Every time she thought to get up and leave, she found a reason to stay.

She said, “I can’t believe I’m going to miss Business After Hours. I haven’t missed a Business After Hours in fourteen years.”

He said, “I’ll order pizza and french fries and wings.”

She said, “I can’t have pizza. I’ve given up wheat.”

He said, “That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard.”

He was right. Whatever was wrong with her, it wasn’t a wheat allergy.

He said, “You’re too thin.”

She said, “I’m down to 106, which is what I weighed in eighth grade.”

He said, “Jeez, Cupe.”

She thought, Lovesick. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel any guilt yet, but when the guilt kicked in, she feared, she would disappear. Box was in London. He stayed in a suite at the Connaught, and his daily life included a chauffeured Bentley that transported him back and forth between the hotel and the School of Economics, and to dinner at Gordon Ramsay and Nobu. His landscape was Big Ben, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the National Gallery, Covent Garden, the London Bridge, and the Thames. Dabney could say the names of these places and things, but she had no concept of what his life there was like, just as he had no clue what her life was now like.

When he returned, she would have to tell him.

They ate dinner in bed, and Dabney drank a beer, something she hadn’t done since the summer of 1987. She groaned and grunted with delight as she ate, she pulled strings of cheese from the pizza with her fingers and dangled them into her mouth. She sucked the sauce off the chicken bones, she dragged piping hot fries through ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard, then back again. She would never have eaten like that in front of Box, but with Clen she was perfectly at ease.

It was for this reason, she supposed, that she said, “I’m worried about Agnes.”

The name Agnes, although spoken casually, sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Dabney immediately stiffened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“No, no,” Clen said. “Please. Please tell me. What is it?”

“She’s engaged,” Dabney said.

Clen coughed. “Agnes is getting married?”

“Yes,” Dabney said. Her voice was barely a whisper-the late, dark hour and the fraught topic seemed to require it. “To a man named CJ Pippin. He’s a sports agent in New York.”

Clen said, “And Agnes and this CJ person who is a sports agent in New York…are they a perfect match?”

“No.”

“Really?” Clen seemed felt suddenly alert, intrigued. “And you’re allowing it, Cupe?”

Dabney laughed. “Allowing it? That question shows just how little you know about having children.”

“You’re right,” he said. “What I know about children I could write on my thumbnail and still have room for the Lord’s Prayer.”

“I have to go,” Dabney said. The pain of their shared past, over a quarter century gone, was exquisite.

She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him goodbye. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a day like today,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Dabney?”

“What?”

“I want to meet her,” he said.

“Who?” she said. And then, “No.”

“Dabney.”

“No.”

She turned and walked to her car, shaking her head.

All the way home, she thought, Agnes, Agnes, Agnes.

And you’re allowing it, Cupe?

A few days later, Dabney overheard Agnes on the phone with CJ. Dabney didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but once she was within earshot, she couldn’t move away.

Agnes said, “I don’t see what your problem is with staying here…my mother likes you…yes, she does…you have to let that go, CJ…no, I am not coming to New York…it’s summertime, I belong here…I don’t want to, CJ…yes, baby, of course I love you…I could say the same to you…okay, baby, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I said!” Tears. “CJ, please, I’m sorry!”

And you’re allowing it, Cupe?

No, she was not allowing it. It was time to step in.

Dabney’s first thought was Dave Patterson, who ran the Island Adventures program. He was scruffy, outdoorsy, and entrepreneurial. He had built Island Adventures up from a camp for ten kids to the sought-after program it was now, serving two hundred kids, and he had bought his own real estate and had built his own facility, including a fifty-foot rock-climbing wall. But Dave lived on Nantucket year-round-he, like Dabney, would never leave (another reason she liked him)-and as much as it pained her to say it, she didn’t envision Agnes living year-round on the island.

Dabney had another idea for Agnes, and that was Riley Alsopp.

Was Dabney troubled by the fact that Riley had done the obvious and asked Celerie Truman out on a date?

Not really. Dabney had heard about the date in excruciating detail from Celerie, who had appeared at the Chamber office half an hour early just so she could talk to Dabney about it. Never mind that Dabney was Celerie’s boss, never mind that Dabney was Riley’s boss, never mind that Dabney, as director, might not love the idea of her two information assistants-who had to work next to each other all summer-dating. Celerie seemed eager, frantic even, to tell Dabney the whole story.

