Free The Matchmaker by Elin Hilderbrand

safe and content, home and at peace on her island, but Clen had been restless and angry, still the boy whose energy could not be contained.
    Had Dabney thought their relationship would last? She hadn’t been able to imagine the alternative.
    But it had not lasted, no, not at all. Clen had left for Thailand, and there had followed twenty-seven years of silence. And yet something had lasted because Dabney couldn’t stop thinking about the man. It was absurd! Dabney was furious with herself. No one else could control her. She would not go to Clen today, or tomorrow. She would not go to him, ever. But certainly he knew where she lived? Everyone on Nantucket knew that Dabney Kimball Beech lived in the fish lots, on Charter Street. He could look her up in the phone book; she was plainly listed. Furthermore, he could come walking into the Chamber whenever he pleased.
    It was for this reason, or so she told herself, that Dabney left work on the third afternoon and drove out the Polpis Road. She would see Clen, say hello and goodbye, and leave. If she bumped into him on the street, it would be awkward, but at least the initial contact would be out of the way.
    However, as she approached the mailbox marked 432, she hit the gas rather than the brake, and sped right past. She kept going—past Sesachacha Pond, past Sankaty Head Golf Course, through the village of Sconset, until she was back on the Milestone Road heading west. The top was down on the Impala and she howled into the open sky. She felt like she had won some kind of game or contest. Clendenin Hughes wanted to see her! But she would not go!
    She tossed and turned that night with the knowledge that Clendenin Hughes was on the island, in his bed. She knew he was thinking of her.
    She got up several times to peer out the window to see if he was standing in the street in front of her house. He had never seen her Impala. When he’d left, three cars ago, she was still driving the Nova.
    So many years had passed. She knew from reading about him when he won the Pulitzer that he had never married or had other children.
    She thought about taking a sleeping pill. Box had some in the medicine cabinet left over from his knee replacement, but instead Dabney lay wide-eyed in bed. She was too antsy to read—even Jane Austen wouldn’t soothe her—and she had no appetite. She felt the velvet dark of four o’clock change into the birdsong hour of five o’clock, which slid into the first pearly light of six o’clock. She went downstairs and made coffee. She put on clothes for her power walk—her gray yoga pants and a crimson T-shirt emblazoned with a white H. (Box kept her outfitted like a faculty wife, though she had been to campus only twice since she’d graduated.) She slipped on her headband, drank her coffee standing up, and tied her sneakers. She set out onto the streets of Nantucket an hour earlier than normal, which wasn’t like her, but that stood to reason as she was not feeling at all herself.
      
    She arrived back at the house at quarter past seven, energized. She ate a piece of whole grain toast with blueberry jam and half a banana. Tomorrow, she would eat the other half of the banana over her shredded wheat. Everything was fine, normal.
    It was only in the shower that she started to cry. The weight of the sleepless night and the enormous burden of the situation poured over her. She got out of the shower, threw on her yoga pants and a T-shirt, and, with her hair still wet, she climbed into her car.
      
    He was sitting on the porch of the cottage in a granny rocker, smoking a cigarette, with a gun across his lap like a character in a John Wayne Western. His beard made him look like a hermit, or a serial killer.
    When Dabney stepped out of the car, he didn’t seem at all surprised. He dropped the cigarette into a jar of water at his feet and it hissed upon extinguishing.
    “Hey, Cupe,” he said.
    Hey, Cupe.
    His voice. She had not accounted for how hearing his voice