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“Can we talk?” Izzy asked, still in sotto voce.

“Sure,” she said, forcing herself to be welcoming to the woman who she knew was about to stick a (hopefully metaphorical) knife in her back. She pulled out a chair for her guest. “Would you like tea?”

Izzy pulled the hat off, as if in relief, and her thick mane of hair tumbled down like a curtain. She whipped off the glasses and rubbed her eyes, which were, famously, a shade of pale green, almost like a cat’s. As she prepared mugs, Cam steeled herself, wishing Izzy would just get it over with. Couldn’t she just have delivered the bad news via Russell?

“This town is just darling!” Izzy enthused. “It’s like a storybook, the way it’s all done up for Christmas!”

Cam couldn’t tell if Izzy was being sincere. This was a woman who could snap her perfectly manicured fingers and have her private jet whisk her anywhere in the world. To her, Silver Cove would probably look pretty rinky-dink.

“Soooo,” Izzy wound up, “I need to ask you, like, a reallyreallyreally big favor.”

Cam felt her jaw drop in surprise. A favor? Izzy Jones, who held her fate—and therefore the fate of Birdie’s beloved home—in her hands, needed something from Cam? Something she couldn’t just demand?

Cam was suddenly doubly suspicious. “What kind of favor?” she asked.

“I kind of need someplace where I can lie low,” Izzy said. “Like, really, really low. So I thought I would come here and we could work on the cookbook.”

“You thought you would come here? To Silver Cove?” Cam asked, still not comprehending what was going on. Why couldn’t Izzy hole up at some five-star spa? And didn’t she have a place in the Hamptons? Surely that would be enough of an escape from whatever she needed to get away from? And the idea that Izzy could just show up and demand to work on the cookbook together? Cam had the fete to cater in a matter of days.

“But why here?” Cam finally managed to get out. “It’s the middle of nowhere.”

“Exactly!” Izzy said. “It’s perfect! There’s nowhere to go, so no one will even see me. I’ll be like a ghost—invisible!”

Cam shuddered. Great, she thought, another needy ghost. Exactly what she did not need at the moment.

“Okay,” Cam said. “And why is it that you need to do a disappearing act?”

Izzy examined her perfect nails with studied nonchalance. “It’s just a little PR thing,” she said. “I need to stay out of the public eye—and way away from the paparazzi—until it all blows over.”

“Hang on. Give me a sec,” Cam said. She hadn’t exactly been keeping up with celebrity news since arriving in Silver Cove, so she had missed whatever trouble Izzy had gotten herself into. She pulled her phone from her pocket and did a quick search. Headlines flashed up on her screen. The first one to catch her eye read, IZZY JONES CANCELED? LIFESTYLE GURU’S DIVA SIDE CAUGHT ON CAMERA.

Cam scrolled, quickly getting the gist. Izzy had apparently dressed down a member of the housekeeping staff at a posh resort in Antigua—not knowing that another staff member had been filming the incident. She had accused the woman of stealing a pair of sunglasses that were, as the housekeeper pointed out in the now-viral video, on her head. Izzy’s people had done as much damage control as they could. Izzy had publicly apologized to the woman. She put out a video in which she tearfully admitted to having had a few cocktails and asked her fans to forgive her for “not being my best self.” She had done talk-show interviews making fun of herself, calling it her “White Lotus moment.”

“You’re reading about it, right?” Izzy asked. “To be fair, that video did NOT show the whole thing. It wasn’t as bad as it looked.”

Cam met her eyes and gave her a raised-eyebrow stare, the kind that Birdie used to give her and Avery when she knew one of them (Avery usually) was fibbing.

“Okay, so it was kinda baaaad,” Izzy acknowledged, cringing. “And here’s the thing. My agent says if I don’t handle this right—like stay out of the tabs and keep away from any disgruntled service worker with a camera—I might lose the book deal. Which means no payout for you.”

Anger flashed hot on Cam’s cheeks. Izzy’s problem was suddenly very much her problem.

“Pretty, pretty please, just let me stay here for a few days,” Izzy pleaded.

“Why can’t you just go to your place in the Hamptons?” Cam spat. “Or, I don’t know, go stay with some friend at their villa on Lake Como?”

“I loaned the Hamptons house to my stylist for a photo shoot,” she said, her face turning suddenly, uncharacteristically sad. “And would it totally shock you if I told you I didn’t have a single friend that I trusted not to tip off TMZ?”

Cam resisted the urge to feel even a little bit sorry for the woman who was, apparently, attempting to bring another extra-large helping of drama into her life, which already had enough for an entire cast of Real Housewives. But she had to save the cookbook deal. Otherwise… well, she wouldn’t be able to pay Ian, and Birdie would have to sell the house. The thought gutted her.

“Okay, if you are dead set on staying here, I suppose I can find you a place nearby,” Cam said. “There’s a B and B just off Main Street and an inn a little ways outside of town.” Neither, she knew, was anything close to the ritzy accommodations Izzy was accustomed to. And she’d have to figure out how to fit Izzy and the cookbook into her crazy schedule. Cam felt like she had about five boiling pots firing away on a stove, and she was desperately trying to keep their lids on.

“I was thinking,” Izzy said hopefully, “that I might just crash here? I swear, you won’t even know I’m here.”

A few moments later, after failing to convince Izzy that staying at Birdie’s wasn’t the best idea, Cam knocked on Birdie’s bedroom door.

“Come in, dear,” her grandmother invited her.

Cam found Birdie folding laundry and tucking it away in her large mahogany dresser. She flopped onto Birdie’s quilt-covered bed, inhaling the familiar scent of laundry soap and old-fashioned talcum powder. She rarely spent time in Birdie’s room, and she noticed a framed photo of Birdie and Eddie on their boat still sat on the old Victorian marble-topped bedside table. Her grandmother probably still thought of him every night.