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The Vineyard Yacht Club sat at the edge of town, a pretty clubhouse perched in front of a busy swatch of harbor.

After working at the diner the past year, Betsy didn’t want to serve anyone grilled cheese or hamburgers again, so she walked past the restaurant to the small beach where the sailing club kept their fleet.

A row of white Opti sailboats were lined up on the pebbly sand, and she asked a baby-faced instructor in navy shorts and collared shirt if he knew where she could find Wiley Prescott.

He pointed to a small white shed halfway down the beach, the double doors wide-open.

“Thank you,” she said, kicking off her cork-soled flip-flops and leaving them near the entrance to the beach.

She found Wiley fixing a sail that had tangled in the rigging. “Hi.” Betsy waved, then adjusted her high ponytail. It took him a minute to register it was her. Then the man grinned, his face looking older than she remembered.

“Welcome home, kiddo.” Wiley stepped over the rigging to give her a quick hug. “Your mother mentioned you were here.”

She let the salt air fill her lungs and felt the tension in her shoulders relax; she was genuinely happy to be at the sailing school.

She’d left a piece of her heart here when she stopped teaching after high school.

“I always forget how beautiful this place is when I’m living my life in the real world. ”

“It never disappoints, and it never changes either. That’s part of the island’s appeal.” Wiley delivered a knowing raise of his eyebrows. “What can I help you with, Betts?”

Betsy rubbed ChapStick on her lips. “Any chance you need another instructor this summer? I’m in desperate need of a job.”

Wiley tore off a piece of tape, nodding along as she explained her predicament.

He wasn’t your typical millionaire. Six foot two and lanky like a teenager, even in his fifties, Wiley had always carried himself like a big kid.

He’d bought the yacht club from an island family when Betsy was a kid, and he’d renovated the simple captain’s house into a more refined, windowed version, which now housed the sailing school for kids and happy hours for their parents.

He’d even made it more of a social club, adding on a nautical-themed dining room replete with a piano player and steamed lobsters so families could eat while overlooking the fancy boats in Edgartown Harbor.

To the disappointment of his members, who were eager to network and chat with the newspaperman who owned a string of papers around the country, he rarely made an appearance.

You could most often find Wiley volunteering at regattas or tinkering with the Optis, sometimes puttering around in a motorboat to help the instructors round up kids who lost their way in the wind, or lack thereof.

He was beloved by locals due to his expansion of the scholarship program; Betsy’s childhood friend James had received a grant to sail, as did a dozen other island children.

“Of course I’ll hire you.” He smoothed the repair tape.

“I need an experienced sailor, and you were always one of our best.” Not only would she teach kids to sail every morning and afternoon, he said, but she’d manage the junior instructors too.

She’d make two hundred fifty dollars a week, and he asked her to stay through Labor Day, since the college kids often left before. “Can you start right after the Fourth?”

“Yes!” She pretended to worship him with her hands. “Thank you so much. I need out of my house right now.”

“And why? Your mother is the loveliest woman I know.” Wiley asked her to help him fold the repaired sailcloth, and she followed him outside to the sand.

“Living with her and my sisters is a bit much. I need a little space.”

Over the last decade, Wiley and her mother had become close friends, much to Betsy’s father’s dismay.

Her father hated Wiley’s left-leaning newspaper and its editorials, which sometimes clashed with his more centrist ideas, and he often complained that Wiley was so rich he didn’t know what to do with himself other than pick apart well-meaning political campaigns.

Nothing her father said made her and her sisters dislike Wiley though—just like all the other kids at the yacht club, Betsy had always adored him.

“You promise you’ll only assign me the good kids, right?”

Wiley stacked the sail onto a pile of other folded ones in the corner of the shed. “I will do no such thing. You and James drove our instructors bonkers.” Wiley waved at someone behind Betsy. “Well, look who it is.”

She glanced to the side, assuming he was speaking of one of the kids, but this person was taller, older.

Betsy pivoted to say hello, her mouth agape when she realized who it was.

Nothing but three feet of sand between them.

Her eye lingered, cataloging. It was James Sunday, and he looked the same if you didn’t count how tousled and wispy his hair was now.

