The only thing that would have made it better, she thought, was if Alex had been Italian.

Next time.

But for Zoe, the most important aspect of Italy was this: it was there that she discovered food. This happened in a tiny restaurant in Ravenna, where she and her parents had traveled to see the Basilica of San Francesco, the site of Dante’s funeral. One of Zoe’s father’s impossibly sophisticated friends had recommended a restaurant to them, a place with just fourteen seats, where the wife cooked and the husband waited on tables. Zoe ate squid ink ravioli stuffed with fresh ricotta in a truffled cream sauce, grilled langostini, and crema calda with wild strawberries. Her parents poured her wine on the implicit understanding that she was to drink it not to get drunk but to enhance the pleasure of the food.

God, yes! Zoe thought with each mouthful. Ecstasy! Better than the sex she had so recently been introduced to by Alex Last-name-unknown. The meal was transcendent. Her parents enjoyed it, but it wasn’t the epiphany for them that it was for their daughter. They had tasted food like this before. For Zoe, it was like the sun’s coming up. Before they left the restaurant, Zoe peered into the kitchen at the wife/chef. Her hair was in a tight bun like a ballerina’s; her eyes were narrowed in concentration as she flipped mushrooms in a sauté pan. Zoe could hear opera playing in the kitchen, and she saw that the woman’s lips were moving. Yes! Zoe thought. Yes!

Zoe’s parents had no qualms about sending her to the Culinary Institute. True, it wasn’t Vassar (where her mother had gone) or Penn (where Julia Lavelle was headed); around Miss Porter’s, it had the whiff of a vocational school. But her parents recognized Zoe’s passion for food, and to their minds, her becoming a chef was preferable to her joining a nudist colony or moving to Haight-Ashbury to volunteer for some left-wing cause they’d never even heard of.

The CIA had led Zoe not only to her career as a chef but also, of course, to Hobson senior, who had in short order made her a mother. She had endured some dark, dark times: Hobson’s death, the deaths of both her parents, the harrowing challenge of raising two children by herself. But at some point-when the kids were seven or eight-Zoe began to feel as if she had emerged from a tunnel. She thought, The hard stuff is behind me now. She thought, I have a good job, a house on the beach, a group of close friends to do fun things with, and two exceptional kids. She didn’t have love, but that seemed okay, maybe even preferable. The kids were her love life. And she maintained her freedom.

And so, how how how could she explain Jordan?

They had been friends for years and years, and yet now Zoe found it hard to recall a time when they were just friends.

She had spent her first years on Nantucket living in a bubble. She had taken the job with the Allencast family and enrolled the kids at Island Day Care. Zoe met a few other working parents while picking up and dropping off Penny and Hobby, but they were all of them so busy that their interactions remained superficial. Zoe frequently worked weekends, when she hired a babysitter. She always had Mondays off, but on Mondays the rest of the world worked; it wasn’t easy to forge a social life on Mondays alone. Zoe tried to get out. Her first year on-island, she attended Town Meeting and marveled at how everyone in the high school auditorium knew everyone else, friendships that clearly spanned centuries. This was one of those times when Zoe wished she’d moved to a less insular community, maybe a city, someplace with single mothers in abundance. But it was at this very Town Meeting that Zoe first laid eyes on Jordan Randolph. He was presenting an article, wearing suit pants and a crisp striped shirt and an elegant leather-banded watch-all of which screamed lawyer to Zoe, though she liked his curly black hair that grew past his collar, and also his rimless glasses. She asked the woman sitting next to her, “Who is that?” Zoe could still remember the look of wariness that came over the woman’s face. Zoe had revealed herself as an interloper, from Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps, or beyond.

“That’s Jordan Randolph,” the woman said. “The publisher of the newspaper.”

Ahhhh, Zoe thought. That’s Jordan Randolph. She had heard his name, of course. Mr. Allencast liked to complain about Jordan Randolph’s liberal politics, which had endeared Zoe to the mysterious Mr. Randolph before she ever saw him. She had been intrigued, even back then.

She didn’t actually meet Jordan until she enrolled the twins in preschool. The Children’s House was the only Montessori on the island, and it was difficult to get into. Rumor had it that people called the school from the delivery room of Nantucket Cottage Hospital and asked to have their newborns put on the waiting list. At first the twins weren’t admitted. Zoe was certain this was because she was a transplant and a single working mother, and because placing two children in the school was five times as hard as placing one. She was secretly crushed, but she resigned herself to keeping the twins in day care. They would survive. However, when Mrs. Allencast discovered that the twins hadn’t been admitted, she made a call-she and Mr. Allencast donated to the school annually-and sure enough, an invitation to enroll them soon followed.

