Baker is so excited after their meeting and tour at the Gifft Hill School that he texts Anna from the parking lot.

Found a school for F. They ran assessments, he can start kindergarten now. V. advanced, they said. Happy to have him and he loved it.

“Bye!” Maia calls out. She’s staying at the school to hang out with friends and then someone’s mother is taking them to town.

“Thank you, Maia!” Baker says.

“Thank you, Maia!” Floyd says, waving like a maniac. Then he turns to Baker. “Daddy, how do we know Maia?”

“Oh,” Baker says. Floyd is probably confused because Maia introduced Floyd to the head teacher, Miss Phaedra, as her “sort of nephew,” a phrase that elicited an expression of surprise and suspicion from Miss Phaedra. Apparently, the phrase didn’t get past Floyd either. Baker was glad Maia threw the sort of in there because it could be explained any number of ways; they wouldn’t have to tell Miss Phaedra that Floyd is, in fact, Maia’s actual nephew, the son of Maia’s brother Baker.

Sometimes Baker wishes Floyd weren’t so “advanced.”

“She’s our friend,” Baker says. Not a lie.

“I like her,” Floyd says. “I like the Gifft Hill School. Why are there two Fs?”

“No idea, buddy,” Baker says. He checks that Floyd’s seat belt is fastened, then heads for home.

He doesn’t hear back from Anna until two days later, Wednesday.

K, the text says.

K? Baker thinks. He hadn’t expected a fight, necessarily, or even a debate, but he had anticipated something more than just K. They’re talking about Floyd’s education! Baker was armed with the school brochure and the notes he’d taken in the margins, and he has the website for backup as well as his own impressions, which he’d spent the past two days organizing into a sales pitch. The school is nurturing (but not indulgent), inclusive, tolerant, and forward-thinking. (Anna will love all of this.) The sky is the limit for Floyd! The classes are small and they have an island-as-classroom initiative that gets the kids outside studying nature and history and Caribbean culture.

But…Anna doesn’t care. Anna is relocating to Cleveland, learning the ropes at a new hospital, meeting her colleagues, reviewing protocols, buying furniture, and maybe even getting excited for Louisa to become pregnant.

Baker tries not to feel like he and Floyd have been brushed off, forgotten.

He doesn’t bother telling Anna that he also got good news during the visit to the Gifft Hill School—he’d received a job offer. The upper school, Miss Phaedra said, desperately needed someone to coach basketball and baseball as well as do some administrative work for the athletic department. She mentioned this because Baker was so tall and “fit-seeming” (the “seeming” being key) and she wondered if maybe he had any background in either sport and might want a chance to get involved in the community, seeing as how he was new to the island. It was like she’d read his mind. Baker said that he did indeed have some background in both sports; he’d played basketball and baseball in high school and in college at Northwestern on the intramural level.

“Which means, essentially, that I haven’t used my skills in almost ten years. I’ve been waiting for Floyd to be old enough so I could coach his teams.”

“The job does come with a stipend, and the hours would be after school during the respective seasons,” Miss Phaedra says. “I’d love to be able to pass your name on to the head of school, and she can talk with you more about it.”

It’s exactly what Baker is looking for, and yet he doesn’t commit right away because he still has to go back to Houston for the auction this coming weekend. There’s a quiet but persistent voice in Baker’s head telling him that it’s crazy—and, worse, irresponsible—to move to the Caribbean with Floyd.

He came down here for one reason only and that’s Ayers. But Ayers is with Mick. And Ayers was clear that she wouldn’t even entertain the possibility of a relationship with Baker until he had a job or an opportunity here on St. John.

The whole thing is risky. Baker can leave Houston, take the job at Gifft Hill, and move here, but Ayers might still stay with Mick.

The evening that Anna responds with K, Irene comes home from work with some fresh wahoo steaks from her charter. She grills them for Baker and Floyd, and because Cash is out somewhere, it’s just the three of them eating dinner on the deck. It’s nice. Irene is in a good mood; her frame of mind seems better now that she’s working on Huck’s fishing boat, though she’s not her old self by any means. Baker tells her that Floyd liked the school but he doesn’t say anything about the job offer yet. He reminds his mother that he and Floyd are headed back to Houston on Friday for the auction.

“Right,” Irene says, though it’s clear she’s forgotten about it. “But you’re coming back, yes?”

“Yes?” Baker says. “I think so. I mean, yes.” He wants to sound definitive but the truth is, he’s not sure. He’s packing everything they brought down, just in case.

“When?” Irene says. “When will you be back?”

“I don’t have return tickets yet,” Baker says. “Though I can get them, of course, at a moment’s notice. I have to figure some stuff out when I get to Houston. What to do about the house, my car, that kind of thing.”

“Of course,” Irene says. “No one expects you to drop everything and move down here. Though that’s what I did.” She laughs—at her own crazy spontaneity, maybe. “And that’s what your brother did.”

“Where is Cash tonight?” Baker asks. He suddenly gets a bad feeling. Cash didn’t come back after Treasure Island. Did he go somewhere with Ayers? Out to dinner? This is what Baker has privately feared about Cash and Ayers working together, that they would become chummy, that Cash would, somehow, manage to charm her.

“He had an incident on the boat today, I guess,” Irene says. “Passenger got drunk and Cash was called on to help get the girl home. Turned out the girl had a friend that Cash knew. From that restaurant you both like so much?”

“La Tapa?” Baker says.

“That must be it,” Irene says. “And I think he went out with the friend. Something like that.”

Baker pushes his chair away from the table. “Was it Ayers, Mom? Is he out with Ayers?”

“It wasn’t Ayers,” Irene says. She throws Baker an exasperated look. “You boys, honestly. No, it was some other name. British, unusual…”

“Tilda?” Baker says.

