“Amazing!” Aunt Valerie said.
But Yoko didn’t smile along with the others. She continued to look at Lily with a quiet intensity. “Tell me,” she said finally, when the silence stretched thin, “how do you know who to pair with whom? What I mean is, why do you think certain people end up together, and why do you think certain people end up apart?”
Lily wasn’t accustomed to having people question her methodology. Her heart banged in her chest. “It’s certainly not scientific,” she said finally.
“Try to explain it, if you can,” Yoko said.
“Okay.” Lily wet her lips and searched for an answer she thought Yoko would like, even if it wasn’t an answer that echoed the whole truth. “I think plenty of people don’t know what they want. They can write a list of all the attributes they want in a person, their interests, what they look like, and so on. But if the chemistry isn’t there, they’re doomed before they even begin.”
“So it’s an aura thing?” Aunt Valerie asked.
“I think it’s something you can feel, yes,” Lily said, snapping her fingers. “An aura. Something almost spiritual. A connection that doesn’t have a language.”
Yoko leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “I see,” she said. She’d never looked at Lily this way, as though she’d discovered something on her face she’d never seen before. “That’s strangely beautiful,” she said.
“But imperfect,” Lily said. “I’m often wrong at first. I have to get to know my clients. I have to talk to them and sense who they are and how they might grow.”
“And you felt this connection with my son?” Yoko asked.
Lily felt a spike of anger that she swallowed away. “Yes! Very much so,” she said.
“And she’s the master,” Grandma Esme said, teasing her.
“Right? It must be easy to date when you’re a matchmaker,” Aunt Bethany said.
Lily laughed along with her family, grateful that the tension had dissipated. But when she glanced back at Yoko, she saw a woman burdened with something Lily couldn’t name. Did it have something to do with Lily and Liam’s relationship? Or was Yoko perhaps asking because her own husband, Kendall, was so often gone?
Chapter Nine
Two weeks later, Lily still hadn’t picked out a wedding dress, nor booked a venue, nor considered what food she wanted to serve to her undetermined guests. October winds fluttered through orange, yellow, and red leaves, and the sea turned the color of a nickel. Walking up and down her mother’s beach, she was in the thick of work, calling her matchmaking clients from New York City to Los Angeles to the ones right here on Nantucket Island, checking up on their most recent dates and asking if they’d discovered “the one” yet. Their hearts beat in time to the tempo she set. It was up to Lily to find the perfect one.
She recognized that their love was a perfect distraction from her own, but she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Maybe, with Liam gone, it was a sort of blessing.
For Mick Hamilton, things in the dating world had gotten off to a bumpy start. The week after he’d hired her, he’d gone on a date with a woman in her mid-twenties who’d moved to Nantucket to start an East Coast fashion brand. Lily paired them together because they were both driven, independent, and eager to do their own thing with their art. What Lily hadn’t reckoned for was the fact that the fashion lady never, ever laughed.When Lily first met her and decided to pair her with Mick, the fashion lady smiled nervously, asked several questions, and agreed to the pairing. It had felt standard and formal; there had been no bubbling intensity that suggested Lily and the fashion lady should be friends or keep in contact, which was fine. But just because Lily hadn’t clicked with the fashion lady, she hadn’t been able to imagine someone not clicking with Mick. Apparently, the date had been so bad that Mick had ducked out immediately after dinner, saying his stomach hurt. The fashion woman had called Lily two hours later to tell her how much she didn’t like Mick.
It was odd. Lily had never missed a pairing so terribly before. She called Mick to tell him about his next match, a sailor lady with gorgeous red hair, a golden doodle, and a trust fund. “She’s hilarious,” she promised, remembering her first conversation with the goddess with more money than she could fathom. “She laughs and laughs and cracks jokes and laughs. You’ll have a great time.”
“Maybe that’s too much laughing. I don’t want to get carried away. What if she never stops?” Mick teased her. “By the way, where are you? You sound like you’re in a wind tunnel.”
It was true that the winds off the ocean had picked up. Lily hurried off the beach and ducked under the cover of her mother’s veranda, where she pulled a big, itchy blanket over her. “Sorry,” she said. “I was walking up and down the beach, making phone calls.”
“Sounds frantic,” Mick said.
“I like to be on my feet when I talk to clients,” she said. “It helps me think.”
“Did you also stand up for all your dates with your fiancé?” Mick asked.
“Yep. I had to prove myself,” Lily joked.
“I’ll try that next time. Every woman loves a man who towers over the dinner table, right?”
“It makes digesting really easy,” Lily quipped.
“Who is this fiancé, anyway?” Mick asked. ”Is he on the island? I have almost no male friends, and it would be nice to get a beer with someone from time to time. Talk about guy things. Whatever those guy things are.”
Lily imagined Mick and Liam sitting at a bar together and wrinkled her nose. What could they possibly talk about? A part of her worried Liam wouldn’t like Mick; another part of her worried that Mick would think Liam was basic, just another successful, rich boy with an acting contract.
“He’s out in LA right now. He’ll be back in a couple of months.”
