“And like I said, I don’t want friends.”

“We’ll be better than friends,” Kayla said. She was sucked into the idea immediately: Great Point at midnight, the stars, the chill water, three women sharing the secrets of their souls. “We’ll be the Night Swimmers.”

Kayla picked up Valerie first because she lived closer, on Pleasant Street, near Fahey & Fromagerie. Her house was smaller than Kayla’s, but more attractive-gambrel-style, like a barn, with neat hunter green shutters, pink geraniums in the window boxes, and a healthy violet-blue hydrangea bush on either side of the front door. Two cars in the driveway: Val’s slick, sexy BMW convertible and her husband’s quieter black Jaguar. Race cars, the cars of professionals who could afford landscapers and a cleaning lady, the cars of people without children. After that first summer on Nantucket, Val had accomplished most of what she set out to do: Law Review, clerking for Judge Sechrist, a job as an associate at Skadden, Arps in New York, where she met and married John Gluckstern, a Wall Street superstar. Within five years they had enough money to leave Manhattan behind and move to Nantucket year-round. Val set up her own law practice in an office overlooking the Easy Street Boat Basin. She was tremendously successful, handling all the biggest real estate deals on the island.

John worked as an investment adviser at Nantucket Bank, a job he took so he could meet other islanders with money to invest. Kayla and Raoul had been to see John twice-once when they set up Raoul’s business and then again in June, when Raoul landed the Ting job. John wore a three-piece suit to work, and at first that made one think that John was no different professionally from how he was socially: a self-important, puffed-up jackass. John had run for local office four times and had never been elected. He was unlikable. He was a one-upper, and he didn’t listen. But what Kayla found after going to see him at work was that in his job, he was different. He was eager and excited and friendly, and although he knew everything in the world there was to know about money and investing, he wasn’t pushy. He explained options to Raoul and Kayla carefully, he asked pertinent questions about the kids’ college educations, and he let them make their own choices-choices that made them feel confident, smart, successful.

After their second visit with John at the bank, Kayla wanted to gently suggest to Val that if John treated his friends and neighbors the way he treated his clients, he’d be better liked. But by that point, Val had lost interest in making John seem less reprehensible. Back in April, John ran for selectman for the fourth time and garnered only sixty-seven votes. Val called Kayla from the high school cafeteria in tears, and Kayla went to pick her up. It was a rainy night, and the two of them drove out to die deserted parking lot of Surfside Beach. The rain was so heavy that Kayla couldn’t even see the ocean through the windshield. Val sopped up her tears and slugged coffee and Kahlúa from a thermos that Kayla had brought. Val talked about how humiliating it was to have received only 67 votes when the winner got over 1,300.

“John doesn’t even see what that means,” Val said. “He doesn’t understand that nobody likes us.”

“Everybody likes you,” Kayla insisted, though she knew this wasn’t true. Some people didn’t like Val- they thought she was too uptight for Nantucket, too tough for a woman. She was wealthy, she was powerful, she intimidated people. But Kayla defended Val against the people who muttered bitch or dyke when Val’s name came up in conversation. Val was Kayla’s first friend on the island; she’d known her longer than she’d known Raoul. Still, Kayla was well aware that Val didn’t help John at all in the polls.

“I feel this deadly combination of disgust and pity for John,” Val said. “Actual pity for him because running for office is his passion. How do I ask my husband to stop pursuing his dream? Do I just say, “Honey, please give up your aspirations, you’re embarrassing me’? Is that what I say? Maybe it is. Because I can’t handle another loss like tonight.”

Six weeks later, when Kayla and Val met for coffee at Espresso Cafe, Val told Kayla she was having an affair. Her passions, she said, lay elsewhere.

Valerie came out of her house holding the largest bottle of champagne Kayla had ever seen. It was almost as big as Luke; the cork was level with Valerie’s head, and the bottom of the bottle was at her waist. Kayla flung open the car door.

“What have you got there?” she asked.

“It’s a Methuselah of Laurent-Perrier,” Val said. She set the bottle down on the seat between them. “I brought it back from France for this very occasion. They had an absolute fit in customs, but they made an exception when I told them it was for Night Swimmers.”

“You don’t suppose we’ll drink all that?” Kayla said.

Val shrugged. “We have a lot to celebrate after twenty years. I’m finally happy, you’re finally rich-”

“I’m not rich,” Kayla said.

“You will be soon enough,” Val said. She closed her door, and Kayla backed out of the driveway. “It’s okay to have money, Kayla, though I know you don’t believe it.”

