Chapter Four Summary and Analysis
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
Summary
This chapter shifts fully into Sasha's perspective and explains how she came to be a Stockton. The chapter opens with a contrast: the Stockton family loves to retell stories of their youthful mischief—Cord getting lost drunk in Paris on a school trip, Georgiana sneaking out at the family's Florida club—and Sasha laughs along but never shares stories of her own. Her family's escapades are of a different order entirely.
Sasha grew up in a small beach town outside Providence, where her cousins were notorious for drunkenly stealing Boston Whalers, doing cocaine on houseboats, crashing Newport weddings, and driving recklessly. They avoided serious legal trouble largely because Sasha's uncle was the police chief. Where the Stocktons' misbehavior reads as charming, Sasha knows her family's antics read as trashy.
The chapter recounts the disaster of Sasha's engagement party, where her older brother Nate was thrown out of the Explorer's Club for trying to feed a stuffed polar bear a leg of lamb. Before the wedding, Sasha made her father deliver a stern lecture to the family, reminding them that their uncle was not the chief of the New York City Police. The lecture was met with merriment, and the cousins proceeded to behave badly at the reception anyway, dismantling a floral arrangement to drink champagne from a giant vase.
Despite all this, Sasha loved her wedding. It was held at the Down Town Association, a private club on Pine Street founded by J. P. Morgan as an all-men's club for bankers. The chapter describes the club's old-fashioned glamour—sky-blue ceilings, dark wooden railings, a walk-in cigar humidor, and a marble barbershop in the men's room where a scene from the film Inside Man was shot. Cord and Sasha fed each other cake, her mother danced with Cord, and Malcolm and Darley loosened up for once, with Malcolm putting his tie around his forehead.
Because Cord's family paid for the wedding, Sasha insisted on paying for the honeymoon. She found a deal on a resort in Turks and Caicos where every suite had a hot tub overlooking the ocean. She worried Cord would be put off by the resort's cookie-cutter feel, but he was happily planning activities. The chapter highlights their different vacation styles: Sasha wanted to lie on the beach and do nothing, while Cord wanted constant activity—chartering a boat to Middle Caicos, hiring a helicopter pilot, and visiting a famous conch fritter restaurant.
On the last full day, Sasha finally got her wish to just lie on the beach while Cord snorkeled. That evening, they stopped at several hotel pools and ended up in a warm-water Jacuzzi surrounded by bougainvillea, where they met a newlywed couple from Boston. They invited the couple back to their suite for champagne. Cord popped the bottles with a saber trick, and the evening turned awkward when the Boston husband removed his wife's bikini top. Cord handled it with diplomatic grace, mentioning dinner reservations, providing the wife with a bathrobe, and ushering the couple out. Alone, Sasha and Cord laughed and agreed to tell friends they'd survived the honeymoon with their vows intact.
The chapter then pivots to Sasha's past. She reflects that Cord loves her but doesn't need her, and that restraint is exactly what she wants after the heartache of her first love. She fell in love in high school with Jake Mullin, a boy from a troubled home. Mullin was barely looked after—he never wore a jacket, ate free lunch, and lived in a peeling green house across from the wharf. He had remarkable artistic talent, drawing realistic birds and leaves in class only to crumple them up and throw them away.
They got together the summer before junior year at a hidden reservoir, where a group of kids swam, drank beer, and jumped off a stone tower. Their first kiss happened while treading water. After that they were inseparable. Sasha's brothers and cousins loved Mullin, who had a landscaping job and a Boston Whaler he'd take them out on. Mullin was generous despite having less, always insisting on paying and bringing gifts for Sasha's mother.
When Sasha got into Cooper Union in New York—the best art school in the country, famous for having no tuition—Mullin celebrated with her but hadn't applied anywhere else. He would stay in Rhode Island, living at home and commuting to the University of Rhode Island. As her move approached, Mullin became increasingly jealous and irritable. He accused her of flirting with a French class coworker at a movie theater, screamed at her, and slammed his hand against the glove compartment. She forgave him.
When he visited her freshman fall, a guy on her hall dropped by and Mullin freaked out, punching the wall in her bathroom and breaking a tile. He left, then called her obsessively. He went to her family's house and talked to her younger brother Olly, who called Sasha sobbing. Her family sided with Mullin, saying he had a messed-up home life and just loved her.
Sasha broke up with him, but he wouldn't accept it. He mailed gifts, sent flowers, and bought her a diamond promise ring she knew he couldn't afford. She loved him despite everything and knew she was all he had. They spent the winter fighting and making up. When Mullin hit a guy for talking to Sasha at a party, she was caught in the scuffle and brought before the Cooper Union disciplinary committee. Mullin was barred from campus, and that was the final straw. She ended it for good.
Her family couldn't forgive her. They continued to see Mullin, went out on his boat, and made a point of telling her about their plans with him when she came home for holidays. When she brought home a new boyfriend two years later, her family gave him the cold shoulder and called him