“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Mallory said. “Yes, yes, of course I’d be willing. Oh my, thank you so much. Seven thirty. Okay, I’ll see you Tuesday.” She hung up and said, “The English teacher at the high school is at Mass General in Boston getting some tests done and he won’t be in for the first week of school, so they’ve asked me to cover for him.”

The relief Jake felt made him light-headed. “That’s great!” he said. “That’s what you wanted, right?”

“I wanted someone to retire,” Mallory said. “I didn’t want anyone to get sick.”

Jake gathered Mallory up and kissed the top of her head. He was happy for her, but he didn’t want to think about Tuesday.

“It’s Sunday night,” she said. “When my aunt was alive, that meant Chinese food and an old movie on TV.”

They ordered from a place called Chin’s—egg rolls, wonton soup, spare ribs, moo shu pork, fried rice, Singapore noodles, beef with broccoli.

“And dumplings!” Mallory cried into the phone. “Two orders! One steamed and one fried.”

It was too much food, but that was part of the fun. Whenever Jake and Ursula ordered Chinese, Ursula ate only plain white rice and she refused to eat fortune cookies; she wouldn’t even read the fortunes. The fortune cookie, she claimed, was a cheap gimmick that diminished the complexity of Chinese culture.

Jake watched Mallory dip one of her golden-brown dumplings into soy sauce, then deliver it deftly to her mouth with her chopsticks. She loaded a pancake with moo shu pork until it was dripping and messy and took a lusty bite. Jake was so stunned by the vision of a woman enjoying her food rather than battling it that he wondered if he might be falling in love with her.

Mallory handed Jake a fortune cookie. He was about to inform her that the purpose of the fortune cookie was to dupe a gullible public and distort the wise sayings of Confucius, but before he could share Ursula’s skepticism, Mallory said, “Whatever it says, you have to add the words ‘between the sheets’ to the end.”

Jake laughed. “Are you serious?”

“My house, my rules,” Mallory said.

Jake played along. “‘A fresh start will put you on your way’”—he paused—“between the sheets.”

Mallory gazed at him. Her eyes were green tonight. “Damn. Was I right or what?”

“Read yours,” he said, handing her a cookie.

“‘Be careful or you could fall for some tricks today,’” she said, “between the sheets!”

He gathered up both fortunes. He would take them home, he decided. Along with his sand dollar. Things to remember her by.

They turned on the TV and found a movie that was just starting: Same Time, Next Year with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. It was about a couple who meet at a seaside hotel in 1951 and decide to return together on the same weekend every year, even though they’re both married to other people.

“Now, that is something we could do,” Mallory said. She was lying between Jake’s legs on the couch, her head resting on his chest. “You could come back to Nantucket every Labor Day, no matter what happens. We could do all the stuff we did this weekend. Make it a tradition.”

A year? he thought. He had to wait an entire year?

On Monday, pregnant, pewter-colored clouds hung on the horizon, and when Jake stepped onto the porch, there was a chill in the air. It felt like an ending—not only of the weekend and the summer, but something bigger.

Jake made omelets while Mallory pulled a Joyce Carol Oates novel off the shelf that she wanted him to read.

“One thing I like about you,” she said, “is that you’re secure enough in your masculinity to read female novelists. Who are, in case you’re wondering, superior to male novelists.” She winked. “Between the sheets.”

She was keeping things light, which made sense. She was excited about her substitute-teaching opportunity, and she got to stay here, in her beachfront cottage on Nantucket. The cottage had grown on Jake nearly as much as Mallory’s company. The wood paneling made it feel like the cabin of a boat and Jake liked that the cottage smelled like summer—a little salty, a little marshy, a little damp. He loved the single deep blue hydrangea blossom in the mason jar on the harvest table; he loved the table itself, how unusually long and narrow it was. He loved the wall of swollen paperback books and he loved the sound of crashing waves in the background. He imagined being back in Washington with the traffic and the sirens and thought of how his heart would ache when he thought about the sound of the ocean.

The end of summer was the saddest time of year.

Jake gave Mallory a long, deep kiss goodbye. “I’m happy the dog chased the cat that chased the rat.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m happy it ended up being just you and me this weekend. And I’m coming back next year. Same time next year.”

“No matter what?” Mallory said.

“No matter what,” Jake said, and it did make leaving a little bit easier.

It isn’t until the invitation to Cooper’s wedding arrives in the mail—on expensive ivory stock, printed in a script so fancy, it’s nearly unreadable—that Jake realizes he won’t have to wait a year to see Mallory.

But there’s a complication that our boy had not foreseen. He and Ursula have decided to give their relationship one last try.

“If we break up again,” Ursula says, “we break up for good.”

Jake thought they already had broken up for good. In their last breakup, the one that took place before Jake left for Nantucket, they had been point-of-no-return honest. Ursula admitted that she valued her career above everything else. It was more important than her health (she’d lost twelve pounds since starting at the SEC and now looked severely malnourished—passing supermodel stage, heading for famine victim), more important than her family (her parents were back in South Bend; her father was an esteemed professor at the university, her mother a housewife, Ursula rarely visited them and she discouraged them from visiting her because it would require sightseeing trips to the Air and Space Museum and the National Archives), more important than her faith (at Notre Dame, Ursula had been vice president of the campus ministry, but now she didn’t go to Mass, not even on Christmas Eve or Easter. There simply wasn’t time). Finally, she said, her career was more important to her than Jake was.

“Really?” he said.

“Yes, really,” she said, leaving no room for interpretation.

Jake had wanted to say something back that was equally cruel—but what?

Jake had met Ursula in sixth grade at Jefferson Middle School. He knew her from his “smart kid” classes—pre-algebra, Spanish, accelerated English—and also because she was friends with his twin sister, Jessica. Ursula was the only one of Jess’s friends who remained steadfast once Jess’s health started to decline. When Jessica’s blood-oxygen level was too low for her to go to school, Ursula swung by with Jessica’s homework assignments, and she didn’t just drop and run, the way any other twelve-year-old would have. Ursula used to sit in Jess’s room, undeterred by the fact that Jess was hooked up to an oxygen tank, unfazed by the terrible coughing fits or the thick, gray mucus that Jess used to spit into a purple kidney-shaped basin, unbothered by their mother, Liz McCloud, who had taken a sabbatical from Rush Hospital in Chicago, where she was a gynecologist, so that she could care for Jess herself.