This might have seemed like a problem if she didn’t have bigger problems on her hands.

“Why?” Stuart said as he descended the stairs of the groomsmen’s house, looking like death on a stick. “Is she missing?”

“What is it this morning?” Ryan said. “Everyone is going missing.”

“Margot!” Ann Graham said. “I hope you’re hungry. We have eggs.”

“Negative on the eggs, Mom,” H.W. said. “I just finished the ones left in the pan.”

“If you’ll excuse me.” These words were spoken by Helen, Chance’s mother, who was responsible for this whole mess in the first place. Margot was tempted to call Helen out right there and then, but she didn’t really have time for a grand confrontation with all the Grahams watching. Helen edged past Margot out the front door, followed by a very tall man who was wearing a pair of embroidered whale shorts that he must have bought right out of the front window at Murray’s Toggery.

Margot took one step into the house. She watched Helen leave, thinking, Interloper!

Stuart ran his hands over his bad haircut. “Is she missing?” he asked again. He looked green-maybe alarm, maybe nerves, maybe hangover. The house was trashed; it looked like it had hosted an all-nighter with Jim Morrison, John Belushi, and the Hells Angels.

“She went for a bike ride,” Margot said. “And I need to find her. Roger has a pressing question.”

All true. She congratulated herself.

“She hasn’t been here,” Ryan said.

Chance pulled aside one of the truly horrendous brocade drapes and said, “Thank God my mother is gone.”

Now Ann Graham looked worried. “When was the last time you saw Jenna?”

“A little while ago,” Margot said. She didn’t want to disclose anything more. “I should go.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Stuart asked.

Margot regarded Stuart. He was pale and sick with love. If he came with her, this would become the story of Margot and the soon-to-be-jilted groom as they hunted down the runaway bride.

Margot said, “Come outside with me?”

Stuart followed Margot outside, and she could sense that Ann Graham was antsy to join them. Margot and Stuart stood in the overgrown crabgrass of the front yard. It was warm in the sun, and Margot worried momentarily about freckles, then told herself to forget it.

“Jenna was really upset last night,” Margot said. “She called Roger and canceled the wedding.”

Stuart dropped his head to his chest. “Fuck,” he whispered.

That was the first time Margot had ever heard the man swear. He was such a good guy. “She’s upset about Crissy.”

Stuart held out a hand. “Stop,” he said. “I can’t even stand to hear her name.”

“You probably should have told her about the engagement,” Margot said.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Stuart said. “It only lasted a month. As soon as Crissy booked the Angus Barn for the engagement party, I broke up with her. And two weeks later, I moved to New York. I was done with her-done done done.”

“It feels like a big deal to Jenna,” Margot said. “She’s… well, you know how she is.”

“Sensitive,” he said.

“Yes,” Margot said. “And in this case, she’s also jealous. She was raised differently from the rest of us. You know, Kevin and Nick and I were always fighting for our parents’ attention. Always jockeying for first place. But not Jenna. She had their undivided attention.”

“Are you saying she’s spoiled?” Stuart said. “She’s never seemed spoiled to me.”

“She’s not spoiled,” Margot said. “But she’s probably not as experienced with this kind of jealousy as another person might be.”

“I didn’t tell her because I didn’t want to tell her,” Stuart said. “I just didn’t want her to know. It meant nothing, it was a big fat mistake, and I wanted to pretend like it never happened.”

“She feels like you lied to her,” Margot said. “I understand it was a lie of omission-”

“I apologized fifty times, a hundred times. If she ever checks her phone again, she’ll see I called her seventeen times last night between the hours of midnight and five. I don’t know what else to do.” He put his face to his hands. “If she leaves me, I’ll die, Margot.”

“I have to go find her,” Margot said. “Let me talk to her.”

“I want to go with you,” Stuart said. “But I’m afraid I might mess it up even worse.”

“You might,” Margot said. She smiled to let him know she was kidding. “But I might, too.”

Margot drove out to Surfside, searching the road for Jenna. She turned down Nonantum Avenue and headed toward Fisherman’s Beach. From Rhonda’s cell phone, she called Jenna’s number. Jenna wouldn’t answer if it was Margot, or the number of the house, but would she answer if she saw a call coming in from Rhonda? Maybe.

But no. The call was shuttled right to voice mail.

Margot paused in the parking lot at Fisherman’s and walked to the landing at the top of the beach stairs. She scanned the coast to the left, then the coast to the right. No Jenna. There were only a couple of men, surfcasting at the waterline.

