She was right. She helped him find someone to clean out the house, she showed him where the Town Building was so he could register the deed in his name, she drove him around in her black Jeep with the top down, even though Nantucket in May was cold and windy and rainy. (Did anything grow here? Jeffrey had to wonder. Maybe the farm was a joke.) She took him for chowder and steamed lobsters and scallops wrapped in bacon. She let him crash on the floor of her room in the rental house that she shared with two other lifeguards. And then, after a full week of this platonic, almost sisterly help, she invited him into her bed and took his virginity.

Because, yes, Jeffrey had been a virgin at twenty-two. Owing to his girlfriend Felicity Hammer’s love of Jesus and her refusal to make love to him until the day they were married.

Andrea was different from Felicity in every way. Andrea was strong and athletic and dark-haired and capable and Italian and Catholic and confident of her many talents and charms. Felicity was blond and petite and meek and easily frightened; she was shy and God-fearing, she was a small-town Baptist whose father had sent her to community college. She was a baker and a knitter. She wanted six children. Felicity had thought that once Jeffrey got settled with the farm, he would send for her and they would get married.

But meeting Andrea at the ketchup dispenser changed that. Andrea was a storm, a force of nature. He could not resist her any more than he could stop the rain. They fell in love. In October they moved in to the tiny farmhouse, now clean, cozy, and all fixed up. They made love, they made pasta, they made curtains for the windows. Jeffrey made a plan for the farm. He got rid of all the livestock except for the chickens. Chickens and eggs he could handle; everything else was too expensive and beyond the perimeters of his expertise. He wanted to grow things: corn, vegetables, flowers. He had no money. He went to the bank for a loan way beyond what he would be able to pay back in this lifetime, but they gave him the money eagerly, with the land as collateral. Andrea got a job teaching private swim lessons at the community pool.

They were happy. They talked about getting married. They talked about kids. They ate a lot of eggs. They had nicknames for each other. He called her Andy. She called him Peach, which had something to do with sex—how he tasted, or the fact that he’d been a virgin until she took a bite out of him.

Life was weird, right? It was weird because Jeffrey and Andrea had been happy, they had been a couple on their way to matrimony and wedded bliss, until somehow it unraveled. As though a sweater had a snag and he pulled at it, or she did, and one by one the stitches came undone until it was a pile of yarn at their feet. Jeffrey was obsessed with the farm, consumed by it; he could not give Andrea his full attention, he could not give her any attention. She complained, he heard her complaining, but he could do nothing about it. He was single-minded, he always had been, and his mind was on the farm, the fields, the crops, the business of it.

At the beginning of their third summer together, Andrea, once again Nantucket’s head lifeguard, went to a party for town employees, where she met the new police chief. Young guy, she said. Single. From Swampscott.

And two weeks later she moved out.

In all honesty, Jeffrey was too busy to do anything to stop her. By the time he got off his goddamn tractor in the figurative sense, Andrea and the new police chief, Ed Kapenash, were engaged.

Life was weird, because instead of Jeffrey’s relationship with Andrea ending, it started a new incarnation. At first Jeffrey was tentatively friends with the newlywed Kapenashes; then Jeffrey met Delilah and they became couple-friends with Ed and Andrea. Andrea’s cousin Tess started dating Greg, and they moved to the island permanently, then Phoebe and Addison joined the scene and the eight of them, over time, developed an insanely tight bond. What did Delilah call them? The Castaways. And it did, at times, seem like just the eight of them alone on a deserted island.

Life was weird because although Jeffrey had seen Andrea every week for nearly twenty years, seeing her now sitting in his chair was sort of like seeing her for the first time. On a rolling boat, by the ketchup dispenser. You do talk! It was as if he’d looked up, finally, after getting the farm running, profitable, and fully staffed, and noticed that she was gone. And he went looking for her. And he found her here, in his chair. Because there was something about her that transported him back. The nickname, Peach. Or the way it was just the two of them here, alone, unlikely to be interrupted. (Had that happened even once since they split?) Or it was the way she was looking at him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

She said, “I’m having a hard time.”

He said, “She worshipped you, Andrea. You were her friend and her sister and her mother wrapped up into one. You did right by her.”

Her tears were silent. “How can you say that? She’s dead.”

“It was an accident.”

“Was it?”

“Wasn’t it?” Jeffrey said. He shifted on the milk crate. He had a nugget of classified information that no one else knew, that had been lobbed at him like a hand grenade by April Peck. I was with him the night before he died. But what did that mean? Did it mean anything? Was it even true? (In his heart, Jeffrey felt it was true. He realized now that Greg had been hiding something.) One thing was for sure: Jeffrey was not going to share this radioactive nugget with Andrea.

“I don’t know,” Andrea said. “All I can tell you is that I’m in agony. I am hurting worse than I could ever imagine I could hurt. Like I lost one of the kids. Like a stranger came into my house and held Kacy’s head under the bathwater until she died. And I wasn’t around. I let it happen.”