“I’m not going to come back especially for Max. Because living with unhappy parents would be the worst thing for Max, way worse than having divorced parents.”

“Divorced.” Cassie seemed to be turning the word over and over in her head, and then in her mouth. She put the emphasis first on one syllable and then on the other. Divorced. Divorced. It was a funny word, once you kept repeating it. But then again, weren’t all words funny, repeated again and again? Tangerine. Hiatus. Incandescent. Rhinoceros. Blue. Plagiarism. “Are we going to be a divorced couple?” she asked.

“Eventually,” he said. “Eventually, I guess we are.”

“And then what?”

“And then, I don’t know, maybe I’ll start writing again.”

Cassie let out a sharp, mean laugh. “Right,” she said. “Like that’s going to happen.” But it didn’t hurt him, not anymore, not the way it would have a few months ago.

“It could,” he said. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Lots of walking on the beach and thinking.”

“Alone?”

“Not always. I started— I’ve been—” He cleared his throat. “That is to say, I was seeing somebody.”

“Somebody here?”

“Yes,” he said. “Somebody here.”

“Wait a minute. You have a girlfriend?”

The word seemed inadequate for his relationship with Joy—the word girlfriend implied youth, transitoriness. Joy deserved another word, a freshly minted, spectacular word. But: “Yes,” he said. Then, “No.”

“Which is it?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You’ll have to end it. Like I did with Glen.”

“Did you end it with Glen, or did Glen end it with you?”

Cassie didn’t answer, thereby making the answer clear. “I don’t think staying apart is the right thing for anyone,” she said instead. “We need to be a family unit again.”

“But we’re not, Cassie. We can’t be.” He believed that both he and Cassie were good parents—that was one piece of knowledge that had sustained him through his Max-less days, the certainty that Cassie would do right by their son. But they were not better together than they were alone, the way parents were supposed to be. In fact, they were worse.

He thought of Joy, bent over the account books in her office. He thought of Maggie teaching him to clam. It was so unlikely, so impractical, this little life they’d carved, really out of nothing, out of sand and sea and grit and determination and whipped cream. And yet. It was what he wanted, more than anything.

“Are you planning to stay with her? This girlfriend? On this . . . island?” She spat the word in a way that made Anthony feel protective of Block Island. “What about us? What are Max and I supposed to do?”

“We’ll figure it out,” said Anthony. “Max is priority number one. We’ll figure it out.”

At exactly that moment the waitress returned with three plates balanced on her arm. Cassie’s face assumed a smooth mask, and all traces of suffering and distress vanished. Cassie never showed vulnerability in public. She smiled at the waitress. “Max!” she called. “Honey, come and eat! Come and eat!”