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Alix had inherited from her father a deep love of building. Her paternal grandfather had been a contractor and his son had spent his summers building houses. In the winter her father had worked in a shop and made cabinets. He’d earned his degree in architecture before Alix was born, and later it had been natural to him to begin teaching at the university level.
    Her parents had divorced when Alix was a child and, as a result, she had grown up in two worlds. One was with her father, which involved everything about building, from her father’s design to hammering in the studs to choosing paint colors for the interior. And he loved teaching his daughter what he knew. She could read blueprints by the time she was in first grade.
    The other half of her life revolved around her mother’s writing. Part of the year Alix and her mother lived quietly, just the two of them, while Victoria wrote novels that the whole world enjoyed. Every August her mother went away to a cabin in Colorado to isolate herself so she could plot that year’s novel. Her wildly popular books took a seafaring family down through the ages. When each book was finished, there were cocktail parties, extravagant dinners, and vacations. Alix’s life with her mother was a wonderful mix of quiet work and great excitement.
    Alix had loved it all! She liked sitting on the tailgate of a pickup with her father’s crew and eating sandwiches, and she liked wearing a designer dress and laughing with the top publishing people in the world.
    “They’re all the same,” Alix always said. “They all work for a living. Whether their tools are claw hammers or six-syllable words, they’re all workers.”
    Between her two very successful parents, Alix had come out talented and ambitious. She had her father’s love of building and her mother’s belief that the top was the only place to be.
    Izzy looked at Alix, her friend’s eyes glazed as she studied Nantucket, and Izzy almost felt sorry for Jared Montgomery. When Alix wanted to know something, she was insatiable.
    “I’ve seen this before,” Alix said.
    “Maybe you remember the place from when you were four.”
    “Not likely, but …” Alix was looking around her. Across the road was a beautiful white wooden building with dark green window-frames across its front. On one side was painted a map that showed the distance from Nantucket to other parts of the world. Hong Kong was 10,453 miles away.
    “ ‘We are the center of everything,’ ” Alix quoted. “That’s what I hear someone saying when I look at that map. ‘Nantucket is the epicenter of the earth.’ I must have heard that when I was four. I had never heard that word before, but in a funny way, I knew what it meant. Does that make sense?”
    “Actually, it does,” Izzy said, smiling. It looked like she was going to be able to leave soon. She could tell by Alix’s tone that her friend remembered more about Nantucket than she thought she did. And even better, she was beginning to feel like Nantucket was home. If Victoria and the late Miss Kingsley had planned all this so Alix could meet the famous Jared Montgomery, it seemed to be working.
    “Let’s go in here,” Izzy said. “We need to celebrate.” It was Murray’s Beverage store and inside were rows of wine, beer, and liquor. Izzy felt that they needed something cold and fizzy so she headed to the refrigerator against the back wall.
    But Alix went to the old-fashioned wooden counter and looked at the shelves behind it. “I want rum,” she said to the woman behind the counter.
    “Rum?” Izzy asked. “I didn’t know you liked that.”
    “Me neither. I think I’ve had one rum and Coke in my life. But here on Nantucket I want rum.”
    “It is a local tradition,” the woman said. “Which one do you want?”
    “That one.” Alix pointed to a bottle of seven-year-old Flor de Caña.
    “No rotgut for you,” Izzy said as she put a bottle of champagne on the counter.
    Alix pulled her cell