Opening
Sunlit beaches and curated lunches give way to ruptured facades. Across five charged chapters, secrets slip, old wounds open, and a single interview detonates decades of carefully managed narratives. The Five-Star Weekend stops pretending to be a vacation and becomes a reckoning.
What Happens
Chapter 26: Book in Hand, Feet in Sand
The beach day begins with a sting: Caroline Shaw-Madden receives a Venmo from her mother, Hollis Shaw, “paying” her for filming—proof she’s staff, not daughter. Remembering flying a drone with her ex, Isaac, Caroline launches the drone and surveys the scene from above: Tatum McKenzie sprawls defiantly in the sun; Brooke Kirtley hides in layers and shade; Gigi Ling looks impossibly polished. Brooke keeps sneaking glances at Gigi, and Caroline wonders if it’s a girl crush. When Dru-Ann Jones spots a seal, Hollis and Gigi stroll to the waterline, wave up at the drone, and keep walking.
On their walk, Hollis confesses she had breakfast with her first love, Jack Finigan, and paints their teenage romance like a movie. She asks why Gigi agreed to come. Gigi hints at a recent loss and, carelessly, says the man she was with “died,” around the time Matthew Madden died. Hollis freezes. Inside, Gigi panics—her slip risks exposing her affair with Matthew—then quickly backpedals, claiming she only wants to escape her past. Hollis misunderstands completely, believing she missed Gigi’s grief and has been self-absorbed. Caroline’s accusation that she’s a phony rings in her ears; she feels an instant, misguided kinship with Gigi.
The chapter widens. Dru-Ann, soothed by the ocean, swims with Gigi, who admits she googled Dru-Ann and affirms her instinct not to apologize for her controversial comments. Hollis lays out a lavish lunch that dazzles everyone. Brooke, wound tight with body anxiety, can’t enjoy a bite. When she asks Gigi how she stays so thin, Gigi says, “I savor every bite,” a sentence that lands like a verdict. Caroline, heading back to the house, finds Brooke’s husband, Charlie, drunk on the porch and demanding to see his wife.
Chapter 27: Calm and Present
In the quiet guesthouse, Dru-Ann turns over Gigi’s compliment—“calm and present”—and smirks at the irony. She checks the British Open leaderboard: her estranged client Phineas sits in third. A charge of pride flickers; she can’t help mentally drafting his press strategy. She finally turns on her phone, hoping for a text from her husband, Nick. Nothing.
Instead, a tidal wave of notifications crashes in. Her co-host, Marla, texts: People know she went shopping on Nantucket. On Instagram, the boutique woman “SexyBexxx” has posted a video of Dru-Ann trying on an expensive jacket, framing her as a hypocrite who dismissed a client’s mental health and then splurged. The video is viral. The top comment snarls, “Cancel this ghoul.” The peace of the island shatters. Outside, a commotion erupts—Charlie Kirtley is screaming at Brooke on the front porch. Dru-Ann’s protectiveness kicks in. She heads out.
Chapter 28: Pardon the Interruption I
Caroline and Hollis wake Brooke to deliver the mortifying news: Charlie is here. On the porch, Brooke faces him and slips into a brutal flashback—how she met him, how she settled, how she has defended his boorishness for years. Drunk and needy, he brags he booked a room at the Wauwinet to win her back. When she refuses, he turns vicious, jabbing at her insecurity and dragging in her fraught relationship with Electra Undergrove.
Feeling like the group’s “fifth wheel,” Brooke nearly agrees to go—until Dru-Ann strides over. She introduces herself, crushes his hand in a controlled handshake, and icily informs him he’s crashing an exclusive event and must leave. Brooke straightens, finds her backbone, and tells him to get out. As a cab takes him away, he flings insults—“Wiccans,” “cougar committee.” In the quiet after, Dru-Ann steadies Brooke, and a fragile new bond forms. Caroline, recognizing narrative gold, asks Tatum for an on-camera interview about her friendship with Hollis. Tatum says yes. Hollis’s stomach drops.
Chapter 29: Pardon the Interruption II
While the house buzzes, Hollis slips into the library and finds Gigi standing still, clutching a framed family photo. The dog, Henrietta, growls—sensing stress Hollis can’t yet name. Gigi has been searching for pictures of Matthew and discovered the annual portraits. She holds the most recent one, taken last summer, and wonders if Matthew was thinking of her when he smiled for it. Reality pierces: maybe their romance was one-sided.
The photo detonates a memory. Hollis revisits last summer, when her marriage is brittle and loud. Matthew resents the Bon Appétit shoot invading their final week on the island. On picture day, Matthew and Caroline vanish and return late; Hollis spirals and pastes on composure. The camera clicks, and the image hardens into a lie. Looking over Gigi’s shoulder now, Hollis sees not a happy family but a portrait of anger and contempt disguised as perfection. The frame in Gigi’s hands is a prop from a play that never existed.
