The Hotel Nantucket (39)

She went to work at the hotel on opening day, disappearing from the house while Michael was on the phone, and she ignored all his calls. Let him wonder. When she walked in the door that evening, he was visibly shaken. “Where were you?” he said.

She narrowed her eyes and tried to read his face. Why did he care? How much did he care? She shrugged. “Out.”

A tirade followed; it was the first time she’d seen him angry (other than when the Wi-Fi went down, but that was different), and it interested her. Worried sick, went driving around looking for you, you just left without a word, the only way I knew you were coming back was your luggage was still here.

Do you love me? she wondered. She thought the answer might be yes, but it wouldn’t be enough.

“I got a job,” she said. “Working the front desk at the Hotel Nantucket.”

Michael’s face turned pill white. “What?”

Alessandra stared him down.

Michael said, “Our…my friend Lizbet Keaton is working there. She’s the GM, I heard. Is she the one who hired you?”

“Yes.”

Michael nodded slowly, then backed away half a step, as though Alessandra were holding a gun. “You didn’t tell her where you were living, did you?”

“Obviously not.” Alessandra didn’t tell Michael that Lizbet had followed her home. Thankfully, Alessandra had spied her in the bike’s mirror before she’d turned into the driveway.

Relief softened his face. “Okay, good. I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.”

“What you mean,” Alessandra said, “is that you wouldn’t want people to get the right idea. Which is that you’re keeping a lover even though you are still fully married. Your wife has no idea you needed space. She thinks you came up here to switch out the storm windows for screens and tackle a ‘top secret project’ for work, which seems outrageous, but she doesn’t question it because she trusts you and she’s probably enjoying the time apart—she feeds the kids pizza three nights a week and goes out with her girlfriends to the new wine bar and flirts with the cute bartender and then goes home and curls up with her vibrator.” Alessandra stopped to breathe. “You’re a liar and a cheat.”

Michael cleared his throat. “They’re coming up on the eighteenth, so you’ll need to go.”

“Will I?” Alessandra said.

There was fear in his eyes. He was the one who had chosen poorly. “Baby, please.”

“I’m not your baby, Michael. I’m a grown woman whom you’ve treated like a concubine.”

“You knew what you were getting into,” Michael said. “You can’t tell me you didn’t understand what this was.”

He got everything backward. He was the one who didn’t understand what this was.

“I’ll go quietly the day before your family arrives,” Alessandra said. “On one condition.”



Alessandra walks from Michael’s house to the hotel with a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag in each hand. It’s a stylish walk of shame—or it would be if Alessandra felt any shame. What she feels most is regret. Michael Bick is the complete package. He has looks, money, intelligence, humor, and even a basic decency (if you ignore the obvious). He asks questions; he listens to the answers; he’s generous and curious and thoughtful. The sex was mind-blowing; Michael is the only man Alessandra ever met who didn’t need to learn a thing or two in bed. And they are so compatible. Oh, well. It has been Alessandra’s experience that men like Michael Bick get scooped up early, in college or the first years of living as an adult in the city.

She also feels triumphant. In her suede Bruno Magli clutch is a cashier’s check for fifty thousand dollars. Michael asked her to name her price and she did so judiciously, unsure of what she could get away with, but now she wonders if she could have asked for double. She won’t worry about it. During their first week of sinful bliss, Alessandra watched Michael punch in the passcode to his phone, and later, while he was sleeping, Alessandra copied Heidi Bick’s number. She also took pictures of herself in different spots throughout the house—in the pool, weighing herself on Heidi’s scale (a trim 105), cooking in the kitchen, even sprawled across the master bed (although they’d never had sex in that room, Michael’s one nod to fidelity).

If Alessandra doesn’t find another situation, she’ll simply text Michael the pictures and ask for more money.

As Heidi Bick is checking things off her packing list in Greenwich—Colby’s inhaler, Hayford’s putter, her Wüsthof tomato knife—Alessandra will be paying for a 1980 CJ-7 in “mint condition” that she found listed in the Nantucket Standard classifieds. The Jeep costs twenty grand; Alessandra will pay cash, then she’ll write the bellman Adam a check for twelve grand, which is her share of the summer’s rent now that she’s moving in with him and Raoul on Hooper Farm Road. She’ll throw ten grand at her credit card bills and still have a bit of a financial cushion.

Alessandra is growing weary of seducing men, then extorting them; she would far prefer to find a permanent provider.

She marches up the front steps of the hotel, trying to carry herself like a hotel guest checking in. Except she’s wearing her uniform, and Adam says, from his spot behind the lectern, “You look like a high-class hobo.”