married that boy.”

  Both Lexie and Toby laughed. “Your mother is a matchmaker.”

  “She loves romance in any form,” Alix said.

  “What happened to the pony?” Toby asked.

  “At the end of the day, when the owner returned, he was livid! Mom had lied, telling him she had a farm in the country and a trainer. She’d been so convincing that he’d turned the pony over to her. When he found out the truth, he was furious, but Mom flirted with him so much that by the time he took the pony back down in the elevator, he was smiling. And by that point, Mom had to push everybody out of our apartment because they were drunk. She gave me a bath, then snuggled down with me in bed and read me a book. That it was the galleys of her own novel with the sex skipped didn’t matter. I was asleep instantly. And after that I was the most popular child in the building. Everybody cried when we moved to the suburbs.”

  For a moment Lexie and Toby sat in silence, taking in the story.

  “How wonderful!” Lexie said with a sigh. “I could stand some adventure in my life.”

  “Doesn’t your boss—” Alix began.

  “He’s too in love with himself to matter,” Lexie said.

  Alix and Toby looked at each other. From what they’d seen of Roger Plymouth, he was madly in love with Lexie, not himself.

  After that first evening, the young women became a threesome—when they could, that is. Both Toby and Lexie had jobs, and Alix was trying to complete her sketches for Jared’s clients.

  And then, of course, there was Izzy’s wedding to work on. Without the rose arbor and with the inclusion of the chapel, everything changed. Alix came up with a theme of wildflowers based on the dishes in Kingsley House. She showed Toby a place setting and Toby made an arrangement that looked like the china pattern. They planned everything around small flowers, many of them on a stem, all of them light and airy, nothing heavy.

  “I think you’re onto something,” Toby said to Alix as she began to sketch the flowers for the table settings.

  For the chapel they designed swags of robin’s-egg blue ribbons that hung from the ceiling along the wall. At every loop would be a bow with bouquets of blue larkspur and tiny white daisies dripping down. They put them on a background of ornamental grasses.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” Alix said, looking at what Toby had done, and Lexie agreed.

  Alix photographed everything and sent it all to Izzy, but she couldn’t focus very well. Her morning sickness was bad, and she told Alix that she kept falling asleep. “You know what I like,” Izzy said. “What would you like for your wedding? That’s what I’ll take.”

  Alix didn’t allow herself to think of her own wedding; if it did happen, it would be years in the future.

  On the evening after Jared left, Alix got on her computer and began searching for Parthenia. With only one name to go on, it wasn’t easy. But she added a place—Nantucket—and she found a Parthenia Taggert Kendricks. The name Taggert led to the Montgomerys of Warbrooke, Maine.

  “Bingo!” Alix said, then began searching to see if she could find any contemporary Montgomerys or Taggerts who might still be living in Maine. To her joy, she saw that there were a lot of them.

  By the time Jared called that night, she had a great deal to tell him. “She was Parthenia Taggert, Valentina’s cousin, and they both came from Warbrooke. Parthenia married a Nantucketer named John Kendricks, but I couldn’t find much about him other than that he was a schoolmaster. I’ll email you the dates.” She hesitated.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “I think you should drive to Maine and talk to those people,” she said.

  “And ask about something that happened two hundred years ago?” Jared asked.

  “Why not?” she said. “Maybe the family is like yours and they have a big old house full of junk that no one has thrown out in centuries.”

  “There couldn’t po