Margot remembered herself as a malcontented teenager, pacing this very beach with her Walkman playing “I Wanna Be Free,” by the Monkees, and “Against All Odds,” by Phil Collins. The beach was often shrouded in fog, which made it an even better place for soulful reflection for Margot and her adolescent woes: she hated her braces, her parents didn’t understand her, and she missed Grady McLean, who was back in Connecticut working the register at Stew Leonard’s.

Margot had also surfed this beach, too many times to count, with Drum Sr. He had been a bronzed surfing god back then, king of these waves. Margot had been awed by his grace and agility on the board. Of course she’d fallen in love with him! Every single person-man and woman, boy and girl-who had watched Drum surf had fallen in love with him. Margot had believed that the magic he demonstrated in the water, and on the ski slopes, would translate to real life. But as a landlubber, Drum Sr. had floundered. He had never been able to display the same kind of confidence or authority.

Maybe now, with his fish taco stand and Lily the Pilates instructor. Who knew.

But these were Margot’s ruminations, which she had to set aside. She needed to start thinking like Jenna.

Margot checked Rhonda’s phone for the time. It was nearly ten o’clock. She wondered what Roger looked like when he lost his cool. She had to move quickly.

As she turned away from the beach, she noticed someone waving at her. It was one of the surfcasters. Waving at her? Was there someone drowning offshore, or a shark? Margot squinted. The man was wearing a white visor.

It was Griff.

Not possible. But yes, of course. Of course Griff was fishing here. Had he mentioned fishing the night before? She couldn’t remember. Maybe he had, and now it would look like Margot was stalking him. Maybe this would become the story where Margot and the man who had kissed her like no other man before but whom she could never kiss again because of the awful way she had wronged him would hunt down the runaway bride.

Margot waved back, but the wave was halfhearted, despite the way her whole heart felt like it was dangling from the end of Griff’s line.

She hurried to her car.

Beth Carmichael had requested that her ashes be scattered in three places on Nantucket. And so, seven years earlier, Margot and her father and her siblings had taken the box of Beth’s remains to the locations she’d specified. The first place Margot and her family had scattered Beth’s ashes was the Brant Point Lighthouse. Brant Point was just a knuckle of land that jutted out into the harbor. The lighthouse was a white brick column with a black cap and a red beacon. It was prettiest at night or in the fog when the crimson light seemed to glow with warm promise. The lighthouse also charmed at Christmastime when the Coast Guard hung a giant evergreen wreath on it.

An old Nantucket legend said that when a visitor left the island on the ferry, she should toss two pennies overboard as the boat passed Brant Point Lighthouse. This would ensure the visitor would return one day. Beth Carmichael had been fanatical about the penny throwing. On the day that the Carmichaels departed each summer, Beth would herd all four kids to the top deck, where they would throw their pennies. Margot even remembered throwing pennies in rainstorms with punishing winds. When Margot, Kevin, and Nick were teenagers and refused to participate in the penny throwing, deeming it “lame,” Beth had taken Jenna up with her to throw the pennies. Jenna had believed in the penny throwing, just as she believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It was Nick who said, “You know it’s a bunch of baloney, right? Throw the penny, don’t throw the penny, you can still come back to Nantucket. It’s a free country.”

But their mother would not back down from this particular superstition. She could risk certain things, but she could not risk a life without Nantucket.

Now a part of her was here forever. As Margot walked to the lighthouse, she spied bike tracks in the sand, ones that her Nancy Drew instincts told her belonged to Jenna’s Schwinn. But when Margot reached the small beach in front of the lighthouse, the exact place they’d all stood when they’d scattered Beth’s ashes, it was deserted. There was gravelly sand, pebbles, the overturned shell of a horseshoe crab, and one of the most arresting views on the island: the sweeping harbor, sailboats, the shore of the first point of Coatue visible a few hundred yards away across sparkling blue water.

Breathtaking.

But no Jenna.

Margot got back in the car. She checked Rhonda’s phone in case Jenna had called. Nothing. It was 10:18.

Madaket was the settlement on the west coast of the island, the somewhat poor relation to Siasconset in the east. Sconset was fashionable and popular; it was home to the Sconset Market and the Sconset Café, it had the Summer House and Sankaty Head Golf Club, it had rose-covered cottages that had once been owned by the silent film stars of the 1920s.