The same boyish face, his brows thick but never bushy, the same golden skin tone and bashful smile.

Her cheeks blazed. She hadn’t expected to see James since they lost touch years ago, theirs a distance formed less by brutal heartbreak and more of a petering out. It had always bothered her that he had seemed to move on before she had. “Hi,” she managed.

“Hi.” His eyes grew curious. “I didn’t know you were on the island.” At that, he glanced at Wiley, who held up his hands like he was innocent.

“My mom needed me to come home.” Betsy was talking with her hands now, too, thanks to a nervous tic of hers. “I’m going to teach sailing again. Right here. With Wiley.”

Betsy could see everything in James that she had seen at sixteen. The boy with the halo over his head, a heart full of empathy, and long curling eyelashes.

“You look exactly the same,” he said, taking a step back. He motioned to her shorts, his cheek registering a faint twitch while his voice sounded light. “I see you’re still making your own cutoffs.”

That he knew her that well made her want to hug him. She smiled. “I could make better jeans than Gloria Vanderbilt.” Her mind raced for things to say. “All I need is a good pair of shears. What are you doing on the island? I didn’t think you lived here anymore.”

She’d heard through the grapevine that James had moved to California a few years back after his mother died.

A lump formed in her throat, a flash of shame spreading down to her fingertips.

Why hadn’t she sent him a condolence card?

She had been too eager to please her father, who’d always disapproved of her relationship with James, but she should have sent James a note anyway.

When her father died, they’d received thousands of letters from well-wishers, and reading them had been critical to Betsy’s grieving.

“Yes, well, the house is in between renters. I figured there’s nothing like an East Coast summer,” he said.

James wore Nike sneakers and a soft gray T-shirt with B ERKELEY printed on the pocket.

His cheeks had lost the extra pinch of fat, and he looked chiseled now, like the guy who sang “Born to Run.” Bruce Springsteen!

James resembled Springsteen, and he stood before her now like he no longer carried the whole world on his back.

“I can’t believe you really left.” She let her voice cool from its earlier high pitch, looking about for Wiley, but he’d gone down the beach to one of the pint-sized sailboats carrying a can of paint. “I thought you’d always be an islander.”

“So did your father.” He shifted his weight onto his other canvas sneaker.

The accusation silenced Betsy, and with her eye on a passing seagull, she thought about ending the conversation there.

Then he continued. “The Realtors are telling me I can get a better price renting with the success of Jaws and all, so I’m fixing it up. ”

“That’s what I’ve heard, real estate prices have skyrocketed.” Why were they talking about houses? The last time they were together they were sneaking out of them. “When will you put it up for rent?”

“Labor Day. I figured I’d spend the summer here.” He was holding a tub of cement and a couple of boxes of plain white tile, and when he realized she was looking at him, he said, “I’m finally fixing that bathroom floor in my mother’s house. I just came by to help Wiley with something.”

“You’ve gotten handy, then?” When she was thirteen, she’d sliced her foot open on the chipped tiles in James’s bathroom, her mother angry with her for going to his house when she’d told her not to.

Betsy had needed three stitches, and she’d been punished on the night they’d had plans to go to the Agricultural Fair.

Her mother made her write a two-paragraph essay to earn her freedom, titled: “Older Boys Are Trouble Because…”

God, her mother was infuriating sometimes.

“Pretty handy, yes.” James briefly cupped the back of his neck.

His hands were bigger now, and she imagined how fast he could pull up rigging on a boat these days.

She’d only known him as a boy, then a teenager.

He asked her how Columbia was, and Betsy lied, saying she loved her degree program.

How did he know she was at Columbia? Wiley, maybe.

She asked him what he was doing these days.

“Teaching history at Berkeley,” he said, and at this moment, his eyes shone, like he’d been waiting his entire life to tell her this. Or anyone, maybe. “I’m writing on the side.”

He’d wanted to be a writer even back then. He’d always adored her mother, and Betsy had hated when he’d ask what she was working on. What teenage boy cared? Betsy would privately seethe when he went out of his way to read her mother’s articles in Vogue .