Her tone can only be described as portentous, and Kacy thinks, She’s going to ask about the selfies. “Sure,” Kacy says. She has to stop sending the selfies to Isla. It’s not fair to Coco. It’s worse than not fair, it’s gross.

“Why haven’t you said anything about my screenplay?” Coco says. “If you hated it, I want you to tell me.”

Kacy feels like a fish released from a hook. Not the selfies after all—the screenplay! “Oh, Coco, I haven’t read it yet.” Though this, she realizes, might be an even greater infraction. Kacy asked Coco to let her read the script, Coco dutifully sent it, and Kacy has allowed it to molder in her inbox. Kacy has all day free, so what’s her excuse? She isn’t quite the reader Coco is—Coco is reading a classic while Kacy snacks on Vogue—but that’s not the reason. Kacy belatedly realized that she wouldn’t know what to say if she didn’t like it. She would have to fall back on I’m a nurse, what do I know about writing? Or she could lie and say she loved it regardless, but what if Coco sensed she was patronizing her? Don’t do business with friends is a rule for a reason, and another one should be Don’t offer to be the first reader of your friend’s screenplay because it could end awkwardly. “But I’ll read it tonight, I promise. I’ll start it as soon as I get home.”

“Will you?” Coco says. “I’d really love some feedback before I… send it out.”

“Where are you sending it?” Kacy asks. “Do you have any connects?”

“I have one,” Coco says. “But I’m keeping it a secret because I don’t want to jinx it.”

Kacy is true to her word. When she gets home, she takes her laptop out to her parents’ back deck and clicks on Coco’s attachment: Rosebush, an original screenplay by Colleen Coyle.

An hour and twelve minutes later, she’s wiping tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. The script is… breathtaking. It’s raw and honest and poignant. It’s very clearly about Coco’s life growing up in Arkansas (the main character is named Coco), but Kacy wonders if everything in it is true or if Coco embellished. The overall arc is Coco’s desire to escape her small town: Can she do it? Coco the character yearns for the world outside of Rosebush, but everything conspires to keep her there, especially her narrow-minded mother and the family’s lack of resources. Kacy wants to know if Coco really robbed the cash register at the diner where she worked; she wants to know if her mother teased her for bringing home library books. The most powerful scene is Coco’s senior banquet. The senior banquet at Rosebush High School includes a father-daughter dance. Coco is supposed to dance with her mother’s boyfriend, Kemp, but the day before the banquet, Coco’s mother picks a fight with Kemp and kicks him out (the viewer learns that she does this with some regularity). The scene follows Coco as she climbs into a pickup in her banquet dress and drives to each of the remote camping spots that Kemp frequents when he’s been banished, but she can’t find him. She ends up missing the banquet and the next day accuses her mother of intentionally sabotaging her big night. Her mother says, “You act like you have some right to be happy when the rest of us are miserable.”

Kacy can’t in a million years imagine either of her parents uttering anything so hurtful. How did Coco make it out of that life with any self-esteem intact? Kacy wants to drive to Triple Eight and give Coco a hug, but that would be weird, and Coco wouldn’t want Kacy feeling sorry for her, so Kacy calls instead.

“I loved every word,” Kacy says. She doesn’t have to make her voice sound persuasive because she’s telling the truth. “It’s brilliant, Coco. You’re a genius.”

There’s a pause, then: “Really? Really-really?”

“Really-really,” Kacy says.

Coco isn’t sure when, why, or how, but at some point in the middle of July, everything clicks. She learns to go to the Stop and Shop at seven in the morning when it’s been freshly restocked; she discovers a secret parking spot in town that’s a stone’s throw from the Born and Bread bakery; she becomes friends with Chris from Pip and Anchor, and he texts her when they have sandwich specials so that she can combine her marketing and lunch stop.

After she pays off her Visa balance, she has sixty-two hundred dollars in the bank, a veritable fortune. She returns to the Lovely and buys a few things from gorgeous Olivia—a tank, a skirt, a couple of dresses, a pair of cute sandals, a new beach bag. She makes an appointment at RJ Miller, even though the idea of spending a hundred dollars on a haircut kills her when she can simply do it herself. She tells the stylist, Lorna, that she wants to grow it out. Lorna is so skilled with her trimming and shaping that Coco vows never to cut her own hair again.

