Dabney Kimball was the most popular girl in the school because she was genuinely kind to everyone. She was kind to Jeffrey Jackson, who had a port-wine stain on his face; she was kind to Henry Granger, who started wearing wingtips and carrying a briefcase in second grade. She included everyone in planning events like Homecoming floats and December Delight. She had grown up an only child raised by her father, Lieutenant Kimball, who was a police officer. Her mother was…well, no one knew exactly what had happened to her mother. A couple of different stories had circulated, as gossip does, but all we knew for sure was that Dabney no longer had a mother, which made us love her even more.

Dabney was also smarter than everyone else at Nantucket High School, except for Clendenin Hughes, who was what our English teacher, Mr. Kane, called a “hundred-year genius.” Dabney was probably a ninety-nine-year genius.

Freshman year, Dabney and I were fledglings on the yearbook committee. The committee was mostly upperclassmen-it was, actually, all upperclassmen, except for the two of us. Dabney felt that, despite our lowly status, freshmen should be represented just like the other three classes, and that no one was going to look out for us if we didn’t look out for ourselves. So that winter, Dabney and I hung out a lot. We would go to yearbook meetings every Tuesday and Thursday after school, and when we were finished, we would watch the boys’ varsity basketball team.

I had a huge, horrible crush on Phil Bruschelli. Phil was a sophomore, and in the varsity games he mostly sat on the bench. If the team was ahead by more than twenty points, Phil would go in for a few minutes. One such time when this happened, I grabbed Dabney’s arm in excitement.

I’ll never forget the look on her face. It was what I’ll now call amused recognition. She said, “You like him. You like Phil.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. Because even though Dabney and I were practically best friends, my crush on Phil wasn’t a secret I was willing to share.

“Yes,” she said. “You do. I can see it. You’re all…pink.”

“Of course I’m pink,” I said. “It’s a hundred degrees in here and I’m Irish.”

“Not your face, silly,” Dabney said. “Your, I don’t know, your aura is rosy.”

“My aura?” I said. “Rosy?”

After the game, Dabney insisted that I wait with her in the hallway outside the boys’ locker room. Her father was coming to pick her up, she said.

“Why aren’t you walking?” I asked. Dabney lived right across the street from the school.

“Just wait with me,” Dabney said. And then she pushed my hair back off my shoulders and flipped up the collar of my IZOD shirt. She was so close to me I could have counted her freckles.

I said, “How come you don’t have a boyfriend? You’re so pretty and everyone likes you.”

She said, “I do have a boyfriend. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

I wanted to ask her whom she meant, but at that instant Phil Bruschelli walked out of the locker room, all six foot three of him. His dark hair was still damp from the shower and he was wearing a dark-brown shearling jacket. I nearly fainted away, he was so cute.

Dabney stepped into his path. “Hey there, Phil.”

Phil stopped. “Hey, Dabney.”

Dabney said, “Nice that you got a little playing time today. Varsity game, you must be psyched.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. Coach says I have to pay my dues. Wait until next year.”

Dabney pulled me close to her side. “You know Ginger, right, Phil? Ginger O’Brien? We’re doing yearbook together.”

Phil smiled at me. My vision blurred. I teetered. Smile! I thought. Smile back! But it felt like I was going to cry instead.

Phil said, “You serve at church, right? You’re an altar girl?”

I felt flames of embarrassment licking my cheeks. Rosy indeed. I nodded, and then made a chirping noise like a sparrow. Who wanted to be recognized as an altar girl? And yet, I was an altar girl, and I had been since I was ten years old. It wasn’t exactly a secret.

Phil said, “My mother makes me go to Mass once a month, and I see you there whenever I go.”

“I’m not surprised you noticed Ginger,” Dabney said. “She’s gorgeous.” With that, Dabney hooked her arm around my neck and kissed my scorching-hot cheek. “See ya, gotta go! My dad is here!”

She bounded out the door to the back parking lot, but her father wasn’t waiting. Lieutenant Kimball drove a squad car, which I would have noticed. There were no cars waiting. Dabney was walking home, abandoning me at a time when I needed her to prop me up. I decided I would never forgive her.

