Maggie pumps her legs hard to make it up the hill on Spring Street, and after a good mile or so she sees Hugo’s car in one of the parking spaces at Mohegan Bluffs. She follows, and tips her bike into the rack. There’s nowhere to go here but down the little path that leads to the steps. The sun has begun to set.

Maggie, like every Block Island kid, knows the history of the clay bluffs that rise up like great monsters on either side of the steps. She knows that in the middle of some long-ago century (sixteenth? seventeenth?) two Native American tribes, the Niantic and the Mohegan, battled it out for supremacy of the island. She knows that the Niantics forced the Mohegans over the bluffs to their deaths. She knows that on a clear day, you can see all the way to Montauk, on the tip of Long Island. She knows that there are 141 steps leading down to the beach below and that you can see all five of the offshore windmills from here and that in the summer bunches of small white flowers line the steps. But she does not know why Hugo has come here, alone. She gives him enough time to make it all the way down, and then she follows.

Then all at once, she knows.

Down on the beach, which spreads out like a half-moon below the steps, stands Olivia Rossi. She has her hand on the back of Hugo’s neck, and he holds her cheeks in the flat of his palms, and they are kissing each other so passionately, and the sunset is illuminating them so beautifully, that Maggie, who has never seen a real kiss like this in person, feels an ache in her center. She doesn’t have time to think yet (she won’t for some time) that this kiss, with the ocean air and the sunset and the great gray Mohegan Bluffs, will be the paradigm for all of the kisses to come in her still-young life. She doesn’t know if she starts to creep down the steps to stop the kiss or to see more of it or just to impress upon herself how very wrong she’s been about Hugo, about what he might have thought or not thought about her.

She also doesn’t have time to figure it out, because her sneaker catches and she tumbles down, down, down the last five steps. She lets out a little wail. The rest of her fall is surprisingly silent, but it is the wail that makes Hugo and Olivia disengage and turn in her direction.

“Maggie!” cries Olivia. She makes her way over the rocky sand, graceful even in this journey that would be awkward to just about everybody else.

“Olivia!” croaks Maggie.

“What de hell?” says Hugo. He does not look happy to see Maggie, and his French accent is less charming than it once was. He is the same boy who works the crepe machine masterfully, who could sell a half dozen macarons to a poverty-stricken anorexic, but tonight he seems older, different, harsher.