The Richardsons have also hit something of a sweet spot. The Fourth of July sail solidified their position in Nantucket society—they have invitations every night. Leslee is now a regular fourth at pickleball with Kacy’s mother and her friends, and Leslee confides in Coco that she and Bull have secured a nominating letter for the Field and Oar Club from Phoebe Wheeler and four seconding letters, including one from the commodore herself, Busy Ambrose.

“If all goes according to plan, we’ll be members as soon as next month,” Leslee says.

“Great,” Coco says—but this response isn’t enthusiastic enough for Leslee.

“The Field and Oar was founded in 1905,” Leslee says. “Its membership includes Nantucket’s oldest and most established families. You can’t just buy your way in; you have to be accepted based on personal merit. This is a very big deal.”

If it’s true that the Richardsons can’t buy their way in, then this is a very big deal. It’ll lend Leslee and Bull legitimacy. Leslee is obsessed with fitting in, with stature, with who’s who, and she’s critical of people she calls wannabes. She shows Coco an invitation she received from the dentist Andy McMann and his wife, Rachel. They’re throwing a summer cocktail party with a Preppy Handbook theme.

“They’re copying us,” Leslee cries, thrusting the invitation at Coco. “I’m surprised Rachel didn’t hand-deliver this, but I’m sure even she knew that would be a step too far. As it is, she’s stealing our idea for a themed cocktail party.” She sounds offended but also sort of delighted.

“A Preppy Handbook theme feels redundant,” Coco says. “It’s Nantucket in the summer.”

Leslee beams. “I could hug you,” she says—and then she does hug Coco, and Coco gets a full inhale of Leslee’s Guerlain Double Vanille perfume and a mouthful of her barrel-curled hair.

“So will you go?” Coco asks. “To the party?”

“Absolutely,” Leslee says, “not. Dr. Andy and Rachel are imitation crab. I could smell their weakness the moment I met them. Besides, I hear Jessica Torre is a far better dentist.”

Coco recalls that the McManns were the first people struck from Leslee’s invitation list for the Fourth of July. Cutting the invite list by half was a strategy that has made the Richardsons’ stock rise. It’s classic supply and demand: Everyone wants what they can’t have.

Everyone, that is, except for Coco, who relishes each second of her new life. She throws her head back as she cruises along the Polpis Road in Baby. The top is down, the sun is shining, she’s playing her favorite song: “I Wanna Get Better” by the Bleachers. But everything is already better, she thinks, because Lamont Oakley is her sneaky-link.

He comes by her apartment at the literal crack of dawn when both Bull and Leslee are fast asleep (they are not early risers). He parks all the way out on the Wauwinet Road, then jogs down Pocomo. (Coco has disabled the driveway alarm, with Leslee’s blessing—they both agree the chiming is obnoxious—but even so, Coco checks daily to make sure Leslee hasn’t turned it back on.) Lamont sprints along the grass on the side of the driveway so his footsteps don’t make noise on the shells. When he arrives, breathless, at her door, Coco feels like they’re working for the CIA. But the last thing either of them wants is to get caught breaking the rule now.

They’ve perfected the art of acting cordial-bordering-on-indifferent when they bump into each other at work. “Hey. S’up.” There are no winks, no lingering looks; it drives them both crazy.

When Lamont enters Coco’s bedroom in the apricot light of dawn each morning, Coco rolls over, warm with sleep, and instantly starts glowing with desire. Lamont kisses just beneath her ear; he nibbles on her hip bone. She cannot get enough of him.

The best part of the morning isn’t even the sex, it’s the talking afterward. One morning, Lamont tells Coco that every child on Nantucket is eligible to take free sailing lessons through Nantucket Community Sailing. Lamont showed a talent for it right away; he had the adaptability, the patience, and the independence. “Plus, I love being on the water,” he says. “I love weather, I love wind, I love the sound of the sails, I love tying and untying knots, I love the boats, especially the very simple Optis we learned on.”

When he got older, members of the Field and Oar asked him to crew. It was at that point he realized there weren’t a lot of Black people in the sailing-verse. “I was usually the only person of color at the Field and Oar,” he says. “Which prepared me, I guess, for the whitewashed world of sailing. When I was in college, most of the teams we sailed against were all white.”

“Did you feel like a trailblazer?” Coco says.

“Sort of,” Lamont says. “But then the kids behind me in school—like Javier and Esteban, for example—saw what I did and their parents heard about all the places I’ve been able to travel. The Nantucket sailing program is way more diverse now.”

