28 Summers

Jake discovers Facebook and adds several of Mallory’s family members as friends on his profile. He looks at Mallory’s profile but doesn’t request to be her friend, since he thinks she’ll decline. While he’s on Nantucket kayaking with Mallory, one of Cooper’s old girlfriends who knew them both in college (the one Cooper met up with at the bar in Chapter 6) sees the two of them and tries to flag him down. Mallory and Jake hurriedly paddle away without responding. Jake had earlier asked the woman to be his Facebook friend, and he finds that she’s written him a message asking if she really did see him. 

As Ursula is reading the newspaper one morning, she learns that Mallory and Cooper’s parents were killed in a roadside accident while Mr. Blessing changed a flat tire. Jake is shocked and devastated but doesn’t want to attend the funeral, ostensibly because of work but in reality because he’s afraid that seeing Mallory in such an emotional state will cause him to reveal their relationship. Instead, Ursula goes to the funeral alone without telling Jake, creating a buzz of attention because of her political status. Leland also attends the funeral and comforts Mallory as she grieves, and—because she doesn’t know about Mallory and Jake’s affair—networks with Ursula to get her to agree to a profile on Leland’s new website.

After the funeral and reception have ended, Mallory and Leland converse as they drink at Mallory’s parents’ house. Mallory drunkenly confesses that she has a recurring annual rendezvous with a lover. Leland questions her for some of the details and guesses that the man is Jake when Mallory says that the man’s wife came to the funeral alone. Leland confesses to getting Ursula’s contact information for an interview, and Mallory isn’t surprised but starts to plead with Leland regarding something about Ursula. However, she doesn’t finish her sentence before drifting off to sleep. Mallory’s unfinished sentence may have been a request for Leland not to contact Ursula, but because her friend never finishes the sentence, Leland decides that it’s fine for her to get in touch with Ursula.

Shortly after the funeral, Leland does a brief interview with Ursula, which goes viral and catapults Leland’s blog to a new level of fame. Mallory is silent about the profile, which makes Leland realize that Mallory doesn’t even subscribe to her blog and didn’t read the interview. 

Mallory continues to grieve the loss of her parents over the course of the spring following their death. She feels guilty about how she treated them, especially her mother, whose ideas about femininity and propriety Mallory rebelled against in her adolescence and early adulthood—“she reveled in becoming the anti-Kitty” (327). Part of her wonders whether their death was a cosmic punishment for her affair with Jake. However, she deals with the practical arrangements of her parents’ property and estate. Link plays on a traveling baseball team during the summer of 2014 that helps Mallory stay distracted, and during a miraculous game in which Link hits three home runs—despite being a lackluster batter most of the time—Mallory begins to feel that she is healing emotionally after her parents’ death.

After the game, Link tells her that he doesn’t want to take his annual trip to Seattle (which is intended to cover Labor Day weekend so that Mallory and Jake can be together undisturbed) to visit Frazier, Frazier’s partner, and their new baby. Link and Frazier have become somewhat distant after Frazier moved across the country, and Link doesn’t like having to spend so much time with Frazier’s partner rather than his father, who is away working a lot. Mallory is concerned about her Labor Day rendezvous with Jake but says that if Frazier allows Link to cancel the trip, it’s fine with her. She doesn’t think Frazier will agree to the idea, but he does. Mallory salvages her weekend with Jake by sending Link to a concert for the weekend with Cooper. She also finds out that Cooper knows about her and Jake. Cooper gives his reluctant blessing to the furtive relationship by agreeing to take Link so the two can be alone.  

After her interview with Leland, Ursula’s popularity with the general public skyrockets, and she does an interview with Vogue magazine in which she states that she would consider running for President of the United States someday. Ursula also becomes a fan of Leland’s blog, and one day reads an article by Leland that discusses a “same time next year” arrangement similar to Mallory and Jake’s. There are enough details in the piece that Ursula quickly realizes that Leland is actually describing Mallory and Jake. She gets a hold of Cooper to ask about the “guys’ weekend” on Nantucket. Cooper lies to protect Mallory and Jake, but Ursula knows he isn’t telling her the truth. She tries to dismiss her suspicions about Jake cheating on her but can’t.

Upset about having to lie for Mallory and about the distance that the affair has put between himself and Jake, Cooper calls Mallory and asks her to make sure he never has to lie for her again. Mallory is upset that Leland included so many details about her affair with Jake in the blog piece, and wonders if it’s Leland’s revenge for the one-time fling between Mallory and Frazier during which Link was conceived. Mallory calls Leland, assertive with her insensitive friend for the first time in their relationship. Mallory tells her how upset she was about having her secret exposed, and then hangs up. She deletes all of Leland’s contact information, blocks Leland’s blog from her computer, and throws away a present that Leland sent Link. 

