Ha! Agnes was making herself laugh. Dabney would be at home.

But Dabney wasn’t at home. Agnes felt irrationally upset about this, as if she were a child who had been abandoned. And, to boot, her mother’s cell phone was lying on the kitchen counter, charging. Really, what good was a cell phone if you didn’t take it with you when you left the house? Agnes considered calling Box in London. It was nine thirty at night over there; Box would probably be at dinner. Agnes hated to interrupt him—and besides, what would she say? Mom left work three hours ago and I don’t know where she went. The island was only so big; Dabney had to be somewhere.

Agnes trudged up to her bedroom and threw herself across her bed. She was tired enough to sleep until morning.

She awoke to the strains of Alicia Keys singing “Empire State of Mind,” her cell phone’s ringtone, handpicked for her by one of the little girls at the Boys & Girls Club. Agnes was groggy and her limbs felt leaden, but she reached for her phone, thinking it would be her mother.

She saw when she picked up that it was five o’clock and that it was CJ calling. How had she slept for so long? What was wrong with her? She considered letting the call go to her voice mail; CJ would sense sleep in her voice and she didn’t feel like explaining that she had eaten five thousand calories already that day and had just woken up from a two-hour nap. But CJ did not like getting Agnes’s voice mail. When he called, he expected her to answer.

She cleared her throat. “Hello?”

“Agnes?” he said. “Are you okay?”

She stretched out like a cat. The room was catching the mellow slant of the late-afternoon sun across the wooden floor. Agnes’s apartment, as lovely as it was, didn’t get this kind of natural light. In the background of the phone call, Agnes heard sirens and hubbub, the city. She didn’t miss it one bit.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“You didn’t call once today,” CJ said. “I thought you couldn’t live without me.”

“Oh,” Agnes said. “Well, I can’t.”

“Good,” CJ said. “I just left the office. I’m headed to the gym and then I’m meeting Rocky for a game of squash. What are you up to?”

Agnes sat up and listened to the rest of the house for sounds of her mother. The house was silent. “Nothing.”

“You and your mom have big plans tonight?” CJ asked. “Peanut butter sandwiches and Parcheesi?”

“No plans,” she said.

“Is everyone on Nantucket aflutter with the news of your return? Are all your old boyfriends banging down your door?”

“No,” Agnes said archly.

“Hey, baby, don’t get angry. If anyone should be angry, it’s me. I have to live here in the big city without the woman I love.”

“We’ll be together in ten days,” Agnes said.

“If I make it up there,” CJ said. “I can’t stay in your parents’ house again. I hate to be a diva that way, but I’m just too old. I’m on the wait list for a room at the White Elephant, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed for that. Otherwise, you can come home to New York.”

Agnes blew her nose. She didn’t want to go back to New York. She had just arrived on Nantucket and she wanted to stay and enjoy it. Her job as a counselor at Island Adventures camp started the next day. Agnes wanted a routine. She wanted sun and beach and ocean air. She wanted to be with her mother.

“It would be much better if you could come here,” Agnes said.

“Well,” CJ said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Agnes thought again about what Manny Partida had told her. Agnes didn’t think CJ would ever hurt her. But she hated being spoken to like a child.

“I hear my mother downstairs,” Agnes said. “I should go. I’ll call you later, baby. Bye.”

But downstairs was quiet and growing darker. Dabney hadn’t returned. She had gone back to the office, Agnes supposed, after running her mysterious errands, and now she would be headed to the Brotherhood, for Business After Hours.

Dabney pulled the yellow dress out of the shopping bag and stared at it for a long minute.

If I make it up there.

She shucked off her shorts and T-shirt and slipped on the dress. Mascara, lip gloss, a hand through her hair, and a pair of gold sandals. She would stop in at Business After Hours, she decided, for old times’ sake.

Glass of mediocre Chardonnay in hand—it was a step up from the boxed wine of her teenage memory—Agnes threaded her way through the party in search of her mother. The best part of the Brotherhood was the old part—a basement grotto with low, beamed ceilings and stone walls and scarred wooden tables. Agnes had loved to come here growing up, although, for some reason, Dabney allowed it only when it was raining. The room was lit by candles; it had the contained coziness of the hull of a ship. Agnes always used to order the Boursin cheese board. Bread, butter, cheese, mustard, pickles, candlelight, rain, sometimes an acoustic-guitar player—it was a good memory that distracted Agnes for a minute.

The place was jam-packed with familiar faces. Everyone was chatting and drinking and picking up fried jalapeños and mini Reuben sandwiches from passing trays. Agnes snagged a sandwich for herself (carbs, how she craved them!), then a jalapeño, then another sandwich—all the while scanning the room for her mother. There was Tammy Block, the Realtor whom Dabney had set up with Flynn Sheehan, creating earth shock waves of scandal a few years back; there was the travel agent, the owner of a popular gift shop, there was Barley Ivan, who made beautiful Lightship-basket furniture, there was the flamboyant gallery owner, and there was Ed Law, legendary owner of Nantucket Cotton, the T-shirt shop where Dabney and then, a generation later, Agnes had worked as teenagers.