He was sitting on the porch of the cottage in a granny rocker, smoking a cigarette, with a gun across his lap like a character in a John Wayne Western. His beard made him look like a hermit, or a serial killer.

When Dabney stepped out of the car, he didn’t seem at all surprised. He dropped the cigarette into a jar of water at his feet and it hissed upon extinguishing.

“Hey, Cupe,” he said.

Hey, Cupe.

His voice. She had not accounted for how hearing his voice would affect her. She feared she might cry, then she realized that crying was far too mild a reaction. She would do something else. She would melt, or turn into a pillar of salt, or spontaneously combust. What happened to a person placed in a situation like this? Box might try to turn this into a formula: if one started with the amount Dabney had loved Clen, then took its derivative and divided it by twenty-seven years, one would certainly end with only a small decimal of 1 percent. Dabney should feel nothing, or practically nothing. She should be able to say, Hey, Beast-because in their long-ago life, that had been their private nomenclature, Cupe and Beast-and shake Clen’s hand or give him a gentle hug because of his arm, and say, So, how have you been?

Dabney briefly closed her eyes: pink. Pink was normally a cause for celebration. But not today.

Clen descended the porch steps and stood before her, and she was funneled into the green glen and weak tea of his Scottish hazel eyes. He was older, and bigger, and lopsided, but the sound of his voice and the beauty of his eyes threatened to bring Dabney to her knees. Their love had been a castle, the castle had been reduced to rubble, and Dabney had cleared the rubble away teaspoon by teaspoon for more than a quarter century until she was sure there was nothing left but a barren clearing inside her.

Why then this rush of feeling, a molten stream of pure silver desire, and a golden glinting of what she feared was love. It had been so many years since she’d felt love like this-love she had known only with Clendenin, love she had forsaken but that she had secretly hoped and prayed would return-that she barely recognized it.

Love.

She couldn’t speak. It was just as it had been when she saw him in Sconset on his bicycle. She could not get air. Was she going to faint again? She did not feel well. The return of Clendenin Hughes was killing her.

“You came,” he said.

His voice.

She broke. Sobbing, tears, she felt raw, exposed, and human. Before the e-mail had arrived in her in-box (subject line: Hello), it had been months since Dabney had cried. The death of their dog, Henry. And before that it had been years-tears of joy, Agnes’s graduation from high school, again from college.

“You are still so beautiful,” Clen said. “Exactly as I pictured you. You look just as you did when you stood on the wharf as my ferry pulled away.”

“Stop it!” Dabney screamed. She was shocked at the volume and pitch of her voice, shocked that her voice worked at all. But really, how dare he start out by conjuring the worst day of her life! He had been standing at the railing of the Steamship on a blindingly blue September day. He had waved at Dabney, shouting out, I love you, Cupe! I love you! Dabney had been unable to shout or wave back. She had stood still as a post, mute with sorrow and fear and regret-and anger at herself for the weakness and failings of her psyche. She could not go with him. She felt as perhaps the first Dabney-Dabney Margaret Wright-had felt when she stood in nearly the same spot and watched her husband, Warren, set sail on the whaling ship Lexington.

Dabney Margaret Wright would never see her husband again.

Dabney Kimball had seen pink with Clendenin for so many years that she had been convinced they would end up together. But watching him disappear toward the horizon shook her confidence. She thought, I will never see Clendenin Hughes again.

Yet, here he was.

He moved to embrace her. She batted at him, pummeled his chest-still being careful of his missing arm; weird how Dabney could be afraid of something that wasn’t there-but Clen pulled her in with his one strong arm, brought her close. She could smell him, he smelled the same, and he was still the same relentless bastard. He would not quit until the world saw things his way.

“Let go of me!” Dabney said.

“No,” he said. “I will not let go. I waited far too long for this moment. I have wanted nothing more in this life than to hold you again.”

“Stop!” Dabney said.

“Just relax,” Clen said. “You can walk away and never come back, but please just give me a moment to hold you and give you one kiss.”

Dabney succumbed. She hugged him fiercely around the middle and inhaled his scent and felt a rush of desire so strong it made her dizzy, and she wobbled. She felt Clen’s mouth in the part of her hair, and the warmth of this was unbearable. She raised her face to him and then they were kissing. It was insane, reckless kissing, kissing like Dabney had never known-but that wasn’t quite true. It was kissing like Dabney had known only with Clendenin when they were teenagers, when the wonder of kissing had first entered their lives. Their mouths, lips, tongues were searching, hungry, aching. It was that kind of kissing, so old it was new again, and with the kissing came desire so intense it hurt. He was instantly hard against her leg. She remembered sex with him, how desperate and mind-altering it had been, how it had felt like the earth was tilting, how she had howled with the first shuddering orgasms of her young body, and how he had placed the side of his hand into her mouth for her to bite so that her cries would be stifled. He would later show her the teeth marks and they would climb onto their bikes and ride to the pharmacy for strawberry frappes, Clen grinning like a fool, Dabney sweetly sore and tender against her bicycle seat.

So many things she had not allowed herself to remember.

She pulled away and there was a sucking sound, like a vacuum seal being broken. The sun went behind the clouds.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You can,” he said. He was short of breath. “You just did.”

“That was…I don’t know what that was.”

