They eat the lobsters on the beach and wash them down with a bottle of very good champagne—this year, vintage Veuve Clicquot that one of her students gave her as an end-of-year gift. The champagne loosens him; it sends glitter through his veins. They finish their lobsters and fall back on “their” blanket—it’s the very same blanket they’ve used since the first year—holding hands, balancing plastic cups of champagne on their chests.

Are they both still spooked by the proximity of Stacey Patterson? Yes! When Jake opened his laptop before dinner, he heard an unfamiliar ping! that turned out to be a Facebook message from Stacey: I could have sworn I saw you kayaking on Nantucket today. Are you here, or am I starting to lose it in my old age? Jake thought about responding with Stacey, you’re starting to lose it, but then he decided it was best not to respond at all.

“What if we went away next year?” Mallory asks. “What if, instead of here, we went to Saskatchewan or Altoona? Someplace nobody knows us, someplace we can walk around in public?”

“There’s always a risk,” he says. “Besides, I like it here. This is the home of our relationship. And Ursula has accepted my trip to Nantucket as a matter of course. She doesn’t question it.”

“She might someday.”

“She might,” Jake says. He pours them each more champagne. It’s better to acknowledge the possibility of Ursula finding out than dismiss it. At this point, Jake is far more concerned about Bess discovering his secret. She’s at the age when she’s just becoming aware of boys, and Jake would like her to believe they are trustworthy. A better man might decide to give up the relationship with Mallory out of respect for his daughter. But Jake finds himself unwilling—he would like to say “unable,” but he knows better—to do that, and so should Bess ever find out, he will admit to his failure. He conducts himself like a prince the other 362 days of the year in hopes that this will balance out his weekend “away” in some karmic sense.

They finish the champagne, then head to bed, hand in hand. They are living inside a magic bubble, the kind that doesn’t pop.

Sunday, it drizzles, and so Jake feels okay about driving up to Great Point, though he wears a baseball cap. Once they pass the Wauwinet gatehouse, they don’t see another soul. The sky is moody, striated “fifty shades of gray,” Mallory quips, and the water is a steel-blue plate. The eelgrass sways; the gulls dip and swoop unpredictably in the wind.

On the way home, they stop to get the Chinese food. Mallory goes in alone. Jake sinks in his seat, pulls down his cap, waits for her to pop out of the restaurant holding the hood of her raincoat closed so it doesn’t blow down in the wind. She has been inside for only three or four minutes, but she grins at him with so much enthusiasm when she reappears that he starts laughing. If he ever has to explain himself to Bess, he will describe how good it feels to know there is one person on earth who is always happy to see him.

Summer #21: 2013

What are we talking about in 2013? The Boston Marathon bombing; Lean In; the fiscal cliff, North Korea; Roger Ebert; “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh”; Chris Kyle; Snapchat; the Met Ball; One World Trade Center; Danica Patrick; Frank and Claire Underwood; Sandra Bullock; John Kerry; Aaron Hernandez; The Goldfinch; James Gandolfini.

Every day when Ursula wakes up, she checks her work phone (a BlackBerry), then her personal phone (the iPhone 5s), and then she gets on the exercise bike with her iPad and reads four newspapers—the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the South Bend Tribune. She would like to say she reads all four cover to cover, but she doesn’t have time. While Congress is in session and she’s in Washington, Ursula rises at a quarter after five and her mind is still half asleep, so who can blame her for skimming the headlines first? She normally ignores the Metro section of the Post and the Times because the murders and house fires of DC and Flushing, Queens, are low on her list of priorities. But on the morning of October 23, 2013, Ursula intentionally checks the Metro section of the Post because she has heard the most outrageous rumor. She heard from Hank Silver, her former boss at Andrews, Hewitt, and Douglas, that A. J. Renninger is considering a run for mayor of DC.

Ursula feels this must be bad information. AJ—Amelia James Renninger, the six-foot blonde who transferred to the New York office and managed to escape the fate of nearly everyone else in the firm on September 11 by virtue of her eyebrow appointment—is now back in the District, working as a “freelance consultant,” which could mean any number of things. Ursula has heard bits and pieces about AJ over the years, none of it terribly positive. She suffered from PTSD after 9/11 and took a leave of absence from the firm even though they’d moved to midtown, and who could blame her? But then, apparently, she got addicted to something, probably Ativan, and there was a period when she dropped off the grid. She resurfaced back in DC a year or two ago and now she’s entering the political fray.

Mayor of DC? Ursula can’t think of a more thankless job. She remembers that AJ grew up a military brat, her father a lieutenant colonel in the navy, so she doesn’t have a hometown, per se, and Washington is good at absorbing people.

Ursula doesn’t see any mention of the mayoral race in general or of AJ specifically, though her attention does snag on a headline that reads “Baltimore Couple Killed on Beltway.”

…pulled over to change a flat…wife stood beside her husband, presumably to alert oncoming traffic to his presence…both husband and wife hit by tractor-trailer…neighbor confirmed the couple was on their way home from a performance at the Kennedy Center.

It was probably Yo-Yo Ma, Ursula thinks. She had wanted to take Bess but her schedule had been too busy.

And then Ursula sees the names: Cooper Blessing and Katherine (Kitty) Duvall Blessing.

Ursula stops pedaling. Cooper Blessing is dead? And who is Kitty? The newest wife? Ursula rereads the article and only then sees the ages—Cooper Blessing, 73, and Kitty Blessing, 72—and she realizes it’s not Cooper himself but Cooper’s parents. Ursula has met the elder Blessings three times; these were people she knew, or sort of (she’s not sure she could have picked them out of a crowd). They’re dead. Killed on the Beltway.

Survived by a son, a daughter, and a grandson, it says in the last line.

Ursula’s hands are ice-cold. The exercise bike is in the basement of their condo unit, and as Ursula climbs the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms are, she wonders how to break the news to Jake.

She’ll wake him up gently, she decides, then hand him his reading glasses and let him see for himself.

She eases onto his side of the bed and studies his face. His hair is more gray than brown now. When did that happen? She realizes that although she sees him every day, she never really looks at him. Long marriages have peaks and valleys, she knows, and while Ursula’s career has been one peak after another, their marriage is surviving solely because of Jake’s steadfastness and his unflappable demeanor. Anyone else would have left her long ago.

When she touches the side of his face, he startles awake. It’s true that she never wakes him this way.

“What is it?” he says.