“I think it’s okay,” Kayla said defensively. “In fact, I think it’s fine.”

Val shook her short hair. She wore a pressed white linen shirt that was so crisp it looked like parchment, and baggy linen pants the color of wheat bread. Beige suede Fratelli Rossetti sandals. She was deeply tanned (from sunbathing nude every weekend at Miacomet Beach), and she wore three gold chains around her neck that were as thin as strands of web. Those chains were her signature jewelry, she said. They defined who she was. Kayla cringed when Val said things like “signature jewelry” in public because it just gave people another reason to dislike her. Who on earth had signature jewelry? Princess Diana? Zsa Zsa Gabor?

As if reading Kayla’s mind, Val fingered her chains. “Did you talk to Antoinette?” she asked.

“I did.”

“How did she sound?”

“She sounded fine.” Kayla threw the car into reverse and backed out of the driveway. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Val said. “We had lunch last week, and she seemed a little reflective.”

“You had lunch?” Kayla said. “You didn’t tell me that.”

Val shrugged. “It was no big deal. It was just lunch.”

“Yeah, but you could have…” Kayla almost said “invited me along,” but she caught herself. “You could have mentioned it.”

“I also had lunch with Merrill and Kelly. I also had lunch with Nina Monroe.”

“Yeah, but those are your friends.”

“Antoinette is my friend. Please, Kayla, don’t get sensitive about this. It was only lunch.”

“You’re right,” Kayla said. She couldn’t help but feel jealous in the most adolescent way-there was no reason why Val and Antoinette shouldn’t have lunch alone. No reason why they shouldn’t pursue a friendship independent of her. But, in fact, Kayla had always believed that she was the glue that held Val and Antoinette together; she was closer to both of them than they were to each other. “So she sounded reflective?”

“Yes,” Val said. “Has she told you anything?”

Kayla considered mentioning Antoinette’s daughter, if only to prove that she had some inside information first, but she shook her head. The announcement about the daughter could wait until midnight, when Night Swimmers officially began.

The Night Swimmers had evolved over the past twenty years into an evening of rules and rituals. It was a rule to eat decadent food-lobsters, cheese, berries. It was a rule to drink champagne. And it was a time to share secrets, like the one Antoinette had shared with them twenty years earlier.

As Kayla drove through the moonlit night toward Antoinette’s house, she thought about the secrets she’d shared over the past years. She’d told Val and Antoinette all the secrets from her past-about sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet a high school boyfriend at a disco, cheating on a chemistry test in college, stealing a pair of duck shoes from Murray’s when she worked there her first summer. She told them one year that she was pregnant with Cassidy B.-before Raoul even knew. Val and Antoinette’s secrets were always more interesting than her own. Val told about sleeping with a professor to get on Law Review, she told about a bank account abroad that she kept a secret from John, she told them she overcharged one of her best clients on a regular basis. Antoinette told about being cut from the Joffrey Ballet School when she lived in New York before she was married, she told about how her mother ran out on her when Antoinette was at boarding school in New Hampshire.

This year Antoinette would tell about her daughter coming to visit, and Val would disclose the name of her lover. Kayla-well, Kayla would talk about Theo. The three women would accept each other’s secrets like valuable gifts to be kept safe from the rest of the world.

Antoinette lived off Polpis Road down a long, bumpy dirt path bordered on both sides by scrub pines. Antoinette bought the land with a portion of her enormous divorce settlement, and she hired Raoul to build her four-room cottage. She invested her set dement with John Gluckstern in the early eighties, and he bought her a load of Microsoft at two dollars a share. Val had let it slip that Antoinette now had close to thirty million dollars. She was worth more than Kayla and Raoul and Val and John put together, but her lifestyle required very little. She danced, she went for walks in the woods, she drank chardonnay, she read novels. It sounded enviable at first-Antoinette had enough money to do whatever she pleased, and what she pleased was to go for days, even weeks, without talking to another soul. She had claimed twenty years earlier that she didn’t want friends, but over time she had given in to Kayla and Val in small ways. She joined them for an occasional meal, she sometimes remembered their birthdays, she called just to talk every once in a while. Her desire to kill herself subsided, although she experienced dark periods when she didn’t eat, didn’t dance, didn’t leave the house. The dark periods lasted a few days, maybe a week, and then they ended and Antoinette went back to what she did best, cultivating her loneliness. “I’m lonely all the time, every day,” she told Kayla. “But there are far worse things than being lonely. Like being betrayed.”