“I put out the word through the family grapevine,” Mario had said in his accented English. “Roberto is so skilled that he can make the wood sing. Last I heard he was somewhere in the Keys living on a boat.”

There seemed to be a lot of that going around.

Please God, she prayed silently now. Send Mario’s cousin the carpenter our way as quickly as possible. And please help me find the money to pay him.

She was still trying to calm down when footsteps sounded on the path.

“We got dizzy watching you pace,” Deirdre said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m working on it.”

“The network?”

She nodded.

Deirdre let out a small, almost ladylike curse. “I understand that you’re in charge of the reno. And I have a pretty clear idea of how much you want to prove yourself. But you’re not in this alone.” She took Avery by the arm and led her to the pavilion where the others waited. “And in my experience multiple brains are almost always better than one.”

“So?” Nicole prompted as Maddie poured Avery a lemonade.

“So,” Avery said, her hands clenched tightly around the glass. “Lisa Hogan’s crunching us on money and time in order to keep things ‘interesting.’”

No one interrupted as she filled them in. “I guess I should have expected this.” Avery shook her head when she’d finished. “But I feel kind of like the general of an invading army whose supply line is stretched too far and too thin. Only there are no local farmers’ fields to forage in.”

“But we do know local farmers.” Maddie topped off her lemonade. “Or semilocal anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Kyra asked.

“I mean, is there any reason we can’t hit up the sponsors who did work in exchange for exposure in Miami?” Maddie asked. “We don’t have a mandate to use all new subs or anything, do we?”

“No.” Avery smiled for the first time that morning. Their contract didn’t particularly protect them; but it didn’t delve into specifics of construction, either.

“That’s good,” Deirdre said. “That means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to find some local spokes.”

“Miami’s only an hour away,” Nicole chimed in. “That’s practically local.”

Maddie passed the lemonade pitcher around. “So we could hit up Superior Pools, Randolph Plumbing, Walls of Windows, and East Coast Electric, right?”

Avery looked at Maddie. “How did you remember all of our Miami sponsors just like that?” Avery had the files from their work on the Millicent, but she hadn’t expected anyone else to remember them.

Maddie shrugged. “I think I put them all together last year when I was trying to learn how to enter contacts in my iPhone. I came across them yesterday by mistake when I was trying to send a text to Andrew.”

“Why don’t you let Nicole and me split up the list?” Deirdre suggested. “We’ll get on the phone this afternoon and remind them all about the first episode tomorrow night and set up appointments.

“When we go in to see them, we can hit up the Miami showrooms, too. I was planning to place orders, but I can call in some favors while we’re there. I don’t see why we couldn’t get furniture and accessories in exchange for on-screen credit.”

“I bet when they hear whose private island they’ll be working on and providing furnishings for it’ll be an even easier sell.” Nicole looked pleased.

“Then maybe I could contact resale shops between here and Miami to see if we can sell or at least place the furniture William’s getting rid of on consignment.” Maddie sipped thoughtfully on her lemonade.

“That’s a great idea.” Avery felt a lightening in her chest as the ideas came one after the other.

Kyra lowered her camera. “Maybe he’s got some memorabilia or old posters or something that we could offer on eBay. I could set up an account online and post photos and video to help sell them.”

Deirdre narrowed her gaze as she looked around the pavilion. “I really want to put in a new outdoor kitchen. If we could get William to agree to cook in it on camera, I bet we could get it for free.”

They were all looking at Maddie now. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I don’t think he does much more than fry and grill fish.”

“It doesn’t have to be a gourmet meal. We’ll stage it.” Deirdre’s voice hummed with excitement. “We just need his famous self using their products. William Hightower is still a bigger name to most than Max Golden.”

“Gax!” Dustin chimed in.

“This just might work.” Avery didn’t want to sound too excited, but she could feel her spirits lifting. “We’ll all reach out and see what we can make happen. Thomas will be here to watch the first episode. I’ll explain our budget issues to both of the Hightowers then and ask for their help attracting sponsors.”