Coco tells Lamont about her home growing up. “Nothing in our house was ever correct,” Coco says. “I don’t know how else to explain it. Something was always breaking—the porch light would go out, the downstairs toilet would overflow, the battery of my mother’s Accord would die. My mother would wash our clothes and hang them on the line, but she never folded them or put them away; we’d all just pull stuff crumpled from the laundry basket. Even my mother’s name, Georgi—that’s her whole entire name, on her birth certificate—it’s just not finished. Like, why not add the final e or a?” Coco sighs. “I remember this one time, my mother brought home steaks for dinner, these thick rib eyes that the butcher at work gave her. She mashed potatoes and boiled up some broccoli, and I made brownies for dessert. I was so excited to have a family dinner like you’d read about in a book and it was one time when Bree and her kids were in a good mood—no one was crying, no one was fighting. Just when everything was ready, my mother’s phone rang. It was Kemp, saying he’d forgotten that darts league started that night and Bree’s boyfriend, Larch, was meeting him at the bar and they wouldn’t be home until late. Georgi got so mad they were missing dinner that she carried the platter of steaks out back and threw them into our pond for the snapping turtles. She just tossed everyone’s dinner. I ran into my room with the tray of brownies, and I invited Bree’s kids in, and we locked the door and ate the brownies straight out of the pan sitting on the floor.” Coco tears up. She had been fourteen years old when this happened. She remembers because she wrote a “personal narrative” about it for a ninth-grade English assignment, and the teacher, Mrs. Buckwalter, asked Coco to stay after class. Coco thought Mrs. Buckwalter was going to report their family to child protective services—in a way, Coco wanted this to happen—but instead, Mrs. Buckwalter told Coco that she was a “very talented writer.”

Coco laughs. “I’m sorry that story doesn’t have an inspirational ending like yours. I didn’t triumph; I only survived.”

“But you did triumph,” Lamont says, kissing her eyelids, her nose, then her lips. “Because you’re here.”

Every morning when Lamont gets up to leave, Coco longs for him to stay.

“Why can’t we go to dinner one night? I know where Bull and Leslee have reservations. If they go to the Galley, we can go to the Sconset Café.”

“If anybody sees us…” Lamont says, and Coco realizes he’s right. The Richardsons know everyone now.

There is one place Lamont is willing to take Coco: to his house to meet his mother, Glynnie. At first, Coco can’t believe it. “You’re sure?” she says. It feels like they skipped a step.

“She wanted to know why I suddenly seemed so happy all the time. And I can’t lie to my mama, so I told her about you. She asked to meet you.”

Coco and Lamont arrange to go to his house at nine o’clock on Saturday morning. Coco has a little more leeway with her errands on the weekends because the Richardsons tend to sleep in even later than usual. Lamont lives in a saltbox cottage on a cul-de-sac over by the Miacomet Golf Course. The house is neat and tidy, with hydrangeas on either side of a yellow front door. As they approach, Coco hears a dog barking.

Lamont opens the door. “Molly!” he says to an English cream golden retriever who is as white and fluffy as a polar bear. “Molly, meet Coco. Coco, Molly.” He ushers Coco inside to a mudroom that is giving Martha Stewart vibes—there’s a rainbow of foul-weather jackets hanging on wooden pegs, and beneath a tastefully weathered bench are a row of boat shoes and flip-flops. They step into a bright kitchen with white glass-fronted cabinets and a white marble island with a bouquet of lilies in a green glass vase and a bowl of peaches and plums sitting on it. There’s a pie underneath a glass-domed cake stand. On the far side of the kitchen is a breakfast nook with windows that open to the backyard. And at the round table sits a petite woman wearing earbuds with her phone in front of her. Her eyes are closed behind the lenses of her glasses, but her posture is as straight as a ballerina’s.

“Mama?” Lamont says.

Lamont’s mother opens her eyes in surprise. She presses the screen of her phone and removes her earbuds. “Darling!”

“I brought Coco,” he says. “Coco, this is my mother, Glynnis Oakley.”

Coco steps forward and offers her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Oakley.”

“Dear girl, call me Glynnie,” she says. She scoots out from behind the table and gets to her feet. She’s wearing white capris and a blue-and-white-gingham sleeveless blouse with a ruffled collar. Her skin is the same light brown as Lamont’s and she has a few pronounced freckles on her cheeks. Her nails, Coco notes, are perfect ovals polished to look like milk glass. “My eyesight isn’t what it used to be so I can’t get a good look at you, but you sound just beautiful.”

“Thank you for inviting me over,” Coco says.

“Lamont will make coffee. I was just listening to my audiobook—it’s quite gripping.”