The narrative action moves back to Mallory and Jake’s weekend together for the first time since Chapter 20. Mallory has used some of the money she inherited from her parents to remodel the cottage, getting rid of its distinctive look, which she found outdated. It takes Jake a while to get used to it.

The two have a close call when they decide to go down to Mallory’s sailboat, which turns out to be docked next to Bayer’s boat. Bayer talks to Mallory briefly, then turns to Jake, asking if he’s seen him somewhere before. Mallory rushes off with Jake, but Bayer clearly notices Jake and thinks he looks familiar because Jake met him briefly at Ursula’s victory party in Chapter 17.

On the last night of his stay, Jake notices a strange-looking spot on Mallory’s bare back while she sleeps. He decides to make Mallory go to the doctor and get it looked at.

The spot on Mallory’s back turns out to be skin cancer, and she anxiously navigates both her treatment and her changing relationship with teenage Link, who is becoming more and more independent. The change in their relationship makes Mallory feel lonely and abandoned as her son continues to grow up. Link’s girlfriend gets accepted to an immersion program in Italy for the following school year, devastating Link. He won’t leave the island so he can spend time with her before she leaves, which again causes complications for Mallory and Jake’s upcoming Labor Day weekend. However, the girlfriend’s mother invites Link along on her daughter’s last weekend—Labor Day—in New York, solving the problem. 

The nation is caught up in allegations of past sexual assault against a male nominee for Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. (The timeline, events, and character are strongly reminiscent of the real-life allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.) As Senator, Ursula will be part of the nomination process, and she receives a stern phone call from Bayer not to question the nominee too harshly. Bayer blackmails Ursula by telling her that he knows about her past affair with Anders.

However, because of a past experience of Ursula’s, in which she got drunk at a party in college and ended up blacking out while a male acquaintance may have sexually assaulted her, she follows her conscience and ends up voting against the nominee after sternly questioning him during the hearing. He wins the seat anyway, and Bayer calls Ursula to say that voters are thrilled that she followed her principles. Because he got the outcome he wanted—the nominee being appointed to the court—he offers to financially support a presidential campaign for Ursula in 2020.   

Link graduates from high school, and during his graduation ceremony Mallory notices a strange spot in her field of vision that won’t go away. She also begins to get strange headaches. During his last summer at home before leaving for his freshman year at the University of South Carolina, Link hardly spends any time with Mallory, instead working a landscaping job and partying with his friends and peers. Apple says his behavior is normal for graduating seniors, who try to begin to distance themselves from their families before leaving to make the permanent separation more bearable. Apple also mentions that Ursula is running for president.

A couple of weeks after she takes Link to college, Mallory is surprised when Ursula appears at the cottage, asking to talk to her. Ursula has come to find out if Mallory and Jake have a recurring rendezvous as she suspects and as Bayer has also told her—Mallory told him about Jake during their fling. Mallory doesn’t acknowledge it, but her behavior confirms to Ursula that she is involved with Jake. Ursula asks Mallory not to see Jake that Labor Day or at any point if she wins the presidency, afraid of the scandal it will create. Ursula doesn’t want to ask Jake to stop because she’s afraid that if Jake knows she knows about Mallory, he’ll leave her, creating even more scandal.

Mallory doesn’t want Jake to know that Ursula knows about them, and so instead of making an excuse and canceling their traditional weekend together, Mallory lets Jake plan to come as usual and arrive at the cottage, which she locks up and leaves behind while she hides on the beach nearby. She watches Jake become increasingly confused and distressed, and he texts and calls her cell phone, hearing it ring on the beach nearby. He asks Mallory for one last kiss, a request that she obliges. Then Jake leaves.

Although Mallory’s melanoma was treated, the cancer has returned and spread to her brain (the cancer caused the spots in Mallory’s vision and her headaches related in the previous chapter). As she declines and is put on hospice care, Mallory asks Link to call Jake, who immediately leaves Ursula’s campaign and comes to be with her. Bess asks to come to Nantucket too, as a break from working on her mother’s campaign. Cooper, Frazier, and Leland also come to Nantucket to be with Mallory in her final days. Mallory and Jake’s storyline ends with Jake playing a song for Mallory on the guitar, as he did during the first time they talked on the phone.

Outside the cottage, Link and Bess meet for the first time and romantic sparks fly between them—suggesting that they may have a love story of their own, just like Mallory and Jake’s.