The Hotel Nantucket (58)

I didn’t give her the tequila, Alessandra thinks. I held her hair! But again, she keeps quiet.

“My parents loved Ali, my mother especially.” Duffy lowers her voice. “She used to talk about adopting you. She wanted to give you a nice normal home.”

Alessandra won’t take the bait, won’t mention that she had both a mother and a home, and she won’t give in to her rogue impulse to lean across the desk and say to Jamie in a stage whisper, I had an affair with Duffy’s father the spring of our senior year.

Instead, Alessandra says, “I’m going to comp your first night.”

“Oh my God, thank you!” Duffy says. “Aren’t you just the summer Santa!”

Ho-ho-ho! Alessandra thinks. “I never got you guys a wedding present, so…”

Duffy’s brow wrinkles. “You didn’t?”

Alessandra shakes her head. Of course Duffy wouldn’t keep track of things like wedding presents; she might not even have set up a registry, she might have just asked guests to donate to Rosalie House. Though from the looks of her diamond ring, the whopper diamond studs in her ears, and her Cartier tank watch (probably a push present—oh, how Alessandra loathes this term), she might be more materialistic now than she was then.

“How about upgrading us to a suite as well?” Jamie asks. “If you have one available?”

They have seven suites available but Alessandra is so taken aback by Jamie’s brazen request—it’s a Taser to her sensibilities—that she says, “It looks like the suites are all spoken for.”

“It’s just, with the baby…” Jamie says.

“This is Cabot!” Duffy says, pulling a cherubic little baby in a sailor suit from the stroller.

Cabot Chung, Alessandra thinks. He’s a beautiful kid, at that most photogenic age for babies—what is that, six months, seven? Alessandra waggles her fingers at him. She’s so unmaternal that this feels campy, but she goes all in with her gushing while inwardly she fumes. She offered Jamie and Duffy a free night but Jamie asked for more, so it feels like she hasn’t given them anything at all.

She makes a show of tapping on her keyboard. “I’m going to work some magic and slide you into a suite after all,” she says. “I’ll have Zeke set up a crib and babyproof the room.”

“Thank you!” Duffy says. “You’re amazing! Can we take you to dinner one night while we’re here so we can catch up?”

Alessandra peeks at her phone; there are two texts from a number she knows is Dr. Romano.

“I’m tied up all three evenings that you’re here,” she says. She activates the keys for suite 216 and slides them across the desk. “But I’m sure we’ll find time to chat.”

“I can’t wait to text my parents and tell them I saw you,” Duffy says. “They won’t believe it!”

“Please give them my best,” Alessandra says.



Alessandra can’t help but revisit the fraught months that she was sleeping with Duffy’s father. Alessandra had been eighteen, which she thought was old enough, though now, nearly the same number of years later, Alessandra realizes it wasn’t old enough at all. She had been a teenager and Drew a tenured professor in his mid-forties. However, Alessandra can’t call herself a victim, even through the lens of 2022.

She had always loved Drew, crushed on him, idolized him, seeing him as somewhere between an unattainable celebrity and a father figure. The Beechams owned an entire Victorian on Filbert Street that they’d inherited from Mary Lou’s parents. Classical music always spilled from the tantalizing, slightly ajar door to Drew’s study. NPR played on a radio in the kitchen, where Mary Lou made the girls crepes for breakfast; for a weeknight dinner, she’d whip up Dover sole and frisée salad with lardons. Both Beecham parents read copiously; they subscribed to The Economist and the New York Review of Books; they attended the symphony. Alice Waters knew the Beechams by name, and they were always taking trips to Lisbon or Granada, where Drew would lecture. They weren’t wealthy but they were rich—with intellect, with ideas, with experiences.

Duffy, however, shared none of her parents’ interests. She liked Britney Spears and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and she was as much of a troublemaker as Alessandra, if not more so. She was the one who became friends with HB, the guy who met them in the Presidio with a bottle of Don Julio that fateful night. Duffy matched HB shot for shot, but Alessandra tossed her shots over her shoulder because she didn’t like the look of HB and didn’t want to lose control.

When Duffy started vomiting, Alessandra held her hair away from her face. It was ten o’clock p.m. on a raw Friday in March and they were sitting on the damp ground of Crissy Field. Alessandra wanted to leave, but Duffy couldn’t make it three steps without doubling over and retching. Alessandra had no choice but to call Drew.

The Beechams had been in the middle of hosting a dinner party; candles glowed in the dining room, bottles of excellent Napa cabernet sat empty on the table, but the conversation and the laughing quieted when Drew ushered the girls past the dining room and down the hall to the kitchen. Mary Lou stood up from the table, making a joke about teenagers: We all remember those days, right, Barry? But when she saw the state Duffy was in, she flamed with anger, which she aimed at Alessandra (the unparented bad influence) until she realized that Alessandra was sober. For some reason, this served to make her even more livid and she snapped at Drew to get Alessandra “out of my sight.”