He growled a laugh. Beast. She had called him Beast because of his size, and his unruly dark hair, and his noises, and the ferocity that surfaced in him when he got riled. When she was first getting to know him, he reminded her of a character from a fairy tale-not an animal per se, but not quite human, either. He had arrived on Nantucket wounded from his life before, in Attleboro. His alcoholic father had drunk himself to death at the kitchen table. Clen had been wild and strange, and the smartest person Dabney had ever known.

“I’m married,” she said.

“I don’t care,” he said.

No, of course he wouldn’t care. He had bucked against convention and authority and the rules the entire time Dabney had known him. She assumed this was still true. He had graduated as valedictorian of their high school class, but had barely escaped being expelled for losing his temper with their history teacher, Mr. Druby, over the philosophical stands of Malcolm X. Clen had used profanity in his outrage, and he had called Mr. Druby an ignoramus (which Dabney had thought sounded like some kind of dinosaur), and it was only the ensuing wrath of Clen’s mother, Helen Hughes (for everyone, including the principal, was afraid of Helen Hughes), that had saved Clen.

“I don’t care if you don’t care,” Dabney said. “I care. Box is a good man.”

“The economist,” Clen said with derision.

“Yes.”

He was studying her. She couldn’t meet his eyes; it was too dangerous. Green glen and weak tea, Scottish hazel, the most mesmerizing eyes she had ever seen. Dabney knew this because they were also Agnes’s eyes.

Oh, God, Agnes.

Dabney said, “I have to go.”

“Come inside,” he said. “See my place.”

“No,” she said.

“Just come look,” he said. “Then you can leave. It’s a step up from the shack behind the Lobster Trap.”

The shack where Clen used to live with his mother, who waited tables at the restaurant. Dabney had lost her virginity in that shack, at Christmastime of her junior year in high school, while Helen Hughes had been off-island, shopping.

She didn’t exactly agree, but she found herself following Clen up the steps to the porch of the cottage.

“What’s with the gun?” she said.

“BB gun,” he said. “I’ve been shooting one-handed at the crows.”

Inside, the cottage was like a very large five-star hotel room, done up in a rustic beach theme. King bed with Frette linens, honey onyx marble in the bathroom. There was a well-appointed galley kitchen and a long pine table where a computer hummed. Legal pads and pens and newspapers were strewn about, anchored down by half-a-dozen dirty coffee cups. There was also a highball glass containing a scant inch of what Dabney knew was bourbon.

He told her that the cottage and the main house belonged to a wealthy Washington family who came to Nantucket only the first three weeks of August, and then again for a week at Thanksgiving, when Joe Biden was a regular guest at dinner. The main house had six bedrooms, Clen said, a gourmet kitchen, and a swimming pool. The family was allowing Clen to live rent-free because he had won a Pulitzer and because he had agreed to do the simple caretaking duties he could physically handle during the eleven months the big house lay fallow. This basically meant that Clen was to make sure the house didn’t burn to the ground or get robbed. He was to make sure the thermostat stayed at sixty-five degrees so that the pipes didn’t freeze.

“I want you to come back tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll make you lunch.”

She said, “I can’t come back.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I’m married, Clen.”

“I saw your husband, the professor, on the street in Sconset, you know. He was hurrying after you, I supposed.”

“Yes,” Dabney said. “I fainted.”

“Fainted?” Clen said. “Because of me?”

“Well, seeing you didn’t help.”

“But you came here today, to see me. And if you came today, you can come tomorrow.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because!” she said.

“Because why?”

“Will you stop?” she said.

“No. I will not stop. I returned to Nantucket for you. Because I haven’t stopped loving you for one second.”

It was her turn to growl, but her growl sounded like the final bleat of a lamb about to be slaughtered. “I don’t believe you.”

“I dated one other woman,” Clen said. “Her name was Mi Linh, Vietnamese woman, beautiful.”

Dabney flinched.

“Our relationship lasted five years,” he said. “We lived together in Hanoi. At the Chinese New Year, I bought her a strand of pearls. She wore the pearls to dinner at the Hotel Metropole. They looked fine on her, but I asked her to take them off. I asked her never to wear them again.” He coughed, and even his coughing was familiar. He had started smoking the day he got to New Haven. Dabney hated herself for holding on to all these details. “She threw them in Hoan Kiem Lake. An offering for the turtle.”

“Lovely,” Dabney said.

“I was glad to see the pearls disappear,” he said. “Pearls were you. Mi Linh wasn’t you, and never would be. We broke up a few weeks later.”

Dabney let the last words of that story float away on the air.

“Why now?’ she said.

Coughing. Deep breath. “My arm.”

She nodded. “What happened?”

“If you come back tomorrow,” Clen said, “I’ll tell you.”

She opened her mouth to say, I’m not coming back tomorrow, but she saw little point in continuing the verbal tug-of-war with him. She turned to go.

“I’m going to make you take your words back,” he said.

“What words?” she said.

A beat of silence. She made the mistake of meeting his eyes. Weak legs. But no. Forbearance.

“You know what words,” he said.

And then, suddenly, she did know.

“Goodbye, Clen,” she said.

Dabney called Nina at home and asked her to come into the office right away, even though it was barely eight thirty. Across the street, the newspaper van was unloading at the Hub, but aside from that, Main Street was quiet.

Nina climbed the stairs heavily, then perched on the edge of her desk, her expression that of a person about to jump off a building. “Am I being fired?” she asked.

“What?” Dabney said. “No. Gosh, no. Why would you ever think that?”

“In eighteen years, you have never asked me to come in early,” Nina said.

This was true. If there had been a need to come to work early, Dabney had been the one to do it.