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Jocelyn is persistent, she doesn’t hear the word no, she’s used to getting what she wants.”
    â€œAnd she wants you.”
    â€œI guess so,” Clen said. “But I told her. I mean, I was clear that I’m taken. I belong to you, Dabney Kimball.”
    And yet, he had planned on leaving her for seven or ten hours while he went to a formal alumni dinner dance thing with Jocelyn and her influential parents. Dabney caught a glimpse of herself in Clen’s dorm room, lying on his bed, sniffing his pillowcase for his scent. She would have read Franny & Zooey for the umpteenth time and tried again to figure out why Franny never made it to the football game with Lane Coutell, why she never took a bite of her chicken sandwich, but felt okay enough to smoke seventeen cigarettes in a forty-page story. She would wait, thinking how dedicated Clen was to the newspaper while in reality Clen ate bloody prime rib and stroked Jocelyn’s long hair and tried to sound impressive for Jocelyn’s father. Dabney felt sorry for the girl who waited alone in Clen’s dorm room, but that girl was not her—because she was leaving.
    Jealousy, cheat, trust, like like-likes, red and blue, Harvard, Yale, Spizzwinks, Whiffenpoofs, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalists, Handsome Dan, nearly fifty Yale graduates killed in World War II. People had problems, Dabney thought. Her father had fought in Vietnam, and he came back different. Dabney’s mother couldn’t handle it. She didn’t leave because of you, honey. She left because of me. Dabney’s father had told her that once, when they were duck hunting.
    But she did leave me, Dabney thought. Her own daughter, her only child.
    There was a game taking place on the football field, and there were, Dabney supposed, other games being played here in the Yale Bowl.
    She turned away from Clen. He said, “Wait a minute, where are you going?”
    Back to Jason’s car, she thought, even though Mallory didn’t want her. To find Clark from Owl. To find a pay phone. She would call Solange and go back to Cambridge. Or she would call Dr. Donegal and go back to Nantucket. Where was she going? Anywhere but here.
    She started walking and people rushed past her, so many people, they swallowed her up, making her invisible. If Clen didn’t move right this minute, she knew, he would never find her.
    It’s like setting foot on another planet, where no one is familiar and I do not know the rules.
    Yes, Dabney thought. That was it. That was it exactly.

Dabney
    D abney couldn’t believe it. She blinked twice, thinking she no longer had the eyes of a girl or even a young woman, thinking she hadn’t been feeling well lately, and was this a trick of her mind? Twenty-seven years later? Subject line: Hello .
    Dabney Kimball Beech, who had served as the director of the Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce for twenty-two years, was in her second-floor office overlooking historic cobblestoned Main Street. It was late April, the Friday morning of Daffodil Weekend, Dabney’s second-most-important weekend of the year, and the weather forecast was a springtime fantasy. It was sixty degrees and sunny today, and would be sixty-four and sunny on Saturday and Sunday.
    Dabney had just checked the forecast for the fifth time that day, the five thousandth time that week (the previous year, Daffodil Weekend had been ruined by a late season snowstorm) when the email from Clendenin Hughes appeared in her inbox.
    Subject line: Hello.
    â€œOh my God,” Dabney said.
    Dabney never swore and rarely took the Lord’s name in vain (thanks to cayenne pepper administered to her ten-year-old tongue by her devoutly Catholic grandmother for saying the word geez .) That she did so now was enough to get the attention of Nina Mobley, Dabney’s assistant for eighteen of the past twenty-two years.
    â€œWhat?” Nina said. “What’s