But then Phil asked if I liked basketball and I said yes, and he asked if I wanted to come watch him play for the JV team the following afternoon, and I said sure. He said he would have a lot more playing time in that game, and I said, Okay, great. And he said, Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, don’t forget me! And I felt like a flock of birds had startled in my chest.

Phil and I have been married for twenty-nine years and we have four beautiful sons, the youngest of whom plays power forward for Villanova University.

Rosy indeed.

Dabney left the Chamber office at four-thirty as usual. All preparations for Daffodil Weekend were in place; Dabney could have organized it in her sleep-thank goodness-because her afternoon had been consumed with rereading Clen’s e-mail and then obsessing about it.

I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slow recovering from it.

What kind of loss? Dabney wondered. Had he lost a good friend, a lover? Dabney had lost her father from a heart attack a decade earlier, and her beloved chocolate Lab, Henry, had died at the age of seventeen, just before Christmas. But neither of these losses compared with the loss of Clendenin.

Not a day has gone by-honestly, Cupe, not an hour-when I have not thought of you.

She would be lying if she said that she had not thought of him, too. The love of her life, her perfect match, her Meant to Be. The father of her child. How it had pained her to break off contact. But years and years later, Dabney was stunned by the wisdom and maturity of her decision.

The only way I am going to survive is with a clean break. Please respect my wishes and let me, and this child, go. Please, Clendenin Tabor Hughes, do me the favor of never contacting me again.

He had been so, so angry. He had called Dabney in the middle of the night, and over the staticky, time-delayed phone line, they had screamed at each other for the first time in their relationship, often stepping on each other’s words until Clen ended the call by saying, We all make choices, and slamming down the phone. But he had let her do things her way. He had not contacted her.

IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION: I could not stay, and you could not go.

That was about the size of it.

Despite this, Dabney had thought Clendenin might appear at the hospital when she gave birth. She had thought he might materialize in the back of the church on the afternoon she married Box and, just like in the movies, interrupt the priest at the critical moment. She had thought he might attend Agnes’s first piano recital, or show up at Dabney’s fortieth birthday party, at the Whaling Museum. She had thought he might come back to the island when his mother, Helen, died-but Helen Hughes had been cremated and there was no service.

Dabney had always thought he might come back.

If all goes well, I should be back on Nantucket tomorrow morning.

Dabney walked home from work, wishing it were a weekday so that she would have the house to herself, time and space to think. Dabney’s husband, John Boxmiller Beech-Box, to his familiars-held an endowed chair in economics at Harvard and spent four nights a week in Cambridge, teaching. Box was fourteen years older than Dabney, sixty-two now, his hair gone completely white. He was a brilliant scholar, he was witty at dinner parties, he had nurtured Dabney’s intellect and saved her in a million ways. Not least of all, he had saved her from the memories of Clendenin Hughes decades earlier. Box had adopted Agnes when Agnes was only three years old. He had been awkward with her at first-he had never wanted children of his own-but as Agnes grew, Box enjoyed teaching her how to play chess and quizzing her about European capital cities. He groomed her to go to Harvard and was disappointed when she chose Dartmouth instead, but he was the one who had driven back and forth to Hanover-sometimes through ferocious snowstorms-because Dabney wouldn’t leave the island unless her life depended on it.

Tomorrow morning. It was Friday, which meant that Box was at their house on Charter Street. He would be Dabney’s escort all through the festivities of Daffodil Weekend, although he was slower now after his knee replacement, and he had a hard time with the name of anyone he hadn’t known for twenty years. Box would be working, and therefore distracted, but if Dabney knocked on the door of his study, he would set down his pen and turn down the Mozart and he would listen as Dabney spoke the words he had surely been dreading for more than twenty years.

I’ve had an e-mail from Clendenin Hughes. He’s coming back to Nantucket for an indefinite period of time. He’s arriving tomorrow morning.

What would Box say? Dabney couldn’t imagine. She had been honest with Box since the day she’d met him, but she decided, while walking home, that she wouldn’t tell him about Clen. She revised history so that she had deleted the e-mail without reading it, and then she deleted it from her deleted file, which meant it was gone, so gone that it was as if it had never existed in the first place.

Couple #8: Albert Maku and Corrine Dubois, married twenty-two years