Okay, he said. Fine. You win. You win, Dabney! I’ll quit my job. I’ll come home.

No, she said. Absolutely not.

What? he said.

Do you think I want you to end up like my mother? If you come back to live here on Nantucket, you will have a small life, a lot smaller than the life you’re going to have overseas anyway. And you’ll hate me, and you’ll resent our child, and you’ll take off in the middle of the night and I’ll never see you again. She paused. No, she said. No way. I don’t want you to come home.

I won’t do that. You know I won’t do that.

What I know, Dabney said, is that you won’t be happy here, writing for the Nantucket Standard. You’re too talented. You’re the hundred-year genius, just like Mr. Kane used to say. You need to face the facts.

What facts? You’re pregnant with my child.

It isn’t going to work either way. It isn’t going to work!

I thought you said we were a perfect match, destined to end up together!

Well, I was wrong, Dabney said. I was terribly, horribly, awfully wrong. I have been right about everyone else, but wrong about us. There is only one solution, one way I’m going to survive, and that is if you let me go. Just please let me go.

I can’t let you go, he said. I love you!

Silence.

What? he said. I leave, and suddenly you don’t love me?

She said something too softly for him to hear. He imagined her words like raindrops falling somewhere into the South Pacific.

I didn’t catch that, he said.

Not suddenly, she said.

There was suggestive coughing from one of the Australians in line and Clen waved a desperate hand over his head, as if to say, I’m drowning here, buddy. Please let me try to save myself. This was the conversation of his life, he realized that. He also knew it might end up costing as much as the plane ticket he had just purchased.

Tell me you don’t love me, he said.

I don’t love you.

You’re lying, he said. You know it and I know it. You’re lying, Cupe.

You will find someone else, she said. And so will I.

As anyone who has ever been in love would know, those words blew him to bits, as though he had stepped on a land mine, or a booby trap set by guerrilla forces. It was the worst pain he had ever sustained. Worse than being hit by his drunk father, worse than waking up and finding his father dead at the kitchen table and then having to knock on his mother’s bedroom door and tell her the news.

Okay, he said. Fine. Cold turkey. Not another word. You understand that, Cupe? Not. Another. Word.

He was calling her bluff, or so he’d thought.

The only way I’m going to survive is with a clean break, she said. Please respect my wishes and let me, and this child, go. Please, please, do me the favor of never contacting me again.

Dabney.

Silence.

Dabney!

He would have thought she’d hung up but he could still hear her breathing.

Fine, he said.

Silence.

If that’s what you want, he said.

Silence.

We all make choices, he said.

He had always been smarter than everyone else, and he’d thought that might help him, but in this case it didn’t matter. Possibly, it made things worse. What he imagined as the finely calibrated gears of his mind were thrown practically into reverse, so that anything he tried to do-track down a source in Surat Thani, or kick-start his motorbike, or cook rice-ended up a disaster.

In May, he learned that Dabney had given birth to a baby girl and named her Agnes Bernadette, after her grandmother. He couldn’t count the number of times-when he was riding in the stinking hot third-class berth of a train, or slogging through rice paddies, or meandering through the markets looking for ripe mangoes but being offered teenaged girls-when the name had popped into his head like a chiming bell.

Agnes Bernadette.

He had heard from Agnes herself only once, shortly after her sixteenth birthday. Dabney had finally told Agnes about her true paternity and Agnes, unbeknownst to Dabney, had sent a letter to Clen in care of the New York Times. The letter had been forwarded to Clen, who at that time was living in Hanoi, in a good flat in the French Quarter. He had just won the Pulitzer and he had an offer for a book deal; for the one and only time in his life, he had been flush with cash, and there had finally been talk of transferring him to the Singapore desk, which had become his sole professional aspiration. Clen and his girlfriend, Mi Linh, drank a lot of champagne and ate dinner twice a week at the Hotel Metropole. They spent weekends at a resort in the cool hills of Sapa; Clen rented a junk and they sailed the emerald waters of Halong Bay.

