He talked for five minutes about White Coral Cay's history, and he was genuinely good at this - warmth in his voice, specificity in his details, the evident love of a man who had lived his entire life in one place and found it sufficient. He talked about the value of deep roots and strong families, about the way the island's greatest strength had always been its people and their commitment to one another. He talked about the Whitmore family - Sterling's grandfather, who had developed North Cay's mining operations, and how they had transformed the island's economy. He talked about the Grove family - the fishermen, the community leaders, the people who had held South Cay together through three hurricanes and a market crash and the slow decline of the traditional fishing economy.

He talked, at some length, about everything except asking his daughter what she wanted.

Then: "It gives me tremendous pride, and I know I speak for the Whitmore family as well, to announce that Priscilla will be engaged to Chad Whitmore. We'll be planning the ceremony for early next year, and we look forward to celebrating this new chapter with all of you."

The table erupted. Diana Whitmore pressed both hands together in front of her mouth. Sterling rose to shake Martin's hand. The other guests offered congratulations with the immediate enthusiasm of people who had seen this coming and were pleased to be present for its confirmation.

Chad looked across the table at Priscilla with exactly the smile she'd expected - the one that said: I told you so. Not cruel, not triumphant. Simply satisfied. The satisfaction of a man whose world was proceeding according to plan.

Jade's champagne flute made a very small, very controlled sound as she set it down. Priscilla did not look at her cousin. She looked at her father, who was receiving congratulations with the glowing ease of a man who had just accomplished something difficult, and she thought: He'll never understand that he's just made the worst mistake of my life.

She did what was necessary. She smiled. She accepted Diana's clasped hands and warm words about becoming family with the gracious composure of a woman who has spent eighteen years being managed and has become, whatever anyone else thought, excellent at it. She answered questions. She agreed with things. She let the momentum of the table carry her through the dessert and the second round of champagne and the photographs on the chapel steps, the white gown perfect in the golden afternoon light, her father's arm around her shoulders, the whole thing rendering down into something neat and inevitable and entirely wrong.

The storm arrived in the late afternoon without much warning, which was, on White Coral Cay, perfectly standard.

Island weather changed the way a mood changed: gradually and then suddenly, without apology. By four o'clock, the sky had turned the grey of old pewter and the trade winds had developed an edge. By six, the palms were bending in earnest and the rain had started - not the warm tropical shower that passed in fifteen minutes and left everything shining, but the heavy, purposeful rain that preceded a real storm. By eight, the weather service advisory on the radio confirmed what every South Cay resident had already understood from the behavior of the birds: batten down. Tonight was not going to be calm.

Priscilla drove herself to the cottage.

It took twenty minutes on the coastal road, which was bad in clear weather and worse in rain, a single track cut through the sea grape and buttonwood that separated the main settlement from South Cay's far shore. The windshield wipers were working hard. The road glistened. The radio played an old Otis Redding song and she turned it up loud enough to fill the car.

The cottage sat at the far end of a small beach that had no particularly useful characteristics - too rocky for swimming at high tide, too exposed for fishing, too remote to attract anyone who wasn't specifically looking for it - but that Priscilla had considered hers since she was twelve and had discovered it on a bicycle ride she wasn't supposed to be taking that far. Her father used it for equipment storage. Her mother called it a liability. Priscilla came here whenever the main house became too small, which happened at a frequency that had increased considerably in the past year.

She let herself in with the spare key hidden under the third porch step. The cottage was musty from disuse - two rooms, a kitchen barely large enough to turn around in, a bathroom, a back room with a narrow cot and a chest of drawers. She lit the old oil lamp on the kitchen table - the cottage's electrical connection was unreliable in storms - and put the kettle on the gas stove and stood in the small kitchen while the storm organized itself outside.

She changed out of the white gown. She hung it carefully on the back of the bathroom door and stood there for a moment, looking at it - white silk in the lamplight, the pearl headband looped over the hanger. Her father's announcement. Her mother's pleased, anxious eyes. Diana Whitmore's warm hands.

She put on jeans and an oversized fisherman's sweater that lived in the cottage's chest of drawers, poured the tea when the kettle boiled, and went to sit on the covered porch.