“I’ll ask the obvious question. Why didn’t your dad just leave your mom earlier? Why didn’t he leave her in year five or ten or fifteen? My mother—” Link sets the fritter down without tasting it and stares out the window. “She never got married. She had boyfriends when she was young and she hooked up with my dad, obviously, and there was a guy she was serious about when I was little, but that didn’t work out. She was alone. I could never understand it, my friends didn’t get it—so many of them thought she was super hot. My grandma used to get on her case all the time about meeting someone.” He sets his elbows on the table and drops his head in his hands. “Now, all I can think is that she wasted her life, year after year, waiting for Labor Day weekend to roll around. How do you live like that? Only seeing the person you love three or four days a year?”

“My dad said it was…well, excruciating was his exact word.”

Link gives a short, bitter laugh. “Excruciating for him? No offense, Bess, but he was married. He went right home to your mother.” Link pushes away the pakora on his share plate and Bess thinks, Oh no, no, no! She only wanted to tell Link what she knew. She didn’t mean to hurt him or make him angry. “You can see how this little arrangement…”

“Same time next year,” Bess says. “It was a movie they used to watch.”

“Yeah, well, the same time next year was profoundly unfair to my mother.”

“That’s what I told my dad,” Bess says. “The arrangement was lopsided. And sexist.” Bess remembers how Jake had patiently endured her tirade about white male privilege. “He assured me that the arrangement was Mallory’s choice. I guess there were a couple of junctures when my dad said he wanted to be with her on a permanent basis and she turned him down. She didn’t want to leave Nantucket.”

“She never would have left the island.”

“He said she was happy. He told me she had a full life.” Bess’s second glass of wine is dropped off by none other than Shamin herself.

“Is everything okay here?” Shamin asks, eyeing the untouched pakoras. “We are busy preparing your entrées.”

“Delicious!” Bess says, too eagerly, and she takes a perfunctory bite of pakora.

“Very good,” Shamin says, smiling, and thankfully, she leaves them.

Bess turns back to Link. “I’m not pretending to know what your mother’s life was like. You would know that far better than me. But my dad claims she had her job, her cottage, friends, a community…and you.”