“There’s no time to get in your feelings, Ed,” he says. “A bold yet subtle Barolo awaits.”

The wine, Ed has to admit, tastes divine even to his unsophisticated palate (left to his own devices, he’s a beer drinker), though he holds himself to half a glass. What he’s really interested in tonight is food. Andrea is seated next to him but she’s whispering with Phoebe and Delilah about the Richardsons. They couldn’t leave it alone; they had to one-up us!

The Chief is going to use his wife’s obsession with the Richardsons to his advantage. He does some ordering for the table—two fritto mistos, the farfalle with crab and local corn (sourced from Jeffrey and Delilah’s farm), the strozzapreti with sausage and broccoli rabe, the ricotta crostini, the stuffed clams.

“Ed,” Andrea says in a warning tone. Andrea is the police chief now, at least where Ed’s diet is concerned.

Ed throws in an order of the giardiniera and a Caesar salad. He waits until Andrea turns away, then says to the server, “For the main course, the Fiorentina.” This is the finest steak on the island; Ed dreams about it the way some men dream about Margot Robbie. It’s a thirty-three-ounce porterhouse served with roasted rosemary potatoes. Ed pushes away thoughts of the salt, the fat, his heart. At home, it’s been chicken, fish, and vegetables for the past six months.

When the steak arrives sizzling on the platter—the scent is enough to bring Ed to his knees—he helps himself to two rosy-pink pieces. This might be what kills him, but what a way to go.

Andrea notices the fried shrimp and squid, the helpings of pasta, and the rare steak, but she zips her lip. She’s proud of Ed—he’s lost thirty-five pounds, started jogging three mornings a week, switched to decaf coffee, stopped going to the Nickel four times a week for lunch (the shrimp po’boy is his kryptonite), and he’s at least pretending to meditate ten minutes each day. Andrea is also relieved that they made it to the end of the summer without any major incidents. That’s not to say the summer was boring—au contraire! The moment Phoebe introduced them to Addison’s new clients the Richardsons, their summer became a blur of lunches at the Field and Oar Club, pickleball, sailing excursions, and parties, parties, parties. Andrea hasn’t had a summer like this since before her kids were born. For most of the summer, the Richardsons seemed like a gift sent from the heavens to remind them that they weren’t too old to have fun.

But when Andrea thinks about the Richardsons now, she… no, she won’t let them live rent-free in her head. She’ll just feel happy that Ed is enjoying his steak.

Addison makes a toast. “To our fearless leader!” Everyone raises a glass; Ed is honored but also a little embarrassed. He drinks his red wine—he thinks Addison might have refilled his glass without his noticing—and suddenly he grows reflective.

He moved to Nantucket from Swampscott thirty-five years earlier when the chief of police position opened. People had warned him that policing on an island would be different than on the mainland. It was like a small town except that it was thirty miles out to sea, so there was no getting away. This has been tricky enough to navigate even in the off-season, and during Ed’s tenure, the year-round population has doubled. But come June, the island explodes with summer residents, short-term renters, and day-trippers, some of whom feel inclined to rent mopeds despite not having a clue how to operate them. There’s traffic to deal with, scores of parking tickets on the daily, kids from the cities and fancy suburbs with their designer drugs and entitled attitudes giving his officers lip.

Beyond that, there’s real trouble—domestics, vandalism, drunk driving, overdoses, accidental deaths. Ed worked a case out in Monomoy half a dozen years earlier that he still believes was murder, though they never quite figured it out.

Their server shows up with a dessert sampler for the table—an apple crostata with cinnamon gelato, baba au rhum, and cannoli.

Phoebe takes a bite of the crostata and says, “This tastes like fall.”

“Blasphemy,” Delilah says. “There’s still an entire month of summer left.”

Ed is considering a cannoli, but he’s afraid he’s pushed the limits of his diet far enough. Andrea is the one who places a cannoli on his plate, her cheeks flushed from the wine. She leans over and kisses him on the lips, a good kiss, one that promises more later. “It’s your special night.”

Ed gazes around the table, and his eyes land on Kacy. She looks wistful, maybe even lonesome; she keeps checking her phone. It’s funny, the Chief thinks. No matter how old your kids get, you still worry about them. Kacy and Coco were close all summer, a Millennial Laverne and Shirley, but things between them seem to have cooled. When the Chief asked Andrea if Kacy and Coco had a falling-out, Andrea said, “They’re grown women, Ed.” Whatever that meant.

After coffee is served, there’s another surprise. Their server turns up the music—Harry Connick Jr. singing “It Had to Be You”—and moves the other tables so they have room to dance. Andrea takes Ed’s hand. “Come on, Chief, let’s show them how it’s done.”

Phoebe and Addison join them on the improvised dance floor, then Jeffrey and Delilah. In that moment, the word retirement, a term that previously evoked only dread for the Chief, seems filled with promise. The weight of the island’s problems will be lifted from his shoulders. He and Andrea can travel; he’ll be able to go out fishing on Eric’s charter boat whenever he wants—maybe he’ll even take a job as Eric’s first mate. They’ll enjoy other nights like this when the Chief can have more than half a glass of wine.