Agnes’s letter had been straightforward: she now knew that Clendenin was her real father and she wanted to meet him; her mother, however, could never find out. Agnes was spending the summer in France. Could Clendenin meet her in France?

Clen had chewed on his answer for as long as he dared. The worst thing, he realized, would be not to respond at all. He wanted very much to buy a ticket to Paris and meet Agnes there. The whole idea of it was cinematic. He understood from the tone of her letter that Agnes didn’t need him to be a father; she had the economist for that. She did, however, require a connection. She was sixteen years old, on the verge of becoming a woman, trying to accrue self-awareness, and she wanted to fill in the missing link. Which was him.

What Clen couldn’t swallow was this meeting taking place without Dabney’s knowledge. He assumed that, seventeen years later, Dabney had made some sort of peace with his absence. She had married, she ran the Chamber of Commerce, and she had, he could only assume, a happy life. If he went behind her back and met Agnes in Paris and she found out about it-well, that wasn’t something Clendenin could risk.

Clen had written back to Agnes and tried to explain all this. The letter he’d sent had been ten pages long. It was an atonement of sorts, because that many years later he had come to understand that Dabney’s telling him she didn’t love him was the ultimate act of love. She hadn’t wanted him even to consider coming home because she knew he would be unhappy, unfulfilled. Not returning to your mother, and by circumstance, you, is the great shame of my life. I offer no excuse other than I was young and selfish, and I believed myself to be destined for great things. In the years since I’ve left Nantucket, I have seen sights both sublime and horrific, and I have tried to uncover truths and bring light and sense to this often misunderstood part of the world. But although I have never met you, I have always been aware that my greatest accomplishment is that I fathered a child. You.

Clen had both anticipated and dreaded a response. If he and Agnes started a secret correspondence, Dabney would be devastated as well. There was no good way for a relationship between them to proceed, and yet he wanted it to. He wanted it to.

But it was a moot point. Agnes never wrote back.

He couldn’t reel in a fish, or dig a grave, or change a tire. He couldn’t shuffle a deck of cards or deal a hand of poker. He would never be able to help Dabney fasten her pearls. This last thing bothered Clen more than he thought it might.

But he wasn’t disheartened, yet. He had the kiss, which redoubled his determination. He was going to keep trying. He was going to make Dabney take those words back, and admit that she had never meant them in the first place.

Couple #40: Tammy Block and Flynn Sheehan, married three years

Tammy: I am the match Dabney doesn’t like to talk about.

We’d all like our lives to be nice and neat. High school, college, marriage, kids, job, church, community, two-week vacations in Aruba or Tuscany-and then watch your kids, and then their kids, follow suit. Some people have lives like that, and some don’t.

I dropped out of Fairleigh Dickinson University (we all called it “Fairly Ridiculous”)-or, rather, I failed out-after three semesters. I just couldn’t handle the reading, it put me to sleep, plus I was drinking every night and smoking a lot of dope. I married a guy I met at a biker bar, a guy I barely knew. We drove to Atlantic City and got hitched, then we moved up to Rhode Island because my new husband was going to work as a fry cook for a buddy opening a fish restaurant. I got pregnant, had a son, then a year later, another son. My new husband left me for one of the waitresses at the fish restaurant and then those two ran off and I never saw a single support check.

I needed a way to make a living while being a full-time mom-at that point, I was qualified to be either a prostitute or work the register at the CITGO-and seeing that these were piss-poor options, I went for my real estate license.

I had a talent for selling houses, and my secret weapon was that which had served me well my whole life-apathy. You want the house? Great. You don’t want the house? Someone else will.

I landed on Nantucket ten years ago the way many people land here, I suppose-I came for a vacation and decided I never wanted to leave. I sold my Victorian on Prospect Street in Providence for three times what I paid for it, banked the profit, and rented a cute three-quarter house on School Street. (Three-quarter house meant two windows to the right of the front door and one window to the left. I was crazy for architectural terminology.)