What had happened was this: Riley had planned on taking Celerie to Great Point for the afternoon, but Great Point had been closed due to nesting piping plovers, so Riley had suggested Smith’s Point-same idea, a remote spit of sand, but on the other side of the island. Celerie had been game-heck yeah, she had never been to Smith’s Point or Great Point. One of the failings of her first summer was not having befriended anyone with a 4WD vehicle; all of Celerie’s friends drove Mini Coopers, so she had gone exclusively to Surfside. On the way from Great Point to Smith’s Point, Riley’s Jeep ran out of gas. The Jeep was older, the gauge unreliable. They were close to Cisco Brewers, so they decided to spend the afternoon there, drinking beer and listening to live music in the sun.

All good, right? Wrong! Celerie drank too much too quickly and didn’t eat anything. It seemed the only food served at the brewery was from a hot-dog cart, and Celerie, as her name suggested, was a vegetarian. She had a Sheila’s Favorite from Something Natural back in the Jeep, but by the time she thought of it, it had been sitting in the sun for hours and would be poisonous. Riley suggested calling a cab, or asking his father to pick them up-but Celerie, being drunk, insisted on one thing and one thing only and that was drinking more. She began to act like a real ass-hat (her word). She approached the lead singer of the band and suggested that he let Riley sing. The lead singer had no interest in relinquishing his microphone to Riley, but Celerie persisted in harassing him. Riley told the lead singer not to worry, he didn’t want to sing. Celerie started to cry, insisting that Riley really did want to sing, and then, seconds later, she began to throw up. She was so sick that she monopolized the brewery’s main bathroom for two hours. Riley waited for her just outside the door, continuously asking could he help, could he call a taxi, could he call her roommate?

When she finally did emerge, Riley had his Jeep waiting. His father had come with a gas can. Riley drove Celerie home and walked her to her door. By that point, it was dark and her roommate was out at the Chicken Box. Celerie made it inside to the living room, where she passed out facedown on the rag rug.

It was, she informed Dabney, the most embarrassing experience of her life, short of what had happened to her during sophomore year, which was too mortifying to relay, even now.

Celerie also said that Riley had called the next day to check on her, and that when Celerie launched into her serial apology, “I’m sorry, so sorry, so sorry!” he said, “Please don’t worry about it, happens to the best of us, my fault for forgetting the sandwiches, maybe we can try it again sometime.”

Celerie had looked imploringly at Dabney and said, “Do you think he’ll ask me out again?”

Dabney realized then that she was being asked her opinion as a matchmaker. I must be sick, she thought. Her radar for such manipulation was failing.

She smiled at Celerie. “One never knows.”

But of course Dabney did know: Riley was just being polite. He had been well raised. Riley needed someone a few years older; Celerie was scarcely twenty-two.

Riley needed Agnes.

But perhaps not as badly as Agnes needed Riley.

And while she was working on Agnes, why not Nina as well?

Dabney had tried to interfere in Nina’s love life once before, when she told Nina not to marry George Mobley. Nina hadn’t listened and Dabney hadn’t blamed her; Dabney had waited too long to speak up and the relationship had too much momentum to stop. It had been like a boulder rolling down a hill. Nina had been left with a mountain of debt on one side of the seesaw, and five bright, talented kids on the other. In the seven years since Nina’s divorce, she had not gone on a single date. She told Dabney she was too tired, too busy, and too disenchanted.

The name that kept presenting for Nina was Jack Copper. Dabney was stuck back in the conversation where she told Nina about Clen’s return, and Nina had confessed to nearly hooking up with Jack. Jack Copper was single, he had always been single, and he was wiry, perpetually sunburned, craggy, salty. He had a South Boston accent that drove people like Box nuts, but that Dabney happened to adore. Arararar, wicked pissah, I gotta stop smokin’, arararar, kinda tough when you live at the bah. Jack Copper ran a fishing charter off his forty-two-foot Whaler; he always caught fish, which attracted a lot of fancy clients. He drank beer at the Anglers’ Club, he shot darts at the Chicken Box, he drove a Chevy pickup truck. He always talked to Dabney about her Impala, and he, too, dreamed of a Corvette Stingray split-window with matching numbers in Bermuda blue. Jack Copper wasn’t a bad choice. Dabney might not have come up with his name on her own, but she was intrigued that Nina regretted passing him up.