Then, a rather lengthy wait, while a doctor read the scan. Everyone at the hospital was being solicitous. Rosemary, the nurse-practitioner in Imaging, treated Dabney like she was a minor celebrity.

She said, “This is all being expedited. We know you want to get home.”

Dabney supposed that Dr. Field had some influence here, or maybe Box did, via Dr. Christian Bartelby.

She ate a tuna fish sandwich in the cafeteria. She looked around at all the other people-some sick, some healthy, some hospital employees. There were so many people in the world, people she didn’t know and who didn’t know her. That was, perhaps, the scariest thing of all.

Dr. Chand Rohatgi was a handsome Indian man with kind eyes.

“There’s someone here with you?” he said.

“No,” she said. “I came alone.”

He nodded. His face was pained.

“Just tell me,” she whispered. “Please.”

“Not a great prognosis,” he said.

Cancer of the pancreas, which had metastasized, already, to her liver. The lungs would likely be next. It wasn’t resectable, and considering her level of pain, she wouldn’t be strong enough for chemotherapy, and there was no guarantee that chemo would do anything other than make her sicker. At this point, Dr. Rohatgi said, there was little they could do but hope the progression was slow. He could help her manage the pain.

She said, “How long…?”

“Difficult to say.”

“Will I live to see the lights on Main Street at Christmas Stroll? It’s my busiest weekend of the year.”

He looked puzzled. He wasn’t familiar with Christmas Stroll, he said, but if it was in December, there was a chance, maybe. Again, difficult to say.

A chance, maybe? she thought. Christmas Stroll was only four months away. Was he telling her then that she didn’t even have four months? She felt blindsided. Someone else should not be able to tell you you’re dying.

No wonder she felt like a shell. Her insides were being consumed by disease.

She said, “I’ve always been an intuitive person. I thought it was something else. I thought I was…lovesick.”

He said, “Yes, I can understand that. The symptoms are probably similar.”

Or perhaps Dr. Rohatgi didn’t say the symptoms are probably similar, perhaps he didn’t say a chance, maybe, perhaps he didn’t say metastasized, already, to the liver. Dabney walked out of the hospital in a state of extreme confusion, and the most confusing thing was this: she wasn’t thinking about Agnes, or Clen, or Box. She was thinking about her mother.

Dr. Donegal had asked her time and again, during the eight or nine years that she had gone to see him, to describe what had happened the night Dabney’s mother left. Time and again, Dabney had stared mutely at Dr. Donegal because she couldn’t remember.

Why, then, all these years later, with the onset of this…news…was the scene so crisp in Dabney’s mind? The suite at the Park Plaza, a ceramic vase holding ostrich feathers, the chandelier in the lobby that was as big and bright as a bonfire, the king-size bed that Dabney had been allowed to jump on for as long as it took her mother to put on her makeup, the front-row-center orchestra seats at The Nutcracker, her mother tapping out the rhythm of the music on Dabney’s hand during the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and Dabney agape at the beauty of the ballerina, her ability to float, twirl, fly. At the hotel afterward there were cheeseburgers from room service and, for Dabney, a hot fudge sundae. Her mother had been drinking red wine, which was what she drank at home, and it always turned her teeth blue, which Dabney found funny. Why blue and not red, Mama? It was quite late, Dabney remembered, pitch-black outside, and it had started to snow, and Dabney’s mother lifted her up to the window so she could see. Dabney was wearing her white flannel nightgown, she had spilled chocolate sauce down the front, which upset her, she grew weepy, she was tired. She brushed her teeth and climbed into the big bed and her mother sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed her hair from her face. Her mother was engulfed in green smoke, she might have been a bit drunk, her words were slurred, she said some things about Dabney’s father that Dabney didn’t understand, how he had come back from the war and vowed, Nantucket, always Nantucket, and her mother couldn’t do it anymore but her father wouldn’t live anywhere else. I’ll always love you, Dabney, you will always be my little girl, this is hard for me, so hard. Her mother’s perfume had smelled like a sugar plum, or so Dabney had thought that night. Her mother’s pearls had glowed even in the darkened room. She was right there on the edge of the bed, and then when Dabney woke up she was gone. May, the Irish chambermaid, was there.

Mama! Where’s my mama?

