“But why?” asked Luca. He looked so genuinely perplexed that Joy almost felt sorry for him. But then she thought about her little shop. She thought about the fingers-to-the-bone effort she’d been putting in for a decade now. She thought about the time the compressor on the walk-in freezer had failed and the repair had cost so much that she’d had to beg Harlan for an extension on the rent payment for three months until she could get herself back on track. She thought about Harlan’s mother moving into her long-term care facility.

“Yes,” she said firmly. “You have a permit. But according to our records, you do not have a roving permit.”

“Eh?” He began to glower. He looked like he might start to chase a villain around while waving a rolling pin, with his chef’s hat lifting off of his head and following several inches behind.

Joy glanced down at the place where a clipboard would have been if she’d thought to bring one. “My records show that your permit is a single-use, single-space permit.” She’d made that up.

“Pardon me?”

“That’s right.” She decided to repeat it, because it sounded so legitimate. “You were issued a permit for a single location, and each time you move your truck you are in violation of the permit.”

Luca blinked at her and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “What is the . . .” He paused, maybe searching for the right word. He looked worried. She almost felt bad for him, again, but then she thought about Bridezilla, and Harlan, and Dustin’s uselessness, and she kept going.

“The penalty?”

“Yes, this is it. The penalty. What is it that you want?”

“Well,” said Joy. It had not occurred to her to think too much past this point. And she knew Luca was asking the question literally, but she found that in her mind she was answering it in the abstract. I want my island back, she wanted to say. I want you to take your golden-skinned son and your twenty-four flavors and your high-end truck and the backing of your New York financiers and I want you to go back where you came from, because if you aren’t going to stick around and put your kid in the school and your tax dollars in the coffers and your butt in the bleachers at basketball games that our kids take hour-long ferry rides to get to, then you don’t deserve to be here right now.

“We are almost done here anyway,” Luca said. “It has been—how do you say it?—a shit summer for the business. And this is the . . . what is it, the ultimate straw.”

Now she was perplexed. “But how can you say that? I drive past your truck all the time. There’s always a line.”

“Lines, yes. But the overhead is high, and the profits are low. So many expenses! You can’t imagine what it costs, to get the ingredients here.”

Oh, she thought, oh, but I can.