He’ll be free.

“Are you sure you won’t get sick of me hanging around all the time?” he asks Andrea. Before she can answer, Ed’s phone buzzes in his pocket.

Andrea groans. “Please just let it go.”

He checks the screen. It’s the station, line four, which means it’s an emergency.

“I’m sorry,” Ed says. “I have to—”

He steps off the dance floor, lifts the phone to one ear, and plugs his other ear with two fingers. It’s his dispatcher, the aptly named Jennifer Speed, whom they just call Speed. The woman defines efficiency. “Do you want the bad news or the bad news?” she asks.

The Chief doesn’t want any news and Speed knows it. He has one hundred hours left as Nantucket’s police chief. “What is it?”

“There’s a fire out in Pocomo,” Speed says. “The NFD is on the scene. I talked to Stu, who says it’s a total loss. Burned to the ground.”

“Pocomo?” the Chief says. “It’s not…”

“The Richardsons’ house, yes, it is,” Speed says. She pauses. “Was.”

The Chief closes his eyes. He feels Andrea’s hand on his back.

“What else?” he says.

“Their assistant, woman by the name of Colleen Coyle?”

“Coco, yes,” the Chief says. “I know her. She’s a friend of Kacy’s.”

“Apparently the Richardsons were having a party on their yacht when someone called them about the smoke at their house, and they hightailed it back. The girl, Coco, was on the boat, but when they got back to the mooring, she was gone. As in, no longer on the boat.”

“No longer on the boat?” the Chief says. “Where did she go?”

“Nobody knows,” Speed says. “She’s missing.”

“Is she the only one?”

“As far as I know, everyone else on the boat is accounted for, and Captain…”

“Lamont?” the Chief says.

“Yes, Lamont Oakley called the harbormaster. The harbormaster called us.”

The Chief turns back to the table. Kacy’s face is bathed in blue light from her phone; she gasps and looks up at him. The Nantucket Current must have just broken the story.

“Thank you, Speed,” he says. The Richardsons’ house burned down, and Coco is missing? The Chief wants to believe this is a prank, a gotcha for his final days. But he knows it’s real. If he’s honest, he would admit he feared something awful like this would happen with the Richardsons. “Tell them I’m on my way.”

1. The Cobblestone Telegraph I

Most towns have a rumor mill. We here on Nantucket have what’s known as the cobblestone telegraph—and Blond Sharon has long been the switchboard operator. Everything goes through her.

But this summer, a twist: Blond Sharon is now the topic of gossip. Everyone on the island is talking about how Blond Sharon’s husband, Walker, left her for his physical therapist, a woman who is less than half Walker’s age. Walker tore his ACL skiing over the holidays, and in March, he announced that he’d fallen in love with “Bailey from PT.” He was leaving Sharon; he wanted a divorce.

Ouch, we thought. It’s hardly a new story, a middle-aged man leaving his wife for a younger woman, but we thought Blond Sharon’s family was bulletproof. Sharon is an exemplary mother. She secured her sixteen-year-old twin girls, Sterling and Colby, coveted internships at the Nantucket Historical Association (unpaid, but so good for their college applications). Sharon’s thirteen-year-old son, Robert, has type 1 diabetes, and Sharon monitors his blood sugar using an app on her phone. We feel bad that Sharon has been dropped like a hot potato at the age of fifty-four, but none of us feel guilty talking about it. When we think of how many hours Blond Sharon has spent blabbing about other people’s business, we can’t help but see this moment as a kind of poetic justice.

The good news, we all think, is that Sharon has her sister, Heather, to lean on. Sharon and Heather are polar opposites: Sharon is blond and Heather is brunette; Sharon is a stay-at-home mom, Heather is an attorney with the corporate finance division of the SEC in Washington. Blond Sharon is like the flight attendant who overshares about the pilot’s hemorrhoids and the famous talk-show host seated in 3C; Heather is the black box. The only thing Heather has ever done with a secret is keep it.

Heather is also the voice of reason. When Sharon admits that what bothers her most about Walker leaving her is being a cliché, Heather says, “Just promise not to wear statement necklaces and fake eyelashes and take cruises in the Mediterranean looking for a rich replacement husband.”

Sharon blinks. That had been her plan exactly.

“This is your chance to reinvent yourself,” Heather says. “Do you remember the quote you taped to your bedroom mirror when we were young?”

It wasn’t a quote, Sharon thinks. It was the last two lines of the Mary Oliver poem “The Summer Day”: Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life? Sharon discovered the poem one summer when she worked shelving books at the New Canaan Public Library. The lines, which Sharon typed out on her father’s electric Smith Corona and taped to her bedroom mirror, had always seemed like a challenge—but when she thinks about it now, it feels like one she has failed to meet. She has spent her one wild and precious life selecting wallpaper and scheduling the pool cleaners; she has spent it reading People magazine in line at the market and fruitlessly trying to improve her backhand. She has spent it scrolling through her phone.