Your father is coming for you, my sweet.

Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

Mama!

Dabney climbed into a taxi. She was just able to tell the driver, “Logan Terminal C, please,” before the tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes. They were not tears about the news, because the news was incomprehensible. She cried all the way to the airport because her mother had left, and still, to this very day, Dabney missed her.

There was no rhyme or reason to her thoughts. It just wasn’t possible, it was too terrifying to comprehend. She was very sick. She would die. She would die? It was a door she would step through without knowing what was on the other side. Her grandmother, Agnes Bernadette, had believed in Heaven, fluffy clouds, angels, harps, peace, and that was what Dabney had grown up believing. But now that she was faced with the concrete reality, she thought, Angels? Harps?

Then she thought, Everyone dies, absolutely everyone, there is no escaping it, so the only reasonable option was to focus on the time she had left.

Dr. Rohatgi had urged her not to look too far ahead. Take things a moment at a time, he’d said. He had given her some literature, which she stuffed into her purse, and a prescription to ease her pain. She thought of Clen, Box, Agnes, Nina Mobley, Riley, Celerie, Vaughan Oglethorpe, Diana at the pharmacy who made her coffee, people she cherished, the people who made her who she was. She would tell no one. But was that feasible? She was holding in so many secrets now. How long would it be until she burst, like a dam?

Dabney’s life had been safe with her mother, and then not safe. Then safe again, and then when Clendenin left, not safe. Then safe for a long time, but now, not safe. Everyone’s life had moments of both. She liked to believe she was special because of what she’d survived, but this last thing she would not survive. Incomprehensible. The literature in her purse was supposed to help her grapple with being terminally ill, but who wrote such literature? And how did they know the best strategies for grappling? Nobody knew what happened next.

She was relieved when Nantucket came into view-historically preserved homes and lighthouses, ponds and moors, the blue-and-white ribbon where the ocean endlessly hit the shore. The only thing Dabney had wanted, all day long, was to be back home.

In the car driving home, she decided that she would wait until Monday to tell everyone the news. She thought of Dr. Rohatgi saying, Take things a moment at a time. She wanted to go to the Levinsons’ Backyard BBQ on Saturday night, she wanted to dance, she wanted to drink wine and laugh and have fun.

She wanted to have one last perfect summer weekend.

Box asked first, and then Agnes, then Nina, then Clen: How did it go at the hospital?

Dabney said, “I had a lot of tests. One thing I know for sure is that I do not have a wheat allergy.”

Dabney would someday be too sick to go to a party, but she wasn’t too sick yet, and so on Friday morning she signed out of the log, writing errands-but instead of going to see Clen, she went to Hepburn to buy a new dress. She selected a white Dolce Vita sundress with a racerback and fringe around the waist that would swing when she danced. Despite her fear and confusion, she decided that she would dance. This, after all, might be her last chance. She bought new white sandals to match the dress-flats, nothing fancy. Dabney loved the new sundress and the new sandals and she hung the dress on the door of the closet, where she could look at it. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she saw the dress glowing white; it looked like a ghost.

Would she haunt this house after she was gone?

She supposed anything was possible.

Box brought a glass of wine up to the bedroom as Dabney was getting ready for the party.

“Here you go, darling.” Box set the wineglass on her bureau. “A dressing drink.”

Dabney moved into an embrace with her husband and clung to him in a way that probably qualified as histrionics, but what did it matter now? Surprisingly, Box reciprocated. He said, “It’s nice just to hold you.”

Dabney squeezed her eyes shut. There was no pink with Box, there had never been pink with Box, but he was a good man.

He led her over to the bed, and she worried for a second that he had intentions, possibly he wanted to try to make love to her, an endeavor that would surely embarrass them both. But Box sat on the bed next to Dabney, with her hand in both of his.

He said, “I have a confession to make.”

“You do?” she said.

He said, “I have been dreadfully jealous of Clendenin Hughes. Since the minute I learned of his existence, really. But even more so now that he’s back on Nantucket.”

Dabney stared into her lap.

Box said, “I know your past relationship with him is complicated, possibly beyond my limited understanding. I’m sure you still have still some residual feelings for him, and although I don’t know what form those feelings take, I want to apologize, because there have been some anomalies in my behavior this summer that have to do with my jealousy of him.”