Fray, obviously, Mallory thinks, and she rolls her eyes. And Jake McCloud, the mysterious Jake McCloud, Cooper’s big brother in his fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta—Fiji—whom Mallory has never actually met. She’s had some intriguing phone conversations with him, however.

“Oh yeah?” she says.

“And I was thinking maybe I could do it there on Nantucket over Labor Day weekend?” He pauses. “If you don’t mind three guys crashing on the sofa…or the floor…wherever.”

“I have two spare bedrooms,” Mallory says.

“You do?” Cooper says. “So it’s, like, a real house? I always got the impression it was more like, I don’t know, a shack?”

“It’s not a house-house but it’s better than a shack,” Mallory says. “You’ll see when you get here.”

“So it’s okay, then?” Cooper says. “Labor Day weekend?”

“Sure,” she says. Labor Day weekend, she thinks, is when Leland said she might come, but those plans are tentative at best. “Mi casa es su casa.”

“Thanks, Mal!” Cooper says. He sounds excited and grateful, and after she hangs up, Mallory runs her hands over the worn-smooth boards of the deck and thinks about how good it feels to finally have something worth sharing.

On the day this conversation takes place, our girl is so tan that her skin looks like polished wood, and her mousy-brown hair is getting lighter. From certain angles, it looks nearly blond. She has lost eight pounds—that’s a guesstimate; the cottage doesn’t have a bathroom scale—but she is definitely more fit thanks to the fact that her only form of transportation is a ten-speed bike that she found listed in the classifieds of the Inquirer and Mirror.

Aunt Greta’s cottage is now Mallory’s cottage. Greta’s attorney, Eileen Beers, takes care of transferring the deed and changing the name on the tax bill and insurance. Signed, sealed, delivered. But something nags at Mallory, a question she wasn’t brave enough to ask Senior but she does ask Eileen.

“Shouldn’t the cottage rightly go to Ruthie? They were”—she isn’t going to use the word housemates, but a more suitable term eludes her. Girlfriends? Lovers?—“partners.”

“Ruthie got the Cambridge house,” Eileen says. “She prefers city life. And your aunt was very clear that she wanted you to have the Nantucket cottage. When she wrote the will, she said it was a magical place for you.”

Magical.

Mallory used to visit Nantucket during the summers when she was in grade school and then middle school—right up until Uncle Bo died. She’d felt awkward the first summer, she remembers, because Aunt Greta and Uncle Bo didn’t have children and, according to Mallory’s mother, wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to deal with one.

“They were smart to ask for you and not your brother,” Kitty said. “All you do is read!”

One entire side of Mallory’s suitcase that summer was packed with books—Nancy Drew, Louisa May Alcott, a contraband copy of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. In subsequent years, Mallory didn’t pack any books because she’d discovered that the length and breadth of one wall in the cottage’s great room was a library. In the summer, her aunt and uncle abandoned their work reading for pleasure reading. Over the course of six summers, Mallory was introduced to Judith Krantz, Herman Wouk, Danielle Steel, James Clavell, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Erich Segal. Nothing was off-limits, nothing was deemed “too adult,” and nothing took precedence over reading; it was considered the holiest activity a person could engage in.

Mallory loved her aunt and uncle’s cottage. The common area was one giant room with wood beams and chestnut-brown paneling. There was a dusty brick fireplace, a rock-hard green tweed sofa, two armchairs that swiveled, an ancient TV with rabbit-ear antennas, and a kidney-shaped writing desk under one of the pond-facing windows where Aunt Greta wrote postcards and letters to people back in Cambridge. A long narrow harvest table marked the boundary between the living room and the kitchen. The kitchen had vanilla-speckled Formica counters and fudge-brown appliances; a black lobster pot sat on the stove at all times. There was one bathroom, with tiny square tiles that sparkled like mica, and Mallory’s room had twin beds, one with a mattress that felt like a marble slab, where she kept her books, and one a little bit softer, where she slept. She sometimes ventured into the third bedroom, but that room had only one window, and it faced the side yard, whereas Mallory’s bedroom had two windows, one that faced the side yard and one that fronted the ocean. She fell asleep each night listening to the waves, and the breeze was so reliable that Mallory slept without a fan all summer.

This island chooses people, Aunt Greta said. It chose Bo and me, and I think it’s chosen you as well.

Mallory remembered feeling…ordained by that comment, as though she were being invited into an exclusive club. Yes, she thought. I’m a Nantucket person. She loved the sun, the beach, the waves of the south shore. Next stop, Portugal! Uncle Bo would cry out, hands raised over his head, as he charged into the ocean. She loved the pond, the swans, the red-winged blackbirds, the dragonflies, the reeds and cattails. She loved surf-casting and kayaking with her uncle and taking long beach walks with her aunt, who carried a stainless-steel kitchen bowl to hold the treasures they found—quahog shells, whelks, slippers and scallops, the occasional horseshoe carapace, pieces of satiny driftwood, interesting rocks, beach glass. As the days passed, they became more discerning, throwing away shells that were chipped and rocks that wouldn’t be as pretty once they dried.

She loved the stormy days when the waves pummeled the shore and the screen door rattled in its frame. Uncle Bo would light a fire and Aunt Greta would make lobster stew. They played Parcheesi and read their books and listened to the classical station out of Boston on the transistor radio.

There is still one photograph in the cottage of Aunt Greta and Uncle Bo together, and Mallory had studied it when she’d first moved in. It’s a picture of them on the beach in their woven plastic chairs, their hair wet and their feet sandy. After looking at it a few seconds, Mallory realized it was a picture she herself had taken with her uncle’s camera. Aunt Greta was wearing a red floral one-piece bathing suit with a tissue tucked into her bosom so her chest wouldn’t burn. Her dark hair, cut short like a man’s, was standing on end. She was beaming—and one could sense in her expression the carefree exuberance of summer. Uncle Bo was wearing sunglasses and had a copy of James Michener’s Chesapeake opened across his hairy chest.

They look happy in that picture, Mallory thought. And yet, if she wasn’t mistaken, this was taken the summer before Uncle Bo died, so a scant year before Aunt Greta got together with Ruthie and thereby fractured her relations with Mallory’s family.

Mallory has of course wondered if her aunt was a lesbian all along and if her uncle was, perhaps, gay. Maybe theirs was a marriage of convenience or a marriage of deep, intense friendship, a meeting of minds if not bodies.

Mallory doesn’t care. She misses her aunt and uncle, but she suspects some spiritual shreds of them remain here, because although Mallory was often lonely in New York, she has not felt lonely in Nantucket even once.