“She never would have left the island.”
“He said she was happy. He told me she had a full life.” Bess’s second glass of wine is dropped off by none other than Shamin herself.
“Is everything okay here?” Shamin asks, eyeing the untouched pakoras. “We are busy preparing your entrées.”
“Delicious!” Bess says, too eagerly, and she takes a perfunctory bite of pakora.
“Very good,” Shamin says, smiling, and thankfully, she leaves them.
Bess turns back to Link. “I’m not pretending to know what your mother’s life was like. You would know that far better than me. But my dad claims she had her job, her cottage, friends, a community…and you.”
Link looks at her incredulously and she can’t help but agree with him. She’s ridiculous! She’s trying to justify what happened between their parents when it was, quite clearly, unfair to Mallory. But then, Link does an amazing thing. He reaches across the table for her hand. Bess tries to act natural but she instantly flushes from the neck up. She likes Link so much—okay, she realizes she doesn’t really know him, but she’s been drawn to him since she first set eyes on him, stepping out of the cottage on Nantucket. He’d looked so forlorn, a boy on the verge of losing his mother. He’d been trying to escape the adults inside and, like Bess, he was probably wondering what the hell Jake McCloud was doing there. But he was kind and funny with Bess, and she thought she’d seen a spark in his eyes, like maybe he thought Bess was pretty, and then he offered to show her the beach. She’d wanted him to ask for her number before she left but her dad had been standing there and it wasn’t clear if she and Link would ever see each other again, so what would be the point?
“Don’t you think everyone deserves to find love?” Link asks. “Isn’t that what we’re all programmed to search for? Someone we can connect with—a lover, a friend—someone to build a life with?”
Bess nods but is afraid to speak. She isn’t sure if Link is trying to tell her she might be that person for him （could she be so lucky?） or if he’s blaming Jake for keeping Mallory from finding such a person.
They found love, she wants to say. Maybe it didn’t look like other people’s love—a split-level house with a two-car garage, family road trips in the summer, date night on Saturday—but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t romantic or real. That doesn’t mean they weren’t devoted.
Something about the way her father described his time with Mallory made it sound very real and very romantic. And if twenty-eight consecutive summers “no matter what” wasn’t devotion, then what was?
But before Bess can articulate any of this, two things happen. The first is that a server arrives with their entrées and the second is that Link’s phone plays Toto’s “Africa”—Bess loves that song too—and the screen lights up with the name Stacey.
Link stands up as his plate of palau lands. “I have to take this.”
Bess blinks. “Okay?”
“Outside,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
Who is Stacey? she wonders. An old girlfriend? A current girlfriend? She tries not to worry. It might be his boss or a coworker or a friend. She feels relieved that they are finished with the Jake and Mallory story. Maybe when Link gets back they can eat and talk about their own lives like two normal people on a date.
Bess watches Link on the sidewalk on his phone, his head bent, his ear plugged. She considers the food. It would be rude for her to start without him, but she’s hungry, so she helps herself to one of the pakoras, which have finally cooled enough to eat. She devours one and is reaching for another when a guy takes Link’s seat.
“Uh…？” Bess says, her mouth full. She swallows. “Wrong table?”
“You’re Bess, right? Bess McCloud?” The guy looks like a Hollister model, or like the lead actor in a sexy HBO series about the Ivy League’s secret societies. And then, of course, it dawns on Bess: It’s the lobbyist.
“Aidan?” she says.
“You ditched me,” he says. “I finally made it to Roofers Union and you were gone.”
Bess stares at Aidan Hydeck’s perfectly coiffed dark hair, his sleepy brown eyes, and his square shoulders and realizes that, in the excitement of leaving Roofers Union with Link, she forgot to cancel this date. And not only that, she continued to share her location with Aidan.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.