With the One Coin for Fee

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In a southern New England shore town where old money, memory, and modern development collide, Margaret Turner has bought a small house on the edge of the once-grand Lathrop property and built a life of hard-won independence. A mathematics teacher with a carefully maintained air of inherited dignity, she has spent nearly everything she owns to secure her future, knowing how easily older women can be dismissed, underpaid, and forgotten. Yet her solitude is shadowed by fatigue, class resentment, and the fear of becoming one of the discarded. That tension sharpens around Susan Lathrop Field, the beautiful, privileged woman whose fall from grace has become local gossip and public scandal. Margaret's old grievance against Susan is tangled with envy, pride, and the memory of a betrayal that shaped her life. As rumors circulate through servants, neighbors, and newspapers, Margaret is both appalled and fascinated, reliving childhood scenes, a defining act of kindness to an injured dog, and the painful realization that Susan's private life has become everyone's spectacle. Against a backdrop of broken piers, shuttered shops, and a fading waterfront, the novel traces the corrosive power of resentment, the ache of lost chances, and the stubborn dignity of survival.