“Just come look,” he said. “Then you can leave. It’s a step up from the shack behind the Lobster Trap.”

The shack where Clen used to live with his mother, who waited tables at the restaurant. Dabney had lost her virginity in that shack, at Christmastime of her junior year in high school, while Helen Hughes had been off-island, shopping.

She didn’t exactly agree, but she found herself following Clen up the steps to the porch of the cottage.

“What’s with the gun?” she said.

“BB gun,” he said. “I’ve been shooting one-handed at the crows.”

Inside, the cottage was like a very large five-star hotel room, done up in a rustic beach theme. King bed with Frette linens, honey onyx marble in the bathroom. There was a well-appointed galley kitchen and a long pine table where a computer hummed. Legal pads and pens and newspapers were strewn about, anchored down by half-a-dozen dirty coffee cups. There was also a highball glass containing a scant inch of what Dabney knew was bourbon.

He told her that the cottage and the main house belonged to a wealthy Washington family who came to Nantucket only the first three weeks of August, and then again for a week at Thanksgiving, when Joe Biden was a regular guest at dinner. The main house had six bedrooms, Clen said, a gourmet kitchen, and a swimming pool. The family was allowing Clen to live rent-free because he had won a Pulitzer and because he had agreed to do the simple caretaking duties he could physically handle during the eleven months the big house lay fallow. This basically meant that Clen was to make sure the house didn’t burn to the ground or get robbed. He was to make sure the thermostat stayed at sixty-five degrees so that the pipes didn’t freeze.

“I want you to come back tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll make you lunch.”

She said, “I can’t come back.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I’m married, Clen.”

“I saw your husband, the professor, on the street in Sconset, you know. He was hurrying after you, I supposed.”

“Yes,” Dabney said. “I fainted.”

“Fainted?” Clen said. “Because of me?”

“Well, seeing you didn’t help.”

“But you came here today, to see me. And if you came today, you can come tomorrow.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because!” she said.

“Because why?”

“Will you stop?” she said.

“No. I will not stop. I returned to Nantucket for you. Because I haven’t stopped loving you for one second.”

It was her turn to growl, but her growl sounded like the final bleat of a lamb about to be slaughtered. “I don’t believe you.”

“I dated one other woman,” Clen said. “Her name was Mi Linh, Vietnamese woman, beautiful.”

Dabney flinched.

“Our relationship lasted five years,” he said. “We lived together in Hanoi. At the Chinese New Year, I bought her a strand of pearls. She wore the pearls to dinner at the Hotel Metropole. They looked fine on her, but I asked her to take them off. I asked her never to wear them again.” He coughed, and even his coughing was familiar. He had started smoking the day he got to New Haven. Dabney hated herself for holding on to all these details. “She threw them in Hoan Kiem Lake. An offering for the turtle.”

“Lovely,” Dabney said.

“I was glad to see the pearls disappear,” he said. “Pearls were you. Mi Linh wasn’t you, and never would be. We broke up a few weeks later.”

Dabney let the last words of that story float away on the air.

“Why now?’ she said.

Coughing. Deep breath. “My arm.”

She nodded. “What happened?”

“If you come back tomorrow,” Clen said, “I’ll tell you.”

She opened her mouth to say, I’m not coming back tomorrow, but she saw little point in continuing the verbal tug-of-war with him. She turned to go.

“I’m going to make you take your words back,” he said.

“What words?” she said.

A beat of silence. She made the mistake of meeting his eyes. Weak legs. But no. Forbearance.

“You know what words,” he said.

And then, suddenly, she did know.

“Goodbye, Clen,” she said.

Dabney called Nina at home and asked her to come into the office right away, even though it was barely eight thirty. Across the street, the newspaper van was unloading at the Hub, but aside from that, Main Street was quiet.

Nina climbed the stairs heavily, then perched on the edge of her desk, her expression that of a person about to jump off a building. “Am I being fired?” she asked.

“What?” Dabney said. “No. Gosh, no. Why would you ever think that?”

“In eighteen years, you have never asked me to come in early,” Nina said.

This was true. If there had been a need to come to work early, Dabney had been the one to do it.

“I’m not firing you, Nina,” Dabney said. “I would never fire you.” Nina accepted the cup of coffee that Dabney had gotten her from the pharmacy. She took the white plastic top off the cup and blew. Normally, Dabney brought Nina a cup of ice, too, but today she was so nervous that it had slipped her mind. It hadn’t occurred to Dabney that Nina might be nervous, too.

“What is it, then?” Nina said. She squinted at Dabney as if maybe the answer were written in small print on Dabney’s forehead.