It was originally going to be a three-person lunch meeting on a Saturday — and maybe Martha Nolan would be alive today if it had been. Nolan and her business partner, Dylan Grace, had been invited to discuss their start-up beachwear company by its only outside investor, Christopher Durnan.

A Long Island widower who’d made a fortune selling his insurance firm a few years earlier, Durnan had put $250,000 into Nolan and Grace’s nascent Hamptons-themed swimwear and sunglasses brand, East x East. Nolan, a 33-year-old Irish immigrant, was betting everything on this start-up and had pitched Durnan on a grand vision for the company: East x East would one day be sold on Revolve and in upscale department stores like Saks. “It’s a long-term game,” she liked to say. In the past three summers, East x

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