The beach is fine.”

“You deserve better,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. Her eyes misted up. She touched his cheek. “You are better.”

You are better: She said things like this and rendered Josh speechless. You are better: He replayed the words over and over again in his mind, even after he took Melanie back to Number Eleven Shel Street, even after he returned to Shimmo to wash the sheets and wipe down the bathroom, even as he fel into bed at three o’clock in the morning. You are better.

The fol owing night, it was back to the beach.

“I almost got caught today,” Melanie said.

They were lying next to each other on an old blanket. (It was, in fact, the blanket that Vicki had given Josh to take to the beach with the kids.

Earlier, he’d had to shake it free of raisins and graham cracker crumbs.) They were on the very smal beach in Monomoy, hidden on the far side of two stacked wooden dinghies. To their left was tal marsh grass, which thrummed with the sound of bul frogs. The best thing about Monomoy was the view of town, which glittered in the distance like a real city. Monomoy was one of Josh’s favorite spots on the island, though compared to the night before, it was camping. Riches to rags, he thought.

Josh propped himself up on his elbows. Melanie wasn’t trying to scare him. It had become part of their ritual to detail the ways in which they had almost gotten caught. There were a hundred pitfal s. Josh himself had nearly blown their cover that morning by showing up at Number Eleven with Melanie’s watch in his pocket. She had left it on the bedside table in Shimmo the night before and he had meant to slip it to her or leave it, casual y, on the kitchen table, but the second he walked through the gate, Blaine grabbed him by the pocket and the watch fel onto the flagstone path.

Brenda was sitting on the step at the end of the path, but she was so intent on landing a pebble in the paper cup that she didn’t notice the watch.

Blaine noticed, however—it was impossible to get anything past that kid—because later, when Josh asked the family beside them at the beach for the time, Blaine scrunched his brow.

I thought you had Melanie’s watch, he said.

Right, Josh said, determined not to get flustered. I found it in the yard. But I gave it back to her.

Oh, Blaine said. He might have looked at Josh suspiciously for an extra beat, or that might have been Josh’s paranoid imagination.

“What happened today?” Josh asked Melanie now. He leaned over and kissed her neck. She smel ed like chocolate. Immediately after sex she had pul ed a bag of M&M’s from her pocket, and now she was letting them dissolve, one by one, on her tongue.

“I sat with Vicki after dinner,” Melanie said. “I read to her. And when I left, I told her I’d check on her when I got in.”

“And she said, ‘Get in? From where? Are you going out?’” Josh said.

“Exactly,” Melanie said. “So I told her I was planning on walking to the market to cal Peter from the pay phone.”

Josh stiffened. Peter? Cal Peter?

“That was a stupid excuse,” he said. “Because why wouldn’t you just cal Peter from the house?”

“There’s no long distance from the house,” Melanie said. “So to cal Peter I’d have to go to the market.”

“It was stil a stupid excuse,” Josh said. “Why would you want to cal Peter? He’s such an asshole.”

“Right,” Melanie said. “That was just what I told Vicki.”

“So you didn’t cal Peter?”

“God, no. Not tonight.”

“Another night? Did you cal him another night? Last night?”

“Last week,” Melanie said. “In the morning, I cal ed him. About a household thing.”

They were quiet. Josh heard the clanging of a buoy somewhere offshore. Normal y, he enjoyed Melanie’s too-close-for-comfort stories. It was thril ing, the secret of the two of them, the forbidden aspect of it. Josh’s senses were heightened, his desire doubled and tripled by the simple fact that they were flying under everyone’s radar. And yet now, with the mention of Peter, with the confession that she had spoken to him earlier in the week, he felt confused and jealous. He felt like he had been deceived. If she had talked to Peter earlier in the week, she should have told him. He might not have gone to al the trouble that last night entailed had he known Melanie was back in touch with Peter the creep, the lowlife, the philanderer. He might have skipped it and saved the ninety dol ars he’d had to pay Zach for the champagne.

