“I have to go, darling,” she said. “I have work to do.”

Box had spent a year courting Dabney before they slept together. She had been keen about giving him the tour of the island and making the picnic—but as soon as he’d kissed her, after taking his first bite of her strawberry pie, she’d inched backward.

He’d said, “I’m sorry, is this not what you want?”

She had welled up with tears and that had made her even more fetching—her big brown eyes shining. “I want to want it,” she said.

At the time, he had not understood what that meant. He was an economist: he dealt in absolutes. But her inscrutable answer doubled his ardor. He decided he would do whatever it took to capture Dabney Kimball’s heart.

What he eventually learned was that Dabney Kimball’s heart was missing. It had been pillaged by Clendenin Hughes, a boy she had loved since she was a teenager. Hughes was Agnes’s father, although by the time Hughes found out that a child existed, he had already embarked on a new life overseas. Hughes had wanted Dabney to move to Thailand, but she couldn’t, because of the confines of her psyche. Instead, she decided to raise Agnes without one word or dollar from Hughes. Dabney convinced herself that she would be better off if she never heard from Clendenin Hughes again. And she hadn’t. But the fact of the matter was that Hughes had taken the tender, beating center of Dabney with him.

For most of that year, Box spent his weekends on Nantucket at the Brass Lantern Inn. He paid a month at a time for a room with a queen canopied bed and a chintz armchair, where he graded student papers. He grew accustomed to the smells of cinnamon-scented candles and the cheddar scones served at breakfast. The proprietor of the inn, Mrs. Annapale, discovered that Box was on the island in pursuit of Dabney Kimball. Mrs. Annapale had known Dabney since she was born and believed her to be a lost cause—not because of Clendenin Hughes but because the girl’s mother had abandoned her in a fancy hotel room when she was only eight years old.

“And you know,” Mrs. Annapale said, “people are never quite right after something like that happens.”

Box had triumphed solely because of his persistence. He showed up in the bitter cold of January and in the windy gray of March. He brought peonies and potted orchids for Dabney and stuffed animals and storybooks for Agnes. He read to Agnes, despite having no experience with children. He brought bottles of single-malt scotch for Officer Kimball and cannoli from the North End of Boston for Dabney’s grandmother, who soon allowed him to call her Grammie instead of “Mrs. Kimball.” He had won over the daughter, the father, and the grandmother, but Dabney remained just out of reach.

Then, in June, Box left to teach for the first time at the London School of Economics, and he missed three consecutive weekends on Nantucket. When he finally returned to the Brass Lantern, he found Dabney waiting for him in his room, sitting on his queen canopied bed.

She said, “I was afraid you’d never come back.”

They made love for the first time that night. Box knew it had been a long while since Dabney had been with a man, and he knew the only man she had ever been with was Clendenin Hughes. Clendenin Hughes was sex to Dabney, and as much as Box wanted to set out to change her mind in a swift, masterful conquering, he proceeded slowly and gently. And she didn’t shy away. She cried out in pleasure, and then she asked him to do it all again the next morning.

He proposed over cheddar scones.

That had been twenty-five years earlier. John Boxmiller Beech was an economist, his area of expertise was guns and butter, supply and demand. He was the first to admit, he knew nothing about the mysteries of the human heart.

Nina Mobley, married seven years, divorced seven years

I am negative proof. I am the one Dabney tried to warn. But did I listen?

I had been working at the Chamber of Commerce as Dabney’s assistant for two years when I started dating George Mobley. I had lived on Nantucket my entire life and I had known George forever. He was five years ahead of me in school, but his sister was only a year ahead of me, and his father was a scalloper who also ran the island’s most popular fish market, where my mother was a faithful patron. (Like all good, old-school Catholics, we ate baked scrod every Friday.) I knew the Mobleys, everyone knew the Mobleys, but I never gave George a thought. I knew he had gone to Plymouth State, and studied statistics, but then he headed down to Islamorada to work on a fishing charter. He had ended up a fisherman like his father, but a far more glamorous kind—sailfish, marlin, fish you hang on the wall.

Then George’s father died in spectacularly tragic fashion—he was thrown off the bow of his boat during a storm, his leg caught in the ropes, and he drowned. George came back to the island for the funeral, which I attended with my mother, and at the reception afterward I started talking to George. It was the deep freeze of January, but George was a golden tan color from his year of fishing on blue water. He had a kind of celebrity, being the bereaved. I was honored that George would talk to me.

I never asked for Dabney’s opinion of George Mobley, and she didn’t offer it. George would stop by the office on Friday afternoons to take me to the Anglers’ Club for appetizers. He had moved back to Nantucket to take care of his mother and sister. Dabney was always her friendly self, saying, “Don’t you two look cute! Have fun now!”

But when George proposed, Dabney chewed on her pearls for a long time, instead of jumping up to congratulate me. And I thought, Oh boy, I know what that means.