Dabney walked home from work, wishing it were a weekday so that she would have the house to herself, time and space to think. Dabney’s husband, John Boxmiller Beech—Box, to his familiars—held an endowed chair in economics at Harvard and spent four nights a week in Cambridge, teaching. Box was fourteen years older than Dabney, sixty-two now, his hair gone completely white. He was a brilliant scholar, he was witty at dinner parties, he had nurtured Dabney’s intellect and saved her in a million ways. Not least of all, he had saved her from the memories of Clendenin Hughes decades earlier. Box had adopted Agnes when Agnes was only three years old. He had been awkward with her at first—he had never wanted children of his own—but as Agnes grew, Box enjoyed teaching her how to play chess and quizzing her about European capital cities. He groomed her to go to Harvard and was disappointed when she chose Dartmouth instead, but he was the one who had driven back and forth to Hanover—sometimes through ferocious snowstorms—because Dabney wouldn’t leave the island unless her life depended on it.

Tomorrow morning. It was Friday, which meant that Box was at their house on Charter Street. He would be Dabney’s escort all through the festivities of Daffodil Weekend, although he was slower now after his knee replacement, and he had a hard time with the name of anyone he hadn’t known for twenty years. Box would be working, and therefore distracted, but if Dabney knocked on the door of his study, he would set down his pen and turn down the Mozart and he would listen as Dabney spoke the words he had surely been dreading for more than twenty years.

I’ve had an e-mail from Clendenin Hughes. He’s coming back to Nantucket for an indefinite period of time. He’s arriving tomorrow morning.

What would Box say? Dabney couldn’t imagine. She had been honest with Box since the day she’d met him, but she decided, while walking home, that she wouldn’t tell him about Clen. She revised history so that she had deleted the e-mail without reading it, and then she deleted it from her deleted file, which meant it was gone, so gone that it was as if it had never existed in the first place.

Couple #8: Albert Maku and Corrine Dubois, married twenty-two years

Albert: Dabney Kimball was the first person I met at Harvard. She was sitting on the side steps of Grays Hall, crying her eyes out. All the other freshmen were carrying their trunks and boxes across Harvard Yard with their good-looking, well-dressed parents and their rambunctious brothers and sisters in tow. I watched people hug and scream—happy reunion!—they had gone to Camp Wyonegonic together, they had been bitter lacrosse rivals, one at Gilman, one at Calvert Hall, they had sailed together from Newport to Bermuda, they had skied in Gstaad—it just got more and more absurd, and I could not listen a second longer without feeling woefully displaced. I was from Plettenberg Bay, South Africa—my father a truck driver, my mother the head of housekeeping at a tourist hotel, my tuition at Harvard paid by a scholarship through the United Church of Christ. I did not belong in Grays Hall, at Harvard, in Cambridge, in America. I slipped out the side door with the intention of escape—back to the T-station, back to Logan Airport, back to Cape Town.

But then I saw Dabney crying, and I thought, Now, look, Albert, there is someone else at Harvard who seems as miserable as you. I sat down on the hot step and offered her a handkerchief. My mother had sent me half a world away, to the planet’s most prestigious university, armed with little more than a dozen white pressed handkerchiefs.

The first white handkerchief won me my first friend. Dabney accepted it, and unceremoniously blew her nose. She did not seem surprised by my presence, despite the fact that I was six foot six and weighed 165 pounds and had skin the same purple-black color as the plums sold by the fruit vendor in Harvard Square.

When she finished blowing her nose, she folded the handkerchief into a neat, damp square and laid it on her dungaree-covered knee.

“I’ll launder this before I give it back,” she said. “I’m Dabney Kimball.”

“Albert,” I said. “Albert Maku, from Plettenberg Bay, South Africa.” And then, as a flourish, I said, “Ngiyajabula ukukwazi,” which means, “It’s nice to meet you,” in Zulu.

She burst into tears again. I thought maybe the Zulu had frightened her and I made a mental note not to use this tactic ever again when introducing myself to someone in America.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Are you lonely? Are you scared?”

She looked at me and nodded.

I said, “Yes, me too.”

Later, we walked to Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. This was a famous burger place mentioned in the freshman handbook. We ordered burgers with onions and chili sauce and cheese and pickles and fried eggs, and we ordered fries with gravy, and as I ate I thought happily that this was American food, and I loved it.

Dabney Kimball had been born and raised on Nantucket Island, which was sixty miles away on land and another thirty over the sea. She told me she was the fifth generation of her family to be born on the island, and I understood that for an American, this was an accomplishment. Her great-great-great-grandfather had traveled to Nantucket when he was only newly graduated from Harvard himself.

Dabney didn’t like to leave the island, because of something that had happened when she was a child, she said.

“Oh, really?” I said. “What?”

I thought maybe she had been mugged or had been in a highway accident, but she pressed her lips together and I realized I had probably overstepped the bounds of our brand-new friendship by asking.