“I don’t go to Nantucket with Jake every year,” Coop says. “I mean, I have, but not in over a decade. I think Ursula is just mixed up.”

(Really? Tish thinks. Ursula de Gournsey doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who gets mixed up.)

Coop starts watching Jake. He’s sitting at table 4 with Ursula and Tish’s family friend Fred-from-San-Francisco and some friends of Tish’s from Vassar. Ursula is on her phone, texting, it looks like, which is vaguely insulting—but then again, she is running for the U.S. Senate, so she probably has urgent business, even on a Saturday evening in August. Jake rises from the table and heads to the bar where…Mallory is ordering a drink. The two of them talk; it looks like an intense conversation. Is it intense, or is Cooper just projecting? Jake and Mallory know each other; they’ve known each other since that first summer and knew of each other while Coop and Jake were in college. They’re friendly—so what?

Mallory gets her wine. She heads back to table 2, where Brian Novak is waiting with his arm draped over the back of her chair.

Cooper watches Jake’s eyes follow Mallory back to the table. Even once she’s sitting down, his gaze lingers. Cooper thinks: Mallory and Jake? Coop has a vision of the two of them slow-dancing at PJ’s however many years ago. That had been…a little strange, even unsettling, but the dance had ended and they’d returned to the table.

Every Labor Day weekend on Nantucket for the past thirteen years.

The next time Jake gets up—he’s heading toward the men’s room—Cooper follows him.

“Be quick,” Tish says. “It’s almost time for the toasts.”

Tish is very excited for the toasts—because who doesn’t like hearing other people say nice things about them?—though Cooper dreads the inevitable “Third time’s the charm” joke.

“Nature calls,” he says. As he follows Jake to the men’s room, Cooper realizes that Jake and Mallory would have been left on Nantucket alone that first year because Fray had some crazy accident and Leland bailed, as Leland does. At the time he thought nothing of it. Then the second year, Cooper met Alison the flight attendant and ended up spending the entire weekend in her room at the Nantucket Inn, again leaving Jake and Mallory alone. He didn’t wonder about that then because…well, because he was in his twenties and woefully self-absorbed.

Has Jake returned to Nantucket every year to…see Mallory? To…sleep with her? That must be wrong. Jake has always been with Ursula. They have a child. Furthermore, Mallory has a child, Link, whose father is Fray. That development was bizarre enough. There is nothing going on with Jake and Mallory. Coop should go back and sit down. He should check that Fray’s best-man toast doesn’t make any references to Coop’s previous marriages.

But instead, Coop pushes into the men’s room.

Jake is at the sink, hands on either side of it, staring into the mirror. He looks…agitated.

“You okay, man?” Coop asks.

Jake straightens. “Yeah, I’m sorry. It’s just…a lot.”

“What’s a lot?” Cooper asks.

“My life,” Jake says. “I don’t expect you to understand and I’m not going to bore you with the particulars.”

“Speaking of particulars—” Cooper stops himself. He can’t ask Jake about it. But then again, he can’t not ask. “Does Mallory let you use her cottage on Labor Day weekend? Do you go every summer? Labor Day weekend?”

“Did she tell you that?” Jake asks.

“No,” Cooper says. “Ursula said something. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

He and Jake stare at each other. Cooper finds he’s shaking. Jake is Cooper’s role model and has been ever since Cooper picked him as a big brother in the fraternity so long ago. And Jake’s relationship with Ursula has been a paragon for Cooper; it’s what he’s been looking for all these years and what he has finally found with Tish. He doesn’t want to hear that it’s fatally flawed.

“No,” Jake says. “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

Later, after the first dances and all the garter and bouquet nonsense—Mallory doesn’t catch the bouquet and Coop overhears Kitty scolding Mallory for not even trying—Cooper corners his sister at the bar. The band is playing “Rock Lobster,” and Tish and her bridesmaids are going nuts on the dance floor, so Coop has a minute.

“I want to bring Tish to Nantucket,” he says.

“You should,” Mallory says.

“What about Labor Day weekend?”

“Won’t you be in Italy?” she asks.

“We get back the twenty-eighth.”

“Don’t you have a job?” Mallory asks. Her voice is light. “You’re going on a two-week honeymoon, then you’re going to turn right around and come to Nantucket for the long weekend?”

Cooper shrugs. “Why not?”

“Doesn’t Tish have a job?” Mallory asks.

“Just answer the question, Mal,” Cooper says. “Can Tish and I come up to Nantucket for Labor Day weekend?”

Mallory takes a sip of her wine. Does she look guilty? Is she a homewrecker? A longtime serial homewrecker?

“Labor Day isn’t great for me,” she says.

“Really? How come?”

“Bunch of reasons,” she says. “I like to prep for my first week of school. And Link comes back from Fray’s on that Monday, so over the weekend I clean his room, wash his sheets, sort through his toys, that kind of thing. Any other weekend would work, though.”

“Sort through his toys?” Cooper says. “That’s the excuse you’re handing me?”

Mallory bumps him with her shoulder. “Wait until you have kids,” she says. “Hey, best wedding so far.”

A week before Thanksgiving Jake calls Cooper and asks if he wants to meet for a beer at the Tombs. Cooper wants to meet Jake very badly—because his marriage to Tish is over. The third time was not the charm; the third time was shorter than even the ill-fated first and second times. Cooper overheard Tish on the phone with her “family friend” Fred, who is not a family friend, it turns out, but an old boyfriend, and actually, not even an old boyfriend—when Cooper checked Tish’s cell phone, he found sixty-eight calls between the two over a ten-day span. Tish cried and begged for forgiveness when he confronted her. It was only an “emotional affair,” she said. She’d never slept with Fred. Well, okay, she’d slept with Fred once, but it wasn’t memorable. Actually, a handful of times. She had slept with Fred a bunch of times, but she wasn’t in love with him. She was in love with him but he lived in San Francisco. She was moving to San Francisco; she had accepted a position at the de Young Museum.

Yes, Cooper wants to have a beer with his old friend Jake McCloud, but Cooper has a nagging suspicion that Jake and Mallory have some kind of arrangement, and, sorry, Cooper won’t collude. He isn’t able to cut Mallory out of his life, she’s his sister, but he can put his friendship with Jake on ice.

“Sorry, man,” Cooper says. “I’m all jammed up.”