“Now for the real question,” Bayer says. “Why are you drinking all alone in the middle of the day?”

“Two reasons,” Mallory says. “One is I have houseguests. My best friend from growing up and her lover, also a woman, who is famous. I can’t tell you who she is…” Mallory pauses and studies Bayer more closely. Does he look like a person who reads? He has intelligent-seeming brown eyes and he’s wearing a polo shirt and a Breitling watch with a blue face (expensive, she knows). “Do you read?”

“Mostly nonfiction,” Bayer says. “And biographies. My favorite book of all time is October 1964 by David Halberstam.”

Mallory mentally adds this book to her list, then chastises herself for being suggestible. “Anyway, my friend Leland and her girlfriend had a fight, a loud fight, during which they said insulting things about me and I overheard them.”

“Ouch,” Bayer says. “What were the insulting things?”

“Not important,” Mallory says.

Bayer tips his glass. “To me, you’re flawless.”

“Because you just met me,” Mallory says. “I haven’t had a chance to disappoint you yet.”

“Amen,” Bayer says. “What’s the other reason?”

Mallory is still coherent enough to stop and ask herself just how honest she wants to be with her new-friend-but-maybe-serial-killer Bayer. “My ex-boyfriend is getting married today.”

“That,” Bayer says, “is quite the double whammy.”

“Tell me about it,” Mallory says.

Bayer suggests food for both of them, says he’s buying, she should get whatever she wants, and she confesses that she used to work at the Summer House and she knows the best thing on the menu is the bacon cheeseburger. She’ll take hers medium rare with extra pickles and she’d like her fries seasoned and crispy.

“I love a woman who knows how to order,” Bayer says. “I’ll have the same.”

“Now you talk and I’ll listen,” Mallory says. “Why are you drinking all alone at the Summer House pool today?”

Bayer just arrived on Nantucket on Wednesday, he says. He sailed in, he’s living on his boat, and he’s rented the slip for the entire summer, though he’s not sure how long he’ll stay. He has a larger boat in Newport—that one has a crew—but he needs time away from them and them from him so he set off on his own for a while.

The Hokey Pokeys have done their job; Mallory has no inhibitions. “What do you do for a living?” she asks. “You sound rich.”

Bayer throws his head back and howls with laughter, and it’s this laugh—and not the fact that Bayer Burkhart owns two sailboats, one with a crew—that makes Mallory see him differently. While laughing, Bayer becomes instantly desirable, even sexy.

“I invented a bar-code scanner,” he says. “The one used in most retail stores across the country.”

“Oh,” Mallory says. She grapples with this a minute. He’s not a lawyer or a doctor or an investment banker. He’s an inventor. He invented a bar-code scanner. “How old are you?”

This makes him laugh again and he says, “How old do you think I am?”

Mallory fears the answer is forty or maybe even forty-five, which would be too old. Mallory can date someone ten years older, maybe. “Thirty-seven?” she asks hopefully.

“Bingo!” he says.

They eat and have more drinks, though how many more, Mallory can’t say. At some point, however, she realizes she is too drunk to bike home. Bayer says no problem, he’ll call her a taxi that will deliver her and her bike safely back to her cottage. This is very kind, but Mallory won’t deny that she’s disappointed.

“Don’t you want to invite me to see your sailboat?” she says.

“If you’re too drunk to bike home, then you’re too drunk to see my sailboat,” Bayer says. “I’m not like that.”

Mallory frowns and Bayer lifts her chin with one finger. “I will take your number, though, if you’re willing to give it to me.”

Mallory arrives back at the cottage around sunset. The Blazer is gone; Leland and Fifi are out. Mallory gets herself a glass of ice water and passes out facedown on her bed. She feels like she’s forgotten something. The oven? No. The iron? No. Well, if she can’t think of it, then it must not be that important.

When Mallory wakes up the next morning, she has a headache and her heart feels like one of the mermaid purses she finds washed up onshore, brittle and empty.

She instantly remembers the thing she had forgotten the night before: Jake is married to Ursula.

Mallory, meanwhile, is single and the reasons why have been cataloged by her very best friend in the world: She is neither interesting nor original. She’s suggestible, a follower. She’s “nice,” like a jelly jar filled with daisies or a pony that trots in a circle.

Jake is married to Ursula.

Through the walls, Mallory hears a woman’s voice moaning in ecstasy.

No, Mallory thinks, this is not happening.

The phone rings. Mallory checks her clock radio. It’s early but not that early—eight thirty. Maybe this is Cooper calling to tell her that Jake left Ursula at the altar.

“Hello?” Mallory says. Her voice sounds like pea gravel in a blender.

“Mallory, it’s Bayer. Feel like a sail?”

How bizarre, how bizarre—Leland and Fifi’s disastrous visit leads Mallory right into a romance with Bayer Burkhart.

Bayer takes Mallory sailing that first Sunday and she falls in love—not with Bayer but with life on the water. His sailboat is a seventy-foot racer-cruiser called Dee Dee. Mallory asks if Dee Dee is an ex-girlfriend, the one who got away, and he says no, he named the boat after Dee Dee Ramone. Does Mallory approve? She answers in the affirmative, even though she knows only three songs by the Ramones. Dee Dee has a finely appointed cabin. There’s a galley kitchen with an espresso machine, a sitting area with satellite TV, a round dining table, a master suite in the bow with a low, wide bed and a head that has a hot shower, and a second, smaller suite that Bayer uses as an office. All of the doors are heavily varnished and have hook-and-eye closures so they don’t fly open in rough seas.

They sail every day the wind is good—to Tuckernuck and then farther on to tiny Muskeget. They sail past Martha’s Vineyard to Cuttyhunk. They sail around Monomoy up to Chatham.

For the first few trips, Mallory lies on the foredeck in her bikini, reading, but after a while she starts to take note of what Bayer is doing—when he trims the headsail and lets out the mainsail, how he tacks, how he handles the ropes. She loves the focus on Bayer’s face when he’s sailing. He seems interested only in getting them from one place to another in this most ancient and storied of ways.

When they’re lying in the low, wide bed looking out the open hatch above them at the towering mast and the stars, Bayer is very, very interested in Mallory’s body. He’s such a skilled lover that she finds herself counting the hours until night falls, when Dee Dee is secure in its slip and they make it rock.