At the Children’s House, the level of parent involvement was high. There were meetings and fund raisers and potluck dinners and slide shows and student presentations. There were five precious minutes every weekday morning when Zoe stood in the cramped coatroom while Penny and Hobby changed out of their street shoes and into slippers, then solemnly kissed her good-bye and disappeared down the stairs for songs and story time.

Zoe first saw Lynne Castle in that coatroom. Lynne was instantly friendly, offering her hand, introducing herself. She was the mother of Demeter, who was the same age as the twins, though Lynne was quick to add that she also had two older boys who had gone through the school a few years earlier, making her something of a fixture there. In fact, she was president of the Board of Directors, but she said she was always thrilled to meet young, new parents who might, somewhere down the line, take over leadership roles, because really, she confided, she was getting too old for this.

Zoe had laughed. Lynne was charming. She was a little older than Zoe herself, maybe as many as ten years older, with a stolid, matronly look about her. She had graying hair that she wore pushed behind her ears, carried about thirty unneeded pounds, and boasted a wardrobe straight out of the Orvis catalog, circa 1978. Zoe wondered what she had looked like to Lynne, with her zippy haircut, the ends newly dyed red, and her dramatic makeup and her houndstooth pants and her chef’s clogs. In hindsight, she supposed that she must have resembled a cross between Cyndi Lauper and Julia Child. But Lynne Castle seemed to like her anyway.

Zoe met Al Castle and Jordan Randolph the following February, when the school held what was known as Fathers’ Night. The twins had been talking about this occasion for weeks, and it bound Zoe’s stomach up in knots. She had hoped to give it a miss altogether, but the twins told her about the pictures they had drawn and the preparations they had made, and Zoe thought, All right, fine, I’ll go. She wasn’t sure the teachers would even let her through the door, though they knew her situation. There wasn’t one suitable man in Zoe’s life who could fill in. She thought briefly of asking Mr. Allencast to go, but the twins were terrified of him, and Zoe wasn’t all that sure that her employer, at age sixty-eight, would want to accompany her three-year-olds to this lofty event.

And so Zoe attended Fathers’ Night on her own. Her presence was alternately ignored and lauded. It made certain fathers uncomfortable, and to those men she wanted to say, “Listen, my husband is dead.” One father, a man Zoe now knew to be Lars Peashway, Anders’s father, had clapped her on the shoulder and said, “You’re very brave.” And Zoe thought, Brave? I’m not brave, mister. I’m just doing what has to be done.

The only fathers who didn’t treat Zoe like an oddity or a martyr were Al Castle and Jordan Randolph. Right off the bat, they included her. They told her that their kids, Demeter and Jake, talked incessantly about her twins.

“I think Jake is especially fond of Penny,” Jordan said.

“I think Demeter is especially fond of Hobby,” Al said.

The two men gave each other the wink-wink, and all three of them laughed. Zoe knew that Jordan was Jordan because she had attended Town Meeting, but she let him introduce himself.

“I’m Jordan Randolph.” He was wearing a sapphire-blue sweater and jeans and sneakers. The beautiful watch with the leather band. The rimless glasses. There was no reason, now, for Zoe to be anything but truthful about it: she had fallen in love with him way back then.

“You may know my wife?” he said. “Ava? She has the long braid? She’s Australian?”

“Yes, yes,” Zoe said. Of course, the most beautiful and best-dressed mother in the coatroom, the one with the cool accent whom Zoe had overheard talking about going to the U2 concert at Boston Garden-that was Jordan Randolph’s wife.

“Jake is our only child,” Jordan said. “But we’re hoping for another.”

“Well,” Zoe said, thinking, Dammit! “Good luck with that.”

Willing herself not to moon any further over Jordan, Zoe then turned her attention to Al Castle, who introduced himself and said, “You must know my wife, Lynne?”

“Ah, yes,” Zoe said. Al and Lynne were a perfect match in their upstanding, verging-on-middle-aged ordinariness. “I like Lynne very much.” This was true. Lynne was the only mother who consistently said hello to her and stopped to chat with her in the parking lot. Lynne knew that Zoe was a private chef for the Allencasts, and Zoe knew that Lynne was starting up a permitting business at home now that Demeter was in school all day.