Avery reached for her glass of lemonade. “Maybe we should feed them one last home-cooked meal before we rip out the kitchen. Then hopefully the episode will impress William enough to get him completely on board.”

Chapter Twenty-one

By the time they’d finished the tiramisu that had topped off the lasagna dinner and headed over to the television to watch season one, episode one, of Do Over, Will felt like the fatted calf. Except it was the women now seated around him who acted as if they were about to be slaughtered.

Though no one had room for another bite, Madeline set out bowls of popcorn and then settled on the sofa with Dustin, whose feet didn’t reach the edge. William watched Maddie’s arm wrap around the little boy’s shoulder to pull him close and he caught himself considering his own son, whose childhood he’d mostly missed. And whose teenage years had been spent at a succession of boarding schools, which Will had paid for but rarely visited. All those years on the road without thought for the cost.

The opening sequence showed the women arriving at a house on South Beach surrounded by a high wrought-iron gate barely taller than the grass inside it. The house was large and streamlined with nautical details, gouged plaster, and mismatched windows. It had been painted in a variety of colors that even Will didn’t think had ever been intended to go together.

The room went silent as the television screen filled with shots of Maddie’s, Kyra’s, Avery’s, Deirdre’s, and Nicole’s shocked faces. Their discomfort with the camera couldn’t have been more evident. A considerably younger Dustin, held in his grandmother’s arms, was the only one who looked good in extreme close-ups—of which there were many.

Despite the fact that Troy and Anthony were even at this moment shooting their reactions to the episode, there were gasps and groans from the women seated around him. Kyra’s fingers shook on her zoom lens; her lips formed a tight, angry line.

“Dustbin.” The little boy pointed at himself on-screen. “Thas Dustbin, Geema.”

The camera angle changed and the screen filled with a shot of the open front door of the house. A small old man with close-cropped white hair and matching caterpillar eyebrows teetered briefly on the front stoop and then began to walk toward the camera. He was dressed in a baggy white shirt and pants, which had been paired with an equally ill-fitting blue blazer. He held an unlit cigar in one hand and had a captain’s hat tucked under his arm. His welcome was delivered directly to the camera as if he were that captain welcoming people onto the Love Boat.

“Gax!” Once again Dustin seemed to be the only audience member who hadn’t gone silent in shock.

Will watched all that followed with interest. Max Golden was a ninety-year-old former vaudevillian with a warm twinkle in his eyes and a still-ready wit. But the thing that kept Will’s eyes locked on the screen was the women’s anger and discomfort in response to the clearly unexpected and intrusive camera. Equally riveting was the horrible state of the house, which had been chopped into apartments that they were somehow supposed to turn back into a single-family home.

“Jesus,” he said when the show cut to a commercial for some sort of drain cleaner. “The Millicent makes Mermaid Point look like a piece of cake.” He pushed back the unexpected sympathy he felt for them. It was bad enough to be on a reality TV show knowingly; how much more awful to end up there without any warning. Up until now he’d thought he was the one lacking options.

No one said anything right away. In fact, they seemed to be having trouble finding their voices.

“I told you those cutoffs and halter were a mistake,” Deirdre said to Avery, who gave her an eye roll in return.

“I can’t believe how stunned and frightened we all look,” Nicole said as she munched on popcorn. “It’s like watching one of those old cowboy movies where the settlers look up and see the entire pissed-off Comanche Nation riding down on their defenseless wagon train.”

“It looks like a frickin’ ambush all right,” Will said.

“We look completely stupid and inept,” Avery muttered.

Kyra glared at Troy. “You added way more shots of Dustin into the opening scenes than we agreed. That’s not what the opening sequence looked like when I left the edit session.”

“Lisa Hogan had final cut,” the cameraman said with an apologetic shrug. “And what the network head wants, the network head gets.”

Will and Tommy exchanged a glance. The cast and crew Will had envisioned as invaders and conquerors were starting to look a lot more like victims. If they weren’t a part of his son’s plan to turn his private retreat into a damned hotel, he might have felt sorry for them.

“Max looks like a nice guy.” Even Tommy seemed subdued by the intrusive nature of the video.