Chapter 30: The Drop I
Caroline sets up her camera in the basement theater. What starts as “How did you and my mother become friends?” becomes confession. Tatum goes back to childhood—after Hollis’s mother died, Tatum’s mother raised them like sisters. She recalls a pregnancy scare in high school, when Hollis was her most trusted person.
Then, the fracture. Four friends—Tatum, Hollis, Kyle, and Jack—plan to attend UMass Amherst together. A teacher urges Hollis to apply to UNC; she gets a full scholarship and keeps it secret. On the day of the state championship softball game, Tatum finds Hollis crying. Hollis admits she’s chosen UNC. Feeling betrayed, Tatum sabotages the game—she deliberately drops the championship-winning catch. She tells Caroline this and says she’s carried the shame for thirty-five years.
Paths split. Hollis builds a new life, new best friend—Dru-Ann—stops returning to Nantucket summers. The final blow: Hollis’s engagement to Matthew, with both Tatum and Dru-Ann as co–maids of honor. Tatum nearly refuses to stand beside her; they smooth things over but never recover. It’s why Tatum has kept her distance for years. Spent from the admission, she ends the interview and walks out.
Character Development
The facades crack, and loyalties realign. Grief, envy, and shame step forward, forcing the women to choose between performance and truth.
- Hollis Shaw: Confronts the lie of her “perfect” marriage and realizes how little she has understood Tatum’s hurt. Her self-image as flawless hostess and loyal friend buckles.
- Gigi Ling: Nearly exposes her affair with Matthew and recognizes the asymmetry in their relationship. She juggles poise and panic on a narrowing tightrope.
- Tatum McKenzie: Drops a generations-old mask to confess the softball sabotage, revealing raw jealousy and abandonment that calcified into distance.
- Dru-Ann Jones: Public image implodes online while her private courage surges; she protects Brooke with clarity and force, revealing the friend behind the brand.
- Brooke Kirtley: Faces the reality of her marriage and the body shame consuming her. By refusing Charlie, she takes the first step toward agency.
- Caroline Shaw-Madden: Evolves from passive documentarian to catalyst; her camera becomes the instrument that excavates the weekend’s core wounds.
Themes & Symbols
These chapters press the past until it bleeds into the present, stripping away image to expose motive and wound. The truths that emerge destabilize every relationship on the island.
- Secrets, Deception, and Truth drive the action: Gigi’s near-confession, Hollis’s revised memory of her marriage, and Tatum’s long-buried sabotage. Caroline’s filmmaking is more than artifact; it’s a truth serum that pulls hidden stories to the surface.
- Friendship and Its Evolution shows how childhood bonds warp under ambition, geography, and jealousy. Tatum and Hollis never redefine their roles as their lives diverge, so resentment fills the space.
- Past vs. Present collapses into a single tense—Hollis’s photo and Tatum’s softball game aren’t memories so much as explanations for current estrangement.
- Authenticity vs. Public Persona haunts Hollis’s domestic theater and Dru-Ann’s media crisis. Both women lose control of their narratives—one by a frame on a wall, the other by a viral video.
Symbols sharpen these tensions:
- The drone: Caroline’s all-seeing lens captures the curated surface and the telling micro-gestures that betray it.
- The family photograph: A glamorized lie that Hollis now reads as a record of anger; it exposes the delta between image and reality.
- The dropped softball: A single choice made of hurt and jealousy that ricochets across decades, freezing a friendship in unresolved time.
Key Quotes
“I savor every bite.” Gigi’s elegance reframes eating as pleasure and control, underlining Brooke’s fraught relationship with food and worth. It’s not advice—it’s a mirror Brooke can’t bear.
“Cancel this ghoul.” The top comment on Dru-Ann’s viral video reduces a complicated woman to a meme. It shows how quickly public judgment flattens context and how merciless the internet can be.
“Calm and present.” Gigi’s description of Dru-Ann becomes an ironic refrain. Dru-Ann is anything but calm, yet she chooses presence when it matters—on the porch with Charlie.
“You’re crashing an exclusive party.” Dru-Ann turns hospitality into boundary. The line resets power on the porch, gives Brooke cover, and exposes Charlie’s entitlement.
“The picture is a lie.” Hollis’s realization reframes not only the photo but her marriage. A curated life turns into a prop closet; grief becomes more complicated—and more honest.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
The island is no longer a sanctuary. Charlie’s intrusion and Dru-Ann’s viral takedown puncture the bubble, proving the women can’t out-cater or out-swim their problems. More crucially, the past stops behaving—it interrupts meals, hijacks interviews, and rewrites memories. Tatum’s confession is the “drop” that reframes a lifetime of friendship; Hollis’s re-seeing of the family photo exposes her marriage’s rot. With facades stripped and allegiances shifting, the stage is set for showdowns that can finally move these women—from performance to truth.