The streets were busy again by lunchtime. I watched from the info booth as tourists filed off the noon boat, a huddle of energy in sunglasses and baseball caps, tugging at suitcases and snapping open brochures. A dad pushed babies in a double stroller. A college kid was bringing his girlfriend home for the first time. He loved his home and wanted her to love it, too. An old woman and her husband were here to visit their children. They couldn’t wait. They spent all year telling stories about their kids, and then for one glorious week each summer they became characters in the stories they told. Two boys with dreadlocks clutched cell phones in their hands like protective amulets. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that cell service was almost nonexistent on Wolf Island.

It was a comfort to sit at the information booth and dole out information—a kind of currency. I told tourists which of the two inns was better for children. I told them where the aquarium was and warned them not to expect more than two sad seals and a tank of lobsters. I told them who had the best clam chowder. When the whale watch cruise left. Where there were mopeds for rent and where there were bikes.

These were the questions I knew how to answer.

Eddie came over from One Eyed Jack’s. He was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Wolf Harbor: A Quaint Little Drinking Village with a Fishing Problem.”

“You want to get lunch or something?” he asked.

“I’m kind of busy right now,” I said, handing over a map of the island to a young couple with a baby in a backpack.

“After it clears out,” he said.

In high school I’d worshipped Ed Frank. I was still trying to get over that, if I’m being honest, even though he’d gotten married a few years back to an island girl, Kim, who had been three grades behind us in school. Marriage had changed him somehow, aged him, but when I looked at him I still saw Ed Frank, seventeen years old, his face flushed from running, his head thrown back laughing—and maybe he saw the girl in me, too. I don’t know what we still wanted from each other, maybe just to hold on to the people we used to be. Despite Kim, and the fact that we’d known each other forever, it seemed somehow a natural progression—expected even—that we’d end up seeing each other secretly. I wasn’t proud of it, I didn’t like sneaking around, but it was hard to stop. Eddie, his warm belly, his clumsy hands.

But I’d made up my mind to end all that.

“You seem tense,” Eddie said.

“I guess I am.”

“I know some good massage techniques.”

“Thanks, Eddie, but I don’t think that will help.”

“Shiatsu,” he said.