Why the hel would Melanie be cal ing Peter? A household thing? Which meant what, the electric bil ? Josh didn’t get it. He wanted to ask Melanie to explain, he wanted her to clarify. But Josh was halted by the sensation that this relationship was becoming too important to him—and one of the deals he had made with himself was that this was fun, yes, and exciting, certainly, but it was also short-term. For the summer only. He and Melanie had real lives to live—Josh would return to Middlebury, Melanie would go back to Connecticut and have her baby. There wasn’t real y room for jealousy or hurt feelings, and yet Josh was dangerously close to suffering from both.

Melanie offered Josh the bag of M&M’s, but he pushed her hand away.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “Someone’s upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“It was nothing, Josh. One phone cal . I probably won’t cal him again this summer.”

“Go ahead and cal him,” Josh said. “He’s your husband.” He took a breath of pungent air. At that moment, Monomoy seemed like less of a haven and more of a swamp. “Let’s get out of here.”

Melanie eyed him for a second, and he thought she might protest, but Melanie wasn’t sil y or desperate like the other girls he knew. She folded the top of the M&M’s bag over neatly, stood up, and brushed herself off.

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They walked back to the Jeep in silence, with Josh thinking alternately that this whole thing was stupid, they should just end it now. Deep down, however, Josh knew he would never be able to end it, and why would he want to? Melanie wasn’t going back to Peter any time this summer, and summer was al he cared about so he should stop whining and enjoy himself.

Fine. That conclusion reached, he felt much better. At the Jeep, he opened Melanie’s door and kissed her as he helped her in.

Headlights swooped in on him so fast he didn’t know what they were at first. He felt caught, like a cartoon convict pegged by searchlights. He shouted at Melanie to get down, but she didn’t hear him or she heard him but didn’t listen because when he checked she was staring into the front of the big, black truck like she thought it might run them over. The engine gunned and the truck swerved into the spot next to the Jeep for just long enough that Josh could see who was driving; then the truck reversed and pul ed out, leaving behind the proverbial cloud of brown dust and a spray of sand that peppered Josh’s legs like buckshot.

Shit, Josh thought, and he said it over and again as he climbed into the Jeep next to Melanie. Shit, shit, shit. It might have been a coincidence, Josh thought. It wasn’t like parking in Monomoy was an original idea. But who was he kidding? Rob Patalka, Didi’s brother, was fol owing him, stalking him, or driving around the island at Didi’s insistence trying to hunt him down. Didi certainly wasn’t paying Rob, so what incentive did Rob have to do her bidding? Was it out of loyalty? Brotherly love? Josh didn’t want to think about it. Al he knew was that the thril and rush of almost getting caught had turned, like sour milk, into the reality of getting caught.

Melanie, not knowing this, looked amused. “Friend of yours?” she said.

“Not exactly,” he said.

A card came in the mail. It was from Dolores, the leader of Vicki’s cancer support group back in Connecticut. Alan, the member of the group with pancreatic cancer, had passed away the previous Monday. Vicki stared at the words “passed away” in Dolores’s spidery handwriting. Alan was fifty-seven years old, he’d been married for thirty-one of those years, he was the father of one son and two daughters; he had a grandchild, the son of his son, a baby named Brendan, who was the same age as Porter. Alan, either coincidental y or on purpose, always chose the seat next to Vicki in the support group circle; they held hands during the opening and closing prayer. This was al Vicki knew of the man, and yet as she read Dolores’s note (“passed away”) she felt cold and numb. Alan had kissed Vicki’s cheek before she left for Nantucket. She’d said, I’ll see you when I get back. And he’d said, You bet.

The support group had been Dr. Garcia’s idea. Vicki had attended half a dozen times—twice a week for the three weeks before she left for the summer. What she had learned, perhaps the only thing she had learned, was that cancer was a journey, a series of ups and downs, of good days and bad days, of progress and setbacks. Vicki yearned to be back in the circle so she could tel the story of her own journey and hear murmurs from people who understood.

The fever, which lasted five days, was like nothing Vicki had ever experienced. She was alternately burning up and freezing cold; she shook so violently in the bathtub that the water splashed over the sides. She wore a sweater to bed, she slept fitful y and had horrible nightmares—armed robbers in ski masks with guns in her bedroom, demanding that she hand over one of her boys. Choose one! How could she choose ? Take me!

she’d said. Take me! Yes, they would take her. They carried her out of the room by her arms and legs.