After her attempted art gallery in Newport fails, Lucy Potter goes out to her parents’ home in Pettaquamscutt Neck for the third time. The first time Lucy comes home, it is after she drops out of college and moves out to California with her boyfriend, Phil. After two years, the couple splits, but Lucy travels for another year. After that, she goes back to Phil briefly, meets a man on a drive to New York, and then goes back east with him to her parents’ home. Lucy goes back to college and takes up painting. Not long after, she meets a British man named Jack and marries him. Jack soon becomes very possessive of Lucy, and constantly believes men are trying to seduce her. Eventually, he confesses that he is having an affair. They get divorced, and Lucy moves back with her parents. Soon after the divorce, Lucy begins an affair with Mr. Paxton, a neighbor renting a home for the summer with his wife. They meet on the beach, dig for clams, and flirt with each other. The affair leads Lucy to reflect on her relationships with Phil and Jack, and wonder what went wrong in either case. Lucy and Paxton take a rowboat out one morning. They swim back to shore and have sex. This marks the moment their relationship explicitly becomes an affair. Paxton’s family comes for the rest of the summer, and their relationship becomes even more secret. The two indicate they plan to have sex at the boathouse, which has become the primary location for their affair, by sticking pins in a beet-seed packet they leave by Lucy’s family’s garden. They have long conversations at night together, though when Paxton compliments Lucy during these talks, it makes her feel alone and uncomfortable with their situation. Paxton decides they should break off the affair, as he thinks they bring out the worst in each other. While Lucy doesn’t want to end it, she agrees. Still, she is embarrassed that he was the one to call off their relationship.