Then one night I happened into American Seasons for a celebratory drink. I had just sold my first house, a fixer-upper on Pilgrim Road, listed at $1.2 million. The listing broker had to get home to his family, but my boys were at football practice until seven, so I had a couple of free hours. I didn’t think anyone would be at the bar at American Seasons at five o’clock—but I was wrong. When I walked in, Flynn Sheehan was sitting there alone, with a tall beer in front of him.

I said, “Flynn, hi! Tammy Block, I’m the one who rents the…”

“Reilly house,” he said. He gave me a sort of half smile, and I thought my heart would stop. “Like I could ever forget you.”

I have gone on long enough, and the story from here takes a bad turn. Some people had neat and orderly lives, and some people’s lives were messy and morally ambiguous. I have lived the latter. Did Flynn and I have an affair? Yes. It pains and embarrasses me to confess that. Did Amy Sheehan—who was, in anyone’s objective opinion, a miserable woman—discover the affair by looking at Flynn’s cell phone records and spread the news of my slutty debauchery all over the island? Yes. Was I ready to pack up my belongings, uproot the kids, and move off the island? Yes.

There were only two reasons I didn’t do this. One was: I loved Flynn Sheehan with every fiber of my being. After Amy smeared our names like blood all over every street in town, he had a difficult choice to make. He could try to repair his marriage and salvage his family, or he could leave. He called me up at eleven o’clock on the night the news broke and said, “I left her, Tammy. I love you.”

The other reason I didn’t leave Nantucket was because of Dabney Kimball Beech. As soon as she heard the news, she knocked on my front door. I ignored her. I didn’t want to hear her lecture. Surely anyone with a life as perfect as Dabney’s would never understand adultery—even though, technically, she was the one who had set me up with Flynn.

When I didn’t answer the front door, she knocked on the back door. When I didn’t answer the back door, she started tapping on my windows. I had to hide in my powder room, where she couldn’t see me. But she was relentless, and finally I gave up. I let her in the back door and waited for the beatings to begin.

She hugged me. Then she sat down at my kitchen table. She said, “I am going to hold your hand until you stop crying.”

I cried for quite a while. I cried and cried. When I finally stopped to blow my nose, I said, “Why did you send him to me when you knew he was married?”

“Because,” Dabney said, “you two are a perfect match. You’re meant to be together.”

Dabney was right. Flynn divorced Amy and married me on the beach in Madaket with only our children and Dabney and John Boxmiller Beech in attendance. There are still people on this island who won’t speak to me, who won’t meet my eye in the supermarket, who wouldn’t give me a referral for a sale if I were the last Realtor left on Nantucket. But I have Dabney—and she is not the person she appears to be.

She is so much more.

Dabney

She was beside herself with excitement. Agnes’s Prius was due to arrive on the five o’clock ferry. It wasn’t just a weekend visit; it wasn’t a few days at Christmas. She was really staying the entire summer!

Unfortunately, Box was going to miss Agnes by a matter of hours. He had come to Nantucket for the weekend, but that morning Dabney had delivered him to the airport. He would go back to Boston tonight, and fly to London in the morning. He would be gone two weeks.

“I feel like we never see each other anymore,” Dabney said.

“The lives we lead,” Box said.

Dabney clung to Box tightly, which he seemed to resist, and when she raised her face, he kissed the tip of her nose like she was a child.

“Please, no more histrionics,” he said. “It doesn’t become you.”

“Histrionics,” Dabney said. “That sounds like a newfangled major at Harvard.”

“I was referring to the middle-of-the-night phone call last week,” he said.

“I know what you were referring to,” she said. “I was trying to amuse you.”

“Waking me up in the middle of the night to ask me questions you already know the answer to isn’t amusing.”

“I’m sorry,” Dabney said, although she had already apologized three separate times over the weekend.

He patted her shoulder. “I’m off,” he said.

He grabbed the handle of his carry-on and strode toward his gate.

“I love you, darling!” she called out after him, but this must have qualified as histrionics because he didn’t respond. He didn’t even turn around.

Dabney planned to leave the office at four thirty so she could get home before Agnes arrived, but just as she was packing up, her computer chirped. She checked the screen. E-mail from Clendenin Hughes. Subject line: Fried rice.

Delete it, she thought. Agnes was on her way. Delete it!

The lives we lead. She opened the e-mail. It said: Come to my cottage for dinner tonight. A crate arrived today with my wok in it. Please? 8:00.

She was tempted to respond: I can’t. I’m having dinner with Agnes.

His daughter.

She was tempted to respond: No. No way. But she feared that any response, even a negative one, would only encourage him.

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

Dabney was standing in the driveway when the Prius pulled in. She was aghast to see CJ behind the wheel.