He went to the station, but he and Astrid barely got a goodbye. He was desperate to give her something so she wouldn’t forget him, but he had nothing meaningful. He wanted to offer her gold, but he just had dumb rocks and bits of junk he’d collected along the shore or retrieved from the river bottom. He hoped she’d give him some kind of memento—a lock of her hair, her book of Byron poems, something. Anything.

But nothing. In front of everyone, Liisa especially, they could only shake hands.

He’d never felt so useless and helpless and angry. Appalled that it kind of helped to be mad at Astrid, too.

He could cut her dead. Dismiss her as weak. Or cruel. A doormat.

It would be easy to do.

Love is doing the hard thing. The right thing?

What’s right—letting her go, letting her come back to me in her own way and her own time?

I can’t make her stay.

It’s no use carrying what she’ll never let go of.

Asta, Asta….

He wanted to scream. But everyone was watching him.

Take her. Take her hand and run.

“Asta,” he said under his breath.

She looked up at him beneath the brim of her traveling hat. Pale as milk. Silvery eyes liquid with ten thousand agonies. “Nyck.”

Shocked, stunned, bewildered, he shook her hand and behaved like a gentleman.

“Don’t marry him,” he said through his best front desk