Denise, who'd been quiet for the past few minutes in the way she sometimes was when everyone else was talking, looked up from her phone and said: "What does it look like, though? The thing you'll know when you see it."

Sophia thought about it honestly.

She'd been in this conversation in various forms for the past three years, with various configurations of these same women on various boats and balconies and restaurant patios, and she'd never quite been able to give the answer that would satisfy anyone. Not because she didn't have one, but because the honest answer was the kind of thing that sounded like a romantic comedy and she'd always been slightly suspicious of her own romanticisms.

"Someone who doesn't need me to perform," she said. "Someone who's actually there in the room when we're talking, not planning what he's going to say next." She turned her wine glass. "Someone who asks a question and waits for the answer. Who reads things - actually reads them, not just knows about them." She paused. "Someone I could sit in a room with and say nothing and it wouldn't be uncomfortable."

Jenny stared at her. "That is not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"I don't know. Taller? More jaw?"

"The jaw is an optional component."

"Thomas Whitfield has excellent jaw."

"Thomas Whitfield also has forty-seven minutes of car content," Flora said, from the stern. "You have to weigh these things."

"I've been weighing them." Sophia leaned back into the cushions. The bay was doing that thing it did in late afternoon, where the light on the water went from blue to a kind of burning gold, and the city skyline behind the masts of the marina had the quality of something that was too beautiful to be a practical place for human activity. "I'm twenty-four. I defended my thesis three weeks ago. I have a yacht and a garden and an apartment and the specific pleasure of knowing that I did what I set out to do and I don't owe anyone an explanation for any of it." She looked at the sky. "I have time."

"You sound like your mother," Pamela said.

"Thank you."

"I meant it as a concern."

"I know."

Vanessa came down from the upper deck with a bottle of sparkling water and sat beside Sophia with her knees pulled to her chest. She was quieter than usual. Sophia noticed - Vanessa was always quieter than usual when she was working herself up to saying something.

"How's your mum?" Vanessa asked, which wasn't what she wanted to say.

"Fine. Busy. She's been reorganizing the office - which means she's anxious about something and channeling it into labeled file folders." Sophia glanced at her. "Why?"

"No reason."

"Ness."

Vanessa turned the water bottle in her hands. "My dad mentioned something at dinner last week. About Vale Enterprises. He heard it from a contact in his firm - I don't know the details, I don't even know if it's true. But he said something about your brother."

Sophia went still. "What about Eric?"

"He said he'd heard Eric made a large investment. A very large one. In something that apparently wasn't-" Vanessa paused. "He said the word 'risky' a lot. And then he stopped saying things because I was in the room and he knew I'd tell you."

"How risky."

"Sophie."

"How risky, Vanessa."

Vanessa looked at her directly. "He stopped the conversation when I came in. You know my dad - he doesn't get worried about much. He was worried."

The rosé on the stern suddenly seemed very far away. The sun was the same, the bay was the same, Jenny was still explaining something animated to Denise about lobster sourcing, but the easy warmth of the afternoon had developed a hairline crack that Sophia could feel running straight down through her chest.

"I have to go home," she said.

"I know." Vanessa touched her arm briefly. "It might be nothing."

"It might be."

It wasn't nothing.

She drove home fast.

Not recklessly - she'd grown up in Seattle and she understood what the rain did to these roads and what the hills did to stopping distances, and she was the kind of person who'd always found reckless speed a signifier of people who hadn't yet learned the difference between urgency and panic. But fast. The kind of fast that uses every lane change the law allows and doesn't linger at yellow lights.

The radio was off. She drove in silence across the floating bridge and up through Montlake and into Broadmoor, through the neighborhood of her entire childhood, past the gates and the brick pillars and the maples that had been here longer than she had, and she thought about Eric.

She'd been thinking about Eric for years, actually. She just hadn't been thinking about it in this register.

Eric Vale was thirty-two years old and had been, for most of those years, the kind of older brother who was simultaneously too close and not close enough - present in the way that brothers who live in the same city are present, at dinners and holidays and the occasional family crisis, but not in the way that people who have spoken honestly to each other are present. Eric had been their father's son in temperament, which was to say he cared about appearances in the way their father had cared about appearances, and he'd inherited the company when Helen stepped back and he'd run it the way he ran everything: with confidence and insufficient caution, in the way of a man who'd always been caught before he hit the floor.