“Couldn’t he rent it?” asked Anthony. “For actual money?”

“He could,” said the friend. Ryan Fitzsimmons, his name was. In college they called him Fitzy. “But, dude, this place is old. It looks like something your great-great-great-grandmother would have lived in. And he can’t be bothered to fix it up. But he doesn’t want it left alone either. Comes with a car too. A Le Baron. Also old.”

“Why don’t you stay there?” asked Anthony.

“Me?” Fitzy laughed, long, deep, almost insolently. “No way. Charlotte’s parents hooked us up with a sweet house on Nantucket for August. And I don’t get that much time off from the bank anyway. Gotta keep making the coin.”

Rub it in, why don’t you? thought Anthony.

Anthony had wanted to go farther away, to a different type of island: Anguilla, Saint Martin, Barbados, someplace where a person could slip in among the beautiful and the glamorous. But his coin was gone. All of his coins were gone.

When the ferry docked he let the bachelorettes lurch ahead of him, pulling their weekender rollaway bags. He now observed that the bride-to-be had a white bow affixed to the side of her cowboy hat—he had missed this before. Her shirt, instead of saying Jennie’s Last Rodeo, said My Last Rodeo. Clever.

Have a great bachelorette weekend, Jennie. Have a wonderful life and a happy, happy marriage.

Marriage is the worst kind of heartbreak, he wrote in his head. That’s what the disgraced, lonely man wanted to say to the young bride-to-be. Get out while you still can, Jennie. Run for the hills.

Before he and Cassie got married she’d gone on a yoga retreat with her four bridesmaids. It was all very civilized and Zen. He’d gone on a bender with his Dartmouth buddies, the details of which were hazy.

He plodded down the ferry ramp and stood for a moment. The wave of summer humanity undulated around him. No. Delete.

Just ahead of him was a large white Victorian-era hotel with a sign reading HARBORSIDE INN. Next to it, another one: NEW SHOREHAM HOUSE. Next to that, another inn, and another one. Any deck attached to any building was full of laughing, drinking people. There were dogs and children and ice-cream cones and sunlight, mopeds and bicycles and Jeeps. And here was Anthony Puckett, dragging behind him his own wheelie bag, holding in his hand a wrinkled piece of paper with an address on Corn Neck Road.

He supposed he’d have to find a taxi to take him to the borrowed cottage, the borrowed Le Baron. Did an island this small have taxis? Ubers? Anything? He could feel sweat dripping down his neck, and his jeans were sticking to his legs. He trudged up the hill that led away from the ferry, and he crossed the street. There his eyes snagged on a sign on a small building next to the post office. He felt a squeeze like cold fingers on his heart.

ISLAND BOUND BOOKS said the sign. And in the front window, of course, inevitable as death or taxes, Leonard Puckett’s latest. The cover was fire-engine-red; no images, just the white letters of the title popping out, The Thrill of the Chase. Book number nine in the Gabriel Shelton series.