“I’m not firing you, Nina,” Dabney said. “I would never fire you.” Nina accepted the cup of coffee that Dabney had gotten her from the pharmacy. She took the white plastic top off the cup and blew. Normally, Dabney brought Nina a cup of ice, too, but today she was so nervous that it had slipped her mind. It hadn’t occurred to Dabney that Nina might be nervous, too.

“What is it, then?” Nina said. She squinted at Dabney as if maybe the answer were written in small print on Dabney’s forehead.

Dabney began to pace the small office. She knew every inch of it by heart: the wall of brochures of each of the Chamber members, the towering stacks of Chamber guides, the photographs of Ram Pasture at sunset and Great Point Lighthouse, taken by Abigail Pease, the frayed oriental rug that Dabney had rescued from her father’s house on Prospect Street, the two desks that had been salvaged from the old police station. She and Nina referred to them as their Dragnet desks. Dabney worked at her father’s old desk; she remembered sitting at it as a girl as her father processed paperwork for a DUI, or joked with Shannon, the pretty, blond dispatcher. The Chamber office was her home, but it offered her zero comfort right now.

Dabney said, “We’ve worked together for so long that you probably think you know everything about me.”

“Almost everything,” Nina said.

“Almost everything,” Dabney said. “However, I’m pretty sure what I say next will shock you.” Dabney sipped her coffee. Diana at the pharmacy made Dabney’s coffee perfectly-cream, six sugars, two dashes of cinnamon-every single morning. But today, this also offered zero comfort.

“What?” Nina asked. “What will shock me?”

Was Dabney really going to say it? She had been taught the lyrics to “American Pie” by an Irish chambermaid named May at the Park Plaza Hotel decades earlier. Singing it always calmed Dabney’s nerves. Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

“Clendenin Hughes has come back to the island,” Dabney said.

Nina spilled coffee down the front of her blouse. This, Dabney had predicted. She handed Nina a wad of napkins.

“It gets worse,” Dabney said. “I went to see him this morning. As in, a little while ago.”

“Oh my gosh golly, golly gosh,” Nina said. There were long seconds of processing this; Dabney watched Nina work through her shock. “Well.” Pause. “Really.” Pause. “Of course you went to see him.” Pause. “How could you not?”

Dabney and Nina had not been friends when Dabney and Clen split, but you didn’t work across from someone for eighteen years and not tell her all the secrets of your heart.

Nina said, “And did you…”

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. “I kissed him,” Dabney whispered.

“You did?” Nina said. She did some deep Lamaze-type breathing, which she usually saved for phone conversations with her ex-husband, George. “Wow. Wowowowow. This is big. This is huge. Do you remember five or six years ago when I asked you…”

“Of course I remember,” Dabney said.

If Clendenin Hughes ever came back to Nantucket, Nina had asked, what would you do?

And Dabney had said, I will stand on my head and spit in my shoe.

“So now what?” Nina asked.

“He asked me to go over there tomorrow,” Dabney said. “He said he would make me lunch.”

“More likely he wants to eat you for lunch,” Nina said.

“Nina!”

“I think you should go,” Nina said. “It’s not like we’re talking about some cute waiter from the Boarding House. We’re talking about Clendenin Hughes. Your first true love.”

My only true love, Dabney thought. Then she hated herself.

“I can’t do it,” Dabney said. “I won’t do it.”

“I hate to break this to you, Dabney,” Nina said. “But you’re not the first person in the history of the world to think about having a love affair. I almost did it myself.”

“You did not!” Dabney said.

“With Jack Copper,” Nina said. “I was at the Anglers’ Club one night when George was off-island, gambling, although I didn’t know that at the time. Jack and I were talking and drinking, and drinking and talking-and then I said I had to leave and he said he’d walk me to my car. He kissed me good night in the parking lot and…it could have gone further. He wanted it to, and so did I. But I stopped it.”

Dabney exhaled. “Because you are a good and faithful person.”

“I’ve always regretted it,” Nina said.

“Have you?” Dabney said.

“I have,” Nina said. “Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they’re over and done. Regretting the things you didn’t do is tougher, because they’re still out there…haunting you. The what-ifs.”

Dabney considered this for a second. It was true: Clendenin Hughes had haunted her all these years. Not going to Bangkok haunted her. The what-may-have-been haunted her.

Nina said, “I have to say, I’m relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“I really thought you were going to fire me. Or tell me something awful, like you were dying.”

My only true love. Dabney felt like she was dying. Her insides were in an agonizing knot. She reached for her pearls and started gnawing. Then the office phone rang and Dabney and Nina both sat down at their desks for business as usual.

Before she answered the phone, Dabney said, “You won’t say a word about this, right?”

Nina said, “I’m insulted that you had to ask.”

The following day at eleven thirty, an e-mail popped up in Dabney’s in-box from Clendenin Hughes. Subject line: Are you coming to lunch?

Dabney clicked on the e-mail, but there was nothing else to read.

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

The following Monday, she saw Clendenin’s bicycle on Main Street. It was leaning up against a tree right in Dabney’s line of vision. If Clen knew how her desk was positioned in the office, he would have realized that she couldn’t look out her window without seeing the bicycle.

Dabney stood up and stretched.

She said to Nina, “Do you mind if I open the window?”

“Be my guest,” Nina said.

Dabney threw up the sash and peered out to get a closer look. Was it Clen’s bicycle? Silver ten-speed with the ratty tape unraveling from the curved handlebars. A relic. Definitely Clen’s bicycle.

“It’s balmy,” Nina said.

“Huh?” Dabney said.

He had left it there on purpose, she decided. To taunt her.

