Julie asked Samantha Bruce-Benjamin:

This question contains spoilers… (view spoiler)

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[Dear Julie, thank you so much for your kind words. I am thrilled to learn that you enjoyed the book so much that you read it twice. That truly is a wonderful compliment for any author to be paid. Thank you, too, for your very insightful question.

SPOILER ALERT: PLEASE DO NOT READ ON IF YOU DO NO WISH TO KNOW THE ENDING:

In the scene to which you refer with Annabelle, who is one of my favorite characters and was named after the exquisite, white Annabelle hydrangeas that bloom in the Hamptons during the summer, I envisaged Kit as the Angel of Death. This is why he manifests for Annabelle and her family, as in less than two minutes, all of them will tragically die when the hurricane makes landfall and the great tidal surge envelops the party. The same holds true for many of the other living characters, in that the ‘ghosts,’ appear just at the moment of death; for example, Venetia Dryden The Little Maid, May Cook, and Helen Fitzgerald.

Yet, when Kit first meets Annablle, he functions as a messenger and an emissary, leading Annabelle to Paradise, a thought which occurs to her as she’s dying and remembers the young man who showed her the way to La Doucette. I also imagined Kit as something of a soul mate for Annabelle, although they are not destined to be together. As Kit has never aged, he is close in age to Annabelle, so underlying their exchange I did conceive that Annabelle may have liked him, which is why she chooses to remember him as she’s dying. I’m so glad you picked up on this scene as it is one of my favorites in the book.

As to the end of the novel, yes I always knew what the ‘twist’ of the book would be. When I conceived of the idea of writing a novel about a society hostess over the course of five minutes, which was inspired by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I understood that I had to evolve the premise to make it in some way original, or run the risk of simply re-hashing Woolf’s inspired novel. When I realized that the last party at The Westhampton Leisure Hour and Supper Club would be no ordinary party, not simply because of the impending hurricane, but also because of the nature of the ‘celebration,’ the entire novel crystallized and all of the characters at the party – with their individual hopes and aspirations – were born. This infused the story with a fatalism that I wanted to mine as they all moved irrevocably toward their respective destinies.
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