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“You were right,” I said to Dabney. “I never should have married him.”

“You have the kids,” Dabney said.

I hid my face in my hands.

It was amazing to me that I could know someone my whole life, I could live with him for nine years, sleep next to him in bed every night, give birth to five of his progeny, hold his hand during the Lord’s Prayer at Mass, high-five him when our eldest son got his first base hit, believe every word that came out of his mouth-including the made-up reasons for his trips off-island every Sunday-and still not know him at all. The only thing being married to George Mobley had taught me was that other people are a mystery. And the people who lie and keep secrets are always the people you’d least expect.

Dabney

She lasted three days without giving in.

Box returned to Harvard for the end of his semester: he had exams, graduation, then the class reunions, including his own fortieth.

Dabney lied to Ted Field, and to Box, and to Nina, telling them she felt better. She did not feel better. She felt worse. She was exhausted, she had no appetite, and she had pains all through her middle-shooting pains as well as a general ache. But this wasn’t something antibiotics could cure. She had been infected by Clen’s return.

Dabney couldn’t stop thinking about him: Clen wearing Chuck Taylors like a teenager, Clen riding his bike like a teenager, Clen with one arm. I have suffered a pretty serious loss…

Dabney had loved Clendenin Hughes since she was fourteen years old, when he told their English teacher, Mr. Kane, that Flannery O’Connor wrote like an angry, lonely woman. Dabney could picture Clen in his jeans and his flannel shirt and his ratty Chuck Taylors, his hair too long, the inflamed pimples on his temple, his knee constantly jogging up and down because his body held energy that could not be contained. He had been on the island for only a couple of weeks at the time of his parry with Mr. Kane. Mr. Kane had said to Clen, And how do you know what an angry, lonely woman sounds like? And Clen had said, I live with one. The rest of the class laughed, but his answer had struck Dabney as painfully honest. Then and there, she decided she was his.

Dabney had been matchmaking since the ninth grade, but what nobody knew was that the first couple she had set up was herself, with Clen. On the day he spoke out in Mr. Kane’s English class, Dabney’s field of vision had turned pink. She had thought there was something wrong with her, possibly a migraine, but as days passed, she realized that the pink appeared only when she was in Clen’s presence-and so it became clear that the pink meant she had fallen madly and forever in love. The second time she saw this pink it was surrounding Ginger O’Brien as Ginger watched Phil Bruschelli play basketball in the high school gym. Ginger and Phil had been married for twenty-nine years. All the couples Dabney had set up had been bathed in luscious pink and all were still together-perfect matches, forty-two of them.

How had she been wrong about Clen?

Did the magic of it not apply to her own self, perhaps?

It had started out well. Dabney had pursued Clen’s friendship; she initiated conversations, first about books and then later about more personal things. In December of that year, a surprise early snowfall came to Nantucket, and Dabney invited Clen to go tobogganing. He had kissed her at the top of the hill at Dead Horse Valley, and that was that. They had been together for nine years before Clen left for Thailand-all through high school, through four years of long-distance while Dabney was at Harvard and Clen at Yale, and then back together on Nantucket for a year, both of them living with their respective parents, Dabney managing a T-shirt shop in town, Clen writing for the Nantucket Standard.

That final year had been difficult. Dabney finally felt safe and content, home and at peace on her island, but Clen had been restless and angry, still the boy whose energy could not be contained.

Had Dabney thought their relationship would last? She hadn’t been able to imagine the alternative.

But it had not lasted, no, not at all. Clen had left for Thailand, and there had followed twenty-seven years of silence. And yet something had lasted because Dabney couldn’t stop thinking about the man. It was absurd! Dabney was furious with herself. No one else could control her. She would not go to Clen today, or tomorrow. She would not go to him, ever. But certainly he knew where she lived? Everyone on Nantucket knew that Dabney Kimball Beech lived in the fish lots, on Charter Street. He could look her up in the phone book; she was plainly listed. Furthermore, he could come walking into the Chamber whenever he pleased.

It was for this reason, or so she told herself, that Dabney left work on the third afternoon and drove out the Polpis Road. She would see Clen, say hello and goodbye, and leave. If she bumped into him on the street, it would be awkward, but at least the initial contact would be out of the way.

However, as she approached the mailbox marked 432, she hit the gas rather than the brake, and sped right past. She kept going-past Sesachacha Pond, past Sankaty Head Golf Course, through the village of Sconset, until she was back on the Milestone Road heading west. The top was down on the Impala and she howled into the open sky. She felt like she had won some kind of game or contest. Clendenin Hughes wanted to see her! But she would not go!

She tossed and turned that night with the knowledge that Clendenin Hughes was on the island, in his bed. She knew he was thinking of her.

She got up several times to peer out the window to see if he was standing in the street in front of her house. He had never seen her Impala. When he’d left, three cars ago, she was still driving the Nova.

So many years had passed. She knew from reading about him when he won the Pulitzer that he had never married or had other children.

She thought about taking a sleeping pill. Box had some in the medicine cabinet left over from his knee replacement, but instead Dabney lay wide-eyed in bed. She was too antsy to read-even Jane Austen wouldn’t soothe her-and she had no appetite. She felt the velvet dark of four o’clock change into the birdsong hour of five o’clock, which slid into the first pearly light of six o’clock. She went downstairs and made coffee. She put on clothes for her power walk-her gray yoga pants and a crimson T-shirt emblazoned with a white H. (Box kept her outfitted like a faculty wife, though she had been to campus only twice since she’d graduated.) She slipped on her headband, drank her coffee standing up, and tied her sneakers. She set out onto the streets of Nantucket an hour earlier than normal, which wasn’t like her, but that stood to reason as she was not feeling at all herself.

She arrived back at the house at quarter past seven, energized. She ate a piece of whole grain toast with blueberry jam and half a banana. Tomorrow, she would eat the other half of the banana over her shredded wheat. Everything was fine, normal.

It was only in the shower that she started to cry. The weight of the sleepless night and the enormous burden of the situation poured over her. She got out of the shower, threw on her yoga pants and a T-shirt, and, with her hair still wet, she climbed into her car.

He was sitting on the porch of the cottage in a granny rocker, smoking a cigarette, with a gun across his lap like a character in a John Wayne Western. His beard made him look like a hermit, or a serial killer.