She sat back down at her desk. She had packed herself a lovely BLT on toasted Portuguese bread for lunch, using the first hothouse tomatoes from Bartlett Farm. But she couldn’t eat a thing. She still felt awful. In the morning, she decided, she would start the course of antibiotics that Dr. Field had prescribed.

She said, “I’m going to run some errands.”

“Errands?” Nina said.

“I’m going to light a candle at church,” Dabney said.

Nina squinted at her. “What?”

“For my father’s birthday.”

“Your father’s birthday was last week,” Nina said.

“I know,” Dabney said. “And I forgot to light a candle. And I need some thread from the sewing center.”

“Thread?” Nina said.

“My Bermuda bag is missing a button,” Dabney said.

“You don’t know how to sew a button,” Nina said. “Bring it to me. I’ll do it.”

Dabney signed out on the log, writing “errands.” “I’ll be right back,” she said.

When Dabney got down to the street, she headed straight for Clen’s bicycle. He hadn’t even bothered to lock it up; he was still living in Nantucket 1987. Anyone might steal it. Dabney considered climbing on it herself and pedaling away.

Then she realized how difficult it would be to lock up a bike with only one arm, and she felt awful.

She looked around. Where was he? He had parked in front of the pharmacy. Was he at the lunch counter, having a strawberry frappe? She poked her head in.

Diana, a stunning West Indian with her head wrapped in a hot-pink bandanna, saw Dabney and waved. “Hey, lady!”

The hot pink caught Dabney’s eye. Pink pink pink. But Clen wasn’t at the counter. Dabney felt a stab of disappointment.

Dabney waved and said, “Hello, lovey, goodbye, lovey, I have to dash!”

“Busy lady!” Diana said.

Dabney hurried down the street to the Hub. Clen and his newspapers; of course, of course he was at the Hub. Dabney straightened her headband. The day was balmy, and she feared she was perspiring. Just the walk down the street had left her winded and a little dizzy. Tomorrow, the antibiotics.

Dabney stepped into the Hub, one of her favorite spots in town, with its smell of newsprint and penny candy. Greeting cards, magazines, fake Nantucket Lightship baskets, buckets of seashells and starfish, Christmas ornaments, saltwater taffy.

No Clen.

She left the Hub and stood on the corner. Where was he? She had been so strong, she had deleted his e-mail, she had not driven back out the Polpis Road, she had not given in to temptation, but it had taken nothing more than seeing the bicycle to start her chasing him.

And what would she do when she found him? What would she say?

She would say: I want you to leave. There’s no reason for you to be here. You said you came back for me, but your mere presence on this island is making me…ill. Ill, Clen. I can’t handle it. I’m sorry, I do realize it’s a free country, but you have to go.

She gazed down Federal Street.

Post office? Was he mailing a letter back to Vietnam, to beautiful Mi Linh?

Dabney was jealous of Mi Linh, a woman who had thrown a perfectly good strand of pearls into a lake for a turtle. Surely that had been a joke?

Dabney headed to Saint Mary’s to light a candle for her father. Her father had never really liked Clendenin; her father had found him smug. Her father used to say, That boy is too smart for his own good.

Dabney walked up the ramp of the church, holding on to the hand railing. She was sweating. One place she was certain not to see Clendenin Hughes was the Catholic church.

Cool, dim, quiet, peaceful: the inside of the church was a salve. Dabney inserted two dollar bills into the collection box and said a prayer for her father. Then, something she had never, ever done before: she fed the box two more dollars and said a prayer for her mother.

Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

She emerged from the church feeling calm, light, and virtuous.

When she headed back up Main Street, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

Clen’s bicycle was gone.

Exasperating!

That night, she couldn’t sleep.

The following night, no sleep.

The third night, at two o’clock in the morning, she called Box. He answered the phone on the eleventh ring. Anyone in her right mind would have realized the poor man was asleep and hung up.

“Professor Beech,” he said. He must have thought the call was a drunk student who had mustered the courage to complain about a grade.

“Do you love me?” Dabney asked.

“What?” Box said. “Dabney? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Do you love me?” she said.

“Yes. Of course I love you.”

“Don’t ‘of course’ me,” Dabney said. “Tell me something real. Tell me how you really feel.”

“What on earth is wrong with you? Did you have a dream?”

“We aren’t close anymore,” Dabney said. “You’re always working! We never have sex anymore.”

“Sex?” Box said, as though he’d never heard the word before. “You do realize that I have to administer final exams to three hundred students in the morning, right?”

“I don’t give a hoot about your three hundred students!” Dabney said. “I want to know if you love me. If you desire me.”

There was a pause. Then a sigh. “Yes, darling, I love you. You are my heart’s desire.”

“Am I?” Dabney said.

“Yes, Dabney. You are.”

“Okay,” Dabney said, but she was not placated.

“Good night,” Box said.

Dabney hung up.

She woke up in the morning exhausted and anxious, which was not good, because it was the day that she and Nina were interviewing job candidates. They had enough money in their budget to hire two information assistants and pay them twenty dollars an hour to answer the phones, which would start ringing nonstop the Thursday before Memorial Day.

One of the assistants would be Celerie Truman, who had worked at the Chamber the summer before. Celerie-pronounced like the underappreciated vegetable-was the most enthusiastic information assistant Dabney had hired in twenty-two years. Celerie had been a cheerleader at the University of Minnesota and had discovered Nantucket through her college roommate. She was the kind of peppy individual who could shout cheers in a stadium of sixty thousand people while wearing shorts and a halter top in minus-thirty-degree weather. And she had turned out to be a magnificent ambassador for Nantucket. Certain visitors had stopped by the Chamber office just to meet Celerie because she had been so helpful on the phone.