Dabney spent the next six months hinting that I should cancel the wedding. But I was in love. I told Dabney that I didn’t care about the green fog. I would not be talked out of marrying George.

At the Methodist church, as Dabney, who was serving as my maid of honor, arranged the hem of my dress, she said, “Nina, my darling, I’m going to tell you this now while I still can. I don’t think George is the man for you. I think you should run out the back door. In fact, I’ll go with you. We can go to Murray’s for a bottle of rum and get drunk instead. We can go dancing at the Chicken Box.”

I looked down at Dabney and laughed nervously. I knew Dabney was right—and not because Dabney had been blessed with a sixth sense, but because I felt it inside myself.

“Well,” I said. “It’s too late now.”

George and I bought a house on Hooper Farm Road. In a span of seven years, I had five children: two sons, then a daughter, then twin sons. George’s mother and unmarried sister lived down the street, so I was able to continue working at the Chamber. I had to work—we needed the money and I needed the time out of the house for my sanity. Things were crazy but I was happy enough, and I was tickled to prove Dabney wrong. The green haze had been an illusion, caused by Dabney’s own prejudice.

But then things went south with our finances. After doing a little digging, I discovered that George was a regular at Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, he had a bookie in Vegas, he had gambled away all our savings, and the kids’ college funds. He had taken out a line of credit on our house and after three missed payments, the bank repossessed it. George and I and the kids were forced to move in with George’s mother and sister. I lasted for fourteen months, then I found a year-round rental and left George.

“You were right,” I said to Dabney. “I never should have married him.”

“You have the kids,” Dabney said.

I hid my face in my hands.

It was amazing to me that I could know someone my whole life, I could live with him for nine years, sleep next to him in bed every night, give birth to five of his progeny, hold his hand during the Lord’s Prayer at Mass, high-five him when our eldest son got his first base hit, believe every word that came out of his mouth—including the made-up reasons for his trips off-island every Sunday—and still not know him at all. The only thing being married to George Mobley had taught me was that other people are a mystery. And the people who lie and keep secrets are always the people you’d least expect.

Dabney

She lasted three days without giving in.

Box returned to Harvard for the end of his semester: he had exams, graduation, then the class reunions, including his own fortieth.

Dabney lied to Ted Field, and to Box, and to Nina, telling them she felt better. She did not feel better. She felt worse. She was exhausted, she had no appetite, and she had pains all through her middle—shooting pains as well as a general ache. But this wasn’t something antibiotics could cure. She had been infected by Clen’s return.

Dabney couldn’t stop thinking about him: Clen wearing Chuck Taylors like a teenager, Clen riding his bike like a teenager, Clen with one arm. I have suffered a pretty serious loss…

Dabney had loved Clendenin Hughes since she was fourteen years old, when he told their English teacher, Mr. Kane, that Flannery O’Connor wrote like an angry, lonely woman. Dabney could picture Clen in his jeans and his flannel shirt and his ratty Chuck Taylors, his hair too long, the inflamed pimples on his temple, his knee constantly jogging up and down because his body held energy that could not be contained. He had been on the island for only a couple of weeks at the time of his parry with Mr. Kane. Mr. Kane had said to Clen, And how do you know what an angry, lonely woman sounds like? And Clen had said, I live with one. The rest of the class laughed, but his answer had struck Dabney as painfully honest. Then and there, she decided she was his.

Dabney had been matchmaking since the ninth grade, but what nobody knew was that the first couple she had set up was herself, with Clen. On the day he spoke out in Mr. Kane’s English class, Dabney’s field of vision had turned pink. She had thought there was something wrong with her, possibly a migraine, but as days passed, she realized that the pink appeared only when she was in Clen’s presence—and so it became clear that the pink meant she had fallen madly and forever in love. The second time she saw this pink it was surrounding Ginger O’Brien as Ginger watched Phil Bruschelli play basketball in the high school gym. Ginger and Phil had been married for twenty-nine years. All the couples Dabney had set up had been bathed in luscious pink and all were still together—perfect matches, forty-two of them.

How had she been wrong about Clen?

Did the magic of it not apply to her own self, perhaps?

It had started out well. Dabney had pursued Clen’s friendship; she initiated conversations, first about books and then later about more personal things. In December of that year, a surprise early snowfall came to Nantucket, and Dabney invited Clen to go tobogganing. He had kissed her at the top of the hill at Dead Horse Valley, and that was that. They had been together for nine years before Clen left for Thailand—all through high school, through four years of long-distance while Dabney was at Harvard and Clen at Yale, and then back together on Nantucket for a year, both of them living with their respective parents, Dabney managing a T-shirt shop in town, Clen writing for the Nantucket Standard.

That final year had been difficult. Dabney finally felt safe and content, home and at peace on her island, but Clen had been restless and angry, still the boy whose energy could not be contained.