A notification appears on his screen: Carla Frick has sent you a friend request.

Carla Frick, the chairperson from the event in Phoenix, has found him already? He’s been on Facebook for only sixty seconds.

Jake feels exposed but he accepts the friend request, and at nearly the same moment, Frazier Dooley and Jake’s mother accept his friend requests.

Jake laughs. Frazier is running a coffee empire and Jake’s mother is an ob-gyn. So what’s happening here? In between hysterectomies and C-sections, Liz McCloud is on Facebook? While overseeing a workforce of thousands, Fray is accepting friend requests?

Apparently so.

Stacey Patterson accepts Jake’s friend request.

It’s eerie. Will Mallory be able to tell that Jake checked out her page like a common stalker? He should click out of it but he can’t help himself. He studies her cover photo. It’s the view of Miacomet Pond. Because Jake knows what he’s looking for, he spies a glimpse of Mallory’s kayak overturned on the small beach.

In eleven weeks and three days, he will be paddling in that kayak.

Should he look at the pictures Mallory has posted? He’s afraid—because what if there’s one of her with the new boyfriend? Jake’s day will be ruined—his week, his life. But curiosity gets the best of him and he scrolls down.

There are only two pictures. One is of Link in a catcher’s uniform, leaning on a bat. The caption reads: He made the ten-year-old all-star team! The other picture is of Mallory and Link and an African-American couple with two little boys standing in front of the Old Mill. Jake knows this is Hugo and Apple, Mallory’s closest friends, and their twins, Caleb and Lucas.

Jake lets out a relieved breath. Maybe Mallory is new to Facebook as well? He sees that she has ninety-seven friends and he scrolls through them. There are a bunch of names he doesn’t recognize, but some he does: Leland Gladstone, Fiella Roget, Dr. Major. Jake sees the name Scott Fulton. That was the guy Mallory dated, the one who almost proposed to her. Jake is about to click on Scott Fulton when his good sense kicks in and he thinks, Come on, man, enough is enough.

Katherine “Kitty” Duvall Blessing accepts his friend request. Jake is now Facebook friends with Kitty. What will Mallory think of that?

He wonders if Coop will accept or decline his friend request. If Coop accepts his friend request, does this mean things are okay? If he declines, does that mean things are irreparably damaged?

Jake moves his mouse over to the blue button on Mallory’s page that says Add friend. Should he add her as a friend? Social media is a parallel universe, as Sara said, and in the parallel universe, it would be perfectly reasonable for Jake and Mallory to be friends.

She would kill him, he thinks. She would most definitely decline the request.

He closes Facebook and tucks his laptop into his briefcase.

Later, when he’s leaving the office, he stops by Sara’s desk.

“Hey, thanks for your help today. With Facebook.”

“Use responsibly,” she says. “It’s a drug.”

On August 31, 2012, Jake takes the direct American Airlines flight from DCA to Nantucket. This is risky, of course—he could easily run into someone he knows on the plane—but it’s convenient. The trip is ninety minutes from wheels up to wheels down. Jake rents a Jeep and drives out to the no-name road. It feels like coming home.

Friday night: burgers, corn, tomatoes, Cat Stevens, candles that they extinguish with wetted fingertips and then double-check, triple-check, before they go to the bedroom.

The harvest table, Jake thinks, looks as good as new.

They spend Saturday morning out on the kayak, and the pond is just as Jake has been picturing it; they even see a pair of swans. They paddle all the way inland, then turn around. On their way back, they pass a woman with a little boy standing in the muck, casting lines. Mallory waves and calls out, “Good morning!” Jake gives them the slightest glance and he notices the woman staring at him.

He tilts in the seat and the kayak wobbles. It’s Stacey Patterson from Goucher, Coop’s old flame.

“Hey?” she says. “Jake? Jake McCloud?”

“Go, go, go,” Jake whispers, but Mallory doesn’t need any prompting, she’s paddling with swift, strong strokes while still managing to appear unconcerned.

Jake hears the boy say, “Who’s that, Mommy?”

“No one, I guess,” Stacey says. “Let’s catch a fish.”

Close call. They get back to the cottage and Jake tells Mallory that the fisherwoman was Stacey from Goucher. Remember she met us that night at PJ’s? Yes, Mallory remembers, of course. Then they sit in silence for a second, thinking the same two things.

It would have been bad had they not escaped.

It’s a miracle something like this hasn’t happened before.

Because of the Stacey Patterson near disaster, they decide it’s best if Mallory goes to the fish store to pick up the lobsters by herself. Jake misses her the entire time she’s gone, though it gives him a chance to poke around the cottage unobserved. He could also do this while she’s out running in the morning but usually he just sleeps with his face buried in her pillow, inhaling her scent. The reason he comes to Nantucket every year is to see Mallory, pure and simple, but there are so many other things he loves about this weekend, one of which is three days of unstructured time. There are no meetings, no calls, no agendas, no parties, no lunches, no daughter to drop off or pick up. He and Mallory have the things that they do, but they’ve adjusted these with age and circumstances. Maybe she feels as bereft about going to the fish store alone as he feels about having to stay behind, but she understands. She doesn’t want to be found out any more than he does. He’s safe with her.

His “poking around” includes studying the books on her bedside table—The Paris Wife, State of Wonder—then opening her closet and looking at her clothes. He pulls out a blouse, then a dress. He imagines her wearing them to school. All of her students, male and female, must be in love with her; he can’t imagine they wouldn’t be. The night before, he asked her if she was dating anyone, though he didn’t admit to seeing her wearing the navy sweatshirt on Facebook and wondering whose it was. Mallory said there was no one special. Jake couldn’t help himself; he asked if there was anyone “not special,” and Mallory confessed that she and Brian from Brookings had had a bit of a text flirtation that ended when Brian sent her a picture of his penis. She said she burst out laughing, then deleted the entire text thread. He’d sent ten follow-up texts asking if he’d crossed a line or offended her or if maybe it wasn’t “big enough,” and Mallory finally answered that she was forty-three years old, too old to be sexting, and when he responded that there was “no such thing as too old for sexting,” she said she thought they’d better stay friends.

Texting is dangerous, they’ve both agreed. It’s tempting, oh, so tempting, to shoot Mallory a message every time he’s thinking of her, but they both know people who have been discovered this way—entire affairs, secret relationships, double lives, et cetera, revealed on a cell phone bill. Jake sends Mallory only two texts a year—one at the end of August to let her know when he’s arriving and one when he’s in the rental Jeep on his way. She doesn’t text him at all.