When Huck confronted Kimberly, she admitted to it right away but said it was more like second base, maybe not even. She couldn’t remember and wouldn’t have been able to pick the guy out of a lineup. “The men are an occupational hazard, Sammy. They don’t mean anything.”

“Men?” he said, and he realized then that Kimberly hooked up with her customers all the time, maybe even every night. Was the baby she lost even his? She had made him a laughingstock, an absolute fool for love.

He told her it was rehab or he was leaving. She agreed to rehab, and once she was safely inside the facility, Huck served her with divorce papers, which broke her heart but broke his heart even worse.

Once Huck left the Keys for St. John, it was only a few weeks before he met and fell in love with LeeAnn Small, who was Kimberly’s opposite in every way. Maia liked to throw around the word queen—Beyoncé is a queen, J. Lo is a queen—but in Huck’s life there had been only one queen and that was LeeAnn. She was statuesque, bronze-skinned, dark-eyed. She had a rich laugh and a slow smile that she shared with Huck like a secret.

On their first real date, at Chateau Bordeaux, Huck told LeeAnn about Kimberly. LeeAnn tsked him—because who couldn’t have predicted how that story was going to end—and then said, “If you’re looking for more crazy, you’re in the wrong place.”

LeeAnn didn’t fish but she checked the wind, watched the sky, passed along fish sightings from their West Indian neighbors that Huck would never have heard about otherwise. She introduced Huck to the people at restaurants who would buy his catch. She never gave him a hard time about how long he spent on the water or tinkering on the boat. And, man, could she cook—conch ceviche, Creole fish stew, fresh tuna steaks with lime and toasted coconut.

LeeAnn was tough, stubborn, uncompromising, but unlike Kimberly, she stuck to a moral code and was utterly beyond reproach. Huck was a little scared of her at times. She was a nurse practitioner and the most competent person up at the Myrah Keating Smith Community Health Center, where she treated everything from ankles sprained on the Reef Bay Trail to jellyfish stings to STDs. LeeAnn was strict with Rosie, but despite this—or because of it—Rosie broke the rules again and again and again, eventually getting pregnant by one of the rich men she waited on at Caneel Bay.

There were six golden years when Huck lived in the house on Jacob’s Ladder with LeeAnn, Rosie, and Maia. He can remember sitting down to dinner in the evenings and seeing their bright faces and hearing their chatter or their squabbling and thinking how blessed he was to be among them.

He missed that sweet spot in his life now that it was over.

LeeAnn died of congestive heart failure.