Is if you promise never to contact me again. Cold turkey. Never contact me again. Please respect my wishes. Please.

We can make it work here, he said. I’ll rent a bigger place, and hire a woman to help you with the baby!

Clen, she said. Please.

Please what? He was ready to pull his hair out in frustration. Just come, Cupe. I bought you a plane ticket.

I can’t! she said. I’m not sure you get it, or that you’ve ever gotten it. I can’t do it, I’m too afraid, and afraid isn’t even the right word. Clen could hear her breathing; he could tell she was trying not to cry. I’m sorry, Clen. I just can’t.

Okay, he said. Fine. You win. You win, Dabney! I’ll quit my job. I’ll come home.

No, she said. Absolutely not.

What? he said.

Do you think I want you to end up like my mother? If you come back to live here on Nantucket, you will have a small life, a lot smaller than the life you’re going to have overseas anyway. And you’ll hate me, and you’ll resent our child, and you’ll take off in the middle of the night and I’ll never see you again. She paused. No, she said. No way. I don’t want you to come home.

I won’t do that. You know I won’t do that.

What I know, Dabney said, is that you won’t be happy here, writing for the Nantucket Standard. You’re too talented. You’re the hundred-year genius, just like Mr. Kane used to say. You need to face the facts.

What facts? You’re pregnant with my child.

It isn’t going to work either way. It isn’t going to work!

I thought you said we were a perfect match, destined to end up together!

Well, I was wrong, Dabney said. I was terribly, horribly, awfully wrong. I have been right about everyone else, but wrong about us. There is only one solution, one way I’m going to survive, and that is if you let me go. Just please let me go.

I can’t let you go, he said. I love you!

Silence.

What? he said. I leave, and suddenly you don’t love me?

She said something too softly for him to hear. He imagined her words like raindrops falling somewhere into the South Pacific.

I didn’t catch that, he said.

Not suddenly, she said.

There was suggestive coughing from one of the Australians in line and Clen waved a desperate hand over his head, as if to say, I’m drowning here, buddy. Please let me try to save myself. This was the conversation of his life, he realized that. He also knew it might end up costing as much as the plane ticket he had just purchased.

Tell me you don’t love me, he said.

I don’t love you.

You’re lying, he said. You know it and I know it. You’re lying, Cupe.

You will find someone else, she said. And so will I.

As anyone who has ever been in love would know, those words blew him to bits, as though he had stepped on a land mine, or a booby trap set by guerrilla forces. It was the worst pain he had ever sustained. Worse than being hit by his drunk father, worse than waking up and finding his father dead at the kitchen table and then having to knock on his mother’s bedroom door and tell her the news.

Okay, he said. Fine. Cold turkey. Not another word. You understand that, Cupe? Not. Another. Word.

He was calling her bluff, or so he’d thought.

The only way I’m going to survive is with a clean break, she said. Please respect my wishes and let me, and this child, go. Please, please, do me the favor of never contacting me again.

Dabney.

Silence.

Dabney!

He would have thought she’d hung up but he could still hear her breathing.

Fine, he said.

Silence.

If that’s what you want, he said.

Silence.

We all make choices, he said.

He had always been smarter than everyone else, and he’d thought that might help him, but in this case it didn’t matter. Possibly, it made things worse. What he imagined as the finely calibrated gears of his mind were thrown practically into reverse, so that anything he tried to do—track down a source in Surat Thani, or kick-start his motorbike, or cook rice—ended up a disaster.

In May, he learned that Dabney had given birth to a baby girl and named her Agnes Bernadette, after her grandmother. He couldn’t count the number of times—when he was riding in the stinking hot third-class berth of a train, or slogging through rice paddies, or meandering through the markets looking for ripe mangoes but being offered teenaged girls—when the name had popped into his head like a chiming bell.

Agnes Bernadette.

He had heard from Agnes herself only once, shortly after her sixteenth birthday. Dabney had finally told Agnes about her true paternity and Agnes, unbeknownst to Dabney, had sent a letter to Clen in care of the New York Times. The letter had been forwarded to Clen, who at that time was living in Hanoi, in a good flat in the French Quarter. He had just won the Pulitzer and he had an offer for a book deal; for the one and only time in his life, he had been flush with cash, and there had finally been talk of transferring him to the Singapore desk, which had become his sole professional aspiration. Clen and his girlfriend, Mi Linh, drank a lot of champagne and ate dinner twice a week at the Hotel Metropole. They spent weekends at a resort in the cool hills of Sapa; Clen rented a junk and they sailed the emerald waters of Halong Bay.

Agnes’s letter had been straightforward: she now knew that Clendenin was her real father and she wanted to meet him; her mother, however, could never find out. Agnes was spending the summer in France. Could Clendenin meet her in France?