Dabney began to pace the small office. She knew every inch of it by heart: the wall of brochures of each of the Chamber members, the towering stacks of Chamber guides, the photographs of Ram Pasture at sunset and Great Point Lighthouse, taken by Abigail Pease, the frayed oriental rug that Dabney had rescued from her father’s house on Prospect Street, the two desks that had been salvaged from the old police station. She and Nina referred to them as their Dragnet desks. Dabney worked at her father’s old desk; she remembered sitting at it as a girl as her father processed paperwork for a DUI, or joked with Shannon, the pretty, blond dispatcher. The Chamber office was her home, but it offered her zero comfort right now.

Dabney said, “We’ve worked together for so long that you probably think you know everything about me.”

“Almost everything,” Nina said.

“Almost everything,” Dabney said. “However, I’m pretty sure what I say next will shock you.” Dabney sipped her coffee. Diana at the pharmacy made Dabney’s coffee perfectly—cream, six sugars, two dashes of cinnamon—every single morning. But today, this also offered zero comfort.

“What?” Nina asked. “What will shock me?”

Was Dabney really going to say it? She had been taught the lyrics to “American Pie” by an Irish chambermaid named May at the Park Plaza Hotel decades earlier. Singing it always calmed Dabney’s nerves. Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

“Clendenin Hughes has come back to the island,” Dabney said.

Nina spilled coffee down the front of her blouse. This, Dabney had predicted. She handed Nina a wad of napkins.

“It gets worse,” Dabney said. “I went to see him this morning. As in, a little while ago.”

“Oh my gosh golly, golly gosh,” Nina said. There were long seconds of processing this; Dabney watched Nina work through her shock. “Well.” Pause. “Really.” Pause. “Of course you went to see him.” Pause. “How could you not?”

Dabney and Nina had not been friends when Dabney and Clen split, but you didn’t work across from someone for eighteen years and not tell her all the secrets of your heart.

Nina said, “And did you…”

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. “I kissed him,” Dabney whispered.

“You did?” Nina said. She did some deep Lamaze-type breathing, which she usually saved for phone conversations with her ex-husband, George. “Wow. Wowowowow. This is big. This is huge. Do you remember five or six years ago when I asked you…”

“Of course I remember,” Dabney said.

If Clendenin Hughes ever came back to Nantucket, Nina had asked, what would you do?

And Dabney had said, I will stand on my head and spit in my shoe.

“So now what?” Nina asked.

“He asked me to go over there tomorrow,” Dabney said. “He said he would make me lunch.”

“More likely he wants to eat you for lunch,” Nina said.

“Nina!”

“I think you should go,” Nina said. “It’s not like we’re talking about some cute waiter from the Boarding House. We’re talking about Clendenin Hughes. Your first true love.”

My only true love, Dabney thought. Then she hated herself.

“I can’t do it,” Dabney said. “I won’t do it.”

“I hate to break this to you, Dabney,” Nina said. “But you’re not the first person in the history of the world to think about having a love affair. I almost did it myself.”

“You did not!” Dabney said.

“With Jack Copper,” Nina said. “I was at the Anglers’ Club one night when George was off-island, gambling, although I didn’t know that at the time. Jack and I were talking and drinking, and drinking and talking—and then I said I had to leave and he said he’d walk me to my car. He kissed me good night in the parking lot and…it could have gone further. He wanted it to, and so did I. But I stopped it.”

Dabney exhaled. “Because you are a good and faithful person.”

“I’ve always regretted it,” Nina said.

“Have you?” Dabney said.

“I have,” Nina said. “Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they’re over and done. Regretting the things you didn’t do is tougher, because they’re still out there…haunting you. The what-ifs.”

Dabney considered this for a second. It was true: Clendenin Hughes had haunted her all these years. Not going to Bangkok haunted her. The what-may-have-been haunted her.

Nina said, “I have to say, I’m relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“I really thought you were going to fire me. Or tell me something awful, like you were dying.”

My only true love. Dabney felt like she was dying. Her insides were in an agonizing knot. She reached for her pearls and started gnawing. Then the office phone rang and Dabney and Nina both sat down at their desks for business as usual.

Before she answered the phone, Dabney said, “You won’t say a word about this, right?”

Nina said, “I’m insulted that you had to ask.”

The following day at eleven thirty, an e-mail popped up in Dabney’s in-box from Clendenin Hughes. Subject line: Are you coming to lunch?

Dabney clicked on the e-mail, but there was nothing else to read.

She deleted the e-mail, then deleted it from her deleted file.

The following Monday, she saw Clendenin’s bicycle on Main Street. It was leaning up against a tree right in Dabney’s line of vision. If Clen knew how her desk was positioned in the office, he would have realized that she couldn’t look out her window without seeing the bicycle.