“Yes!” Irene says. “He went out with Tilda.”

“Who’s Tilda?” Floyd asks.

“A friend of your uncle’s,” Irene says.

Baker can’t describe his relief. He tousles Floyd’s hair. “You want some ice cream, buddy? They had red velvet cake at the Starfish Market.”

Baker puts Floyd to bed, then decides to turn in himself, mostly because there’s nothing else to do. Cash is still out and Baker has no other friends. If he were at home in Houston right now, he would smoke some weed and crash out in front of the TV—he needs to catch up on Game of Thrones—but he can’t watch that with Irene around.

His phone rings. This, he thinks, will be Anna, just getting home from work at nine o’clock at night. He steels himself. It would be just like Anna to have glanced at his text distractedly and responded with K, but then, after running the whole thing past Louisa, suddenly have a list of objections.

Baker should have texted Louisa.

But his display says Ayers.

“Ayers?” he says.

“Hey.” Her voice sounds funny—sad, trembling, like she’s been crying. “Are you busy?”

“Not at all,” he says. “I just put Floyd to bed so I can talk. What’s up?”

There’s a pause. “Can you get out? Is Cash there? Or your mom? To watch Floyd?”

“Uh…yeah. Cash is out but my mom is here.” Baker stands up and checks himself in the mirror. He hasn’t shaved—or showered, for that matter, unless swimming in the pool counts as a shower—since the day he went to Gifft Hill, Monday. He does have a nice tan now, but he looks like a Caribbean hobo. “Do you want to meet somewhere?”

“Can you just come here, to my place?” Ayers asks. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Your place?”

“Fish Bay,” Ayers says. “It’ll take you fifteen minutes if you leave right now.”

“Right now?” Baker says. And before he can explain that he needs to shower and change, she’s giving him directions.

Unlike the rest of the island, Fish Bay is flat. And really dark. Ayers said she lived past the second little bridge on the left, but Baker would have missed her house if he hadn’t caught a flash of green, her truck, out of the corner of his eye.

She’s standing in the doorway, backlit, hugging herself. He doesn’t need to feel bad about not showering, he sees. She’s still wearing her Treasure Island uniform and her hair is wild and curly.

“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

She moves so that he can step past her, inside.

Her place is small, cute, bohemian. There’s a tiny kitchen with thick ceramic dishes on open shelves. There’s a papasan chair, a bunch of houseplants, a glass bowl filled with sand dollars, and a gallery wall of photographs from places all over the world—the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids, the Matterhorn. Ayers is in every picture; in many, she’s a kid.

“Have you been to all these places?” Baker asks.

“Story for another day,” she says. “Come sit.”

Baker picks a spot next to Ayers on a worn leather sofa draped with a tapestry. There’s a coffee table with three pillar candles sitting in a dish of pebbles, and lying across the pebbles is a joint.

Are they going to smoke?

“Would you like a glass of water?” Ayers asks.

“Maybe in a minute,” Baker says. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

Ayers folds her legs underneath her. How is it possible that even when she looks awful, she’s beautiful?

“This morning—” She laughs. “Which now feels like three days ago.” She picks up the joint and lifts a barbecue lighter off the side table, then seems to think better of it and sets both down. “It’s been a very long day.”

“Some days are like that,” Baker says. “Start at the beginning.”

“Last night Mick told me he had to go to St. Thomas to get restaurant supplies today,” Ayers says. “Whatever, I found it a little strange, but I didn’t question it. Too much.” She throws her hands up. “Anyway, then this morning, I saw him on the ferry with Brigid.”

Baker makes a face like he’s surprised. But he’s not surprised. He knew Mick would screw it up. He actually wishes Cash were here to listen to this. Baker leans in. “You’re kidding.”

“Not kidding. I saw them sitting together and I was…pissed. Livid. Suspicious.”

“I bet.”

“So I sent him a text telling him never to call me again.”

Baker spreads his palms against the cool, cracked leather of the sofa. This is real? He didn’t fall asleep in bed next to Floyd? Ayers is telling him exactly what he’s been waiting to hear, only much sooner than he had hoped. Her timing couldn’t be better.

“Then Cash and I had this weird, awful thing happen at work.”

“Yeah, I heard, sort of.”

“This girl got really drunk, and I thought she’d tanked while snorkeling. We stopped the boat, I dove off, your brother dove off, this other kid who’s probably going to be in the Olympics dove off, it was a total circus, and in the end the chick was in the head changing out of one inappropriate suit into a second, even more inappropriate suit, and this was all before we even got to Jost. The girl continued to drink and then puked off the side the whole way home.” Ayers sighs. “And I left your brother to handle it because guess who was waiting for me at the dock.”

“Mick,” Baker says, and he suspects that maybe this story isn’t going to have the ending he wants it to.

“Mick,” Ayers says. “He just left here a little while ago. Right before I called you. We broke up.”

“You broke up?” Baker says. He’s afraid to go back to feeling optimistic. “What did he say? Why was he with Brigid?”

“He said they bumped into each other. Unplanned. A coincidence. She was headed over to St. Thomas to get a tattoo of the petroglyphs.”

“Okay?” Baker says.

“I just got a tattoo of the petroglyphs a few weeks ago,” Ayers says. She holds out her ankle so Baker can see the tattoo; it’s a curlicue symbol in dark green. “We’re hardly the only two people in the universe with a petroglyph tattoo. Rosie had one. But still, I was chafed.”

“Understandably,” Baker says.

“Mick says they only talked for a couple of minutes, then Mick took Gordon, that’s our dog, his dog, up to stand at the bow and he didn’t see Brigid again.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t want to believe him,” Ayers says. “But I do.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“So…why did you break up?”