On Sunday, Sept. 7, Linda Fairstein texted all her friends: “What did you do this weekend? We got married!”

Ms. Fairstein and Michael Goldberg had eloped at their home in Chilmark. The two have been friends for 45 years. They met during their first year at the University of Virginia Law School, where Ms. Fairstein was just one of a dozen women in a class of 340.

During her career, Ms. Fairstein was the head of the sex crimes unit for the Manhattan district attorney. She later became a best-selling crime novelist, but still does pro bono law work for victims of violence. She divides her time between Manhattan and Chilmark.

Ms. Fairstein was introduced to the Vineyard in 1985 by her late husband Justin Feldman, who died in 2011 at the age of 92. Mr. Goldberg had often visited the couple over the years, and in 2013 he and Ms. Fairstein began dating. Mr. Goldberg is a partner at Kelso and Company, a private equity firm. He proposed earlier this summer, but the couple kept it quiet. They visited the Chilmark town hall to see what was required and met Jennifer Christy the town clerk. When they found out Mrs. Christy is also a justice of the peace, they hatched a plan with her.

On Sept. 6, while vacationing on the Vineyard, the couple took some friends out on a dinner cruise aboard Mr. Goldberg’s boat, Twilight. The next morning they told everyone they had to go to an important meeting, on Sunday morning no less. Driving from the boat’s mooring in Vineyard Haven to their home in Chilmark, they stopped to buy a newspaper, and three white roses and three pink ones. Since there is no bridal shop on the Vineyard, Ms. Fairstein had purchased a mail-order veil, which she “has hardly taken off since.”

Mrs. Christy met the couple at their home, and with some musical accompaniment from an iPad, they were married. Later, there was a small celebration with the crew of the Twilight, with a cake from the Black Dog. Then it was off for a two-day honeymoon at sea, near the shores of Nantucket, where, alas, “the stripers were not any more plentiful than they had been on the Vineyard.”