Free The Island by Elin Hilderbrand

started to settle, like a dog on its canvas Orvis bed, like a baby in its quilted Moses basket. She had crisscrossed the United States of America dozens of times with little expectation or fanfare, but the mere sight of Madaket Harbor, sparkling blue and green in the July sun, smelling salty and swampy, and presenting itself exactly as she remembered it when she was last here at seventeen years old, was turning Tate to jelly.
    Home!
    And there, whistling, waving his bronzed arm in an arc, cutting a frothy swath through the placid water of the harbor, was her prince on a white horse—it was Barrett Lee on a thirty-three-foot Boston Whaler Outrage with dual 250s off the back. In gold letters across the back of the boat, it said, Girlfriend, NANTUCKET, MASS.
    “Barrett Lee,” Chess said. Her voice sounded surprised, as if he’d appeared out of the recesses of her deepest memory. Tate, meanwhile, had thought about nothing but Barrett Lee since her mother had first mentioned his name.
    She wondered if Barrett Lee was married. She had searched for him on Facebook and come up empty handed. She had googled him but had been unable to find evidence of her Barrett Lee amid the 714 other Barrett Lees who had left footprints in cyberspace. She searched the online archives of the Inquirer and Mirror, the Nantucket weekly newspaper, and discovered—aha!—that Barrett Lee had been in the Thursday night dart league in 2006 and 2007.
    Tate wondered if she would still have feelings for Barrett Lee, and if she did, would these be new feelings, or old, resurrected feelings? She wasn’t the same person she’d been thirteen years ago, and he wouldn’t be either. So did resurrected old feelings even count, if she didn’t know him anymore?
    This was all pretty deep thinking for Tate. She preferred to work in tangibles, and what was tangible was this: Barrett Lee was more attractive than ever. The kind of attractive that made Tate feel like her heart was being pulled out through her nose. Was that tangible enough for you?
    “I got his girlfriend right here,” Tate said. Chess may have been heartbroken, medicated, and shorn, but there was no way she was getting Barrett Lee. Tate planted her feet, removed the earbuds of her iPod, and waved back.
    Barrett Lee was the person from Tate’s past who evoked the deepest and most poignant longing. In Tate’s memory, she had loved him since he was six and she was five. At six, Barrett had been what her parents called a towhead; his hair was white, like an old person’s. Tate’s most intense memories centered on the summer she was seventeen, the last summer she’d been to Tuckernuck with her family. It was for Tate, as it no doubt was for many other seventeen-year-olds, the seminal summer of her life. She had been headed into her senior year of high school. Barrett Lee, she remembered, had just graduated, and although Plymouth State had expressed interest in him as a wide receiver, he wasn’t going to college. Tate found this very exotic. Chess had just finished her freshman year at Colchester in Vermont, which epitomized the New England collegiate experience that absolutely everyone in Tate’s New Canaan high school was seeking: the scholarly brick buildings with white pillars, the green quadrangle, the flaming orange maple trees, the cable-knit sweaters, the ponytails, the keg parties, the a cappella singing groups strolling among the tailgaters as Colchester took on rival Bowdoin in football. Instead of going to college, Barrett Lee was going to work for his father; he was going to learn to build houses and then take care of them once they were built. He was going to tile bathrooms, plumb dishwashers, wire stove burners. He was going to build bookshelves and window seats. He was going to make money, buy his own boat, fish for striped bass, ride his Jeep to Coatue on the weekends, go to the Chicken Box, drink beer, see bands, pick up girls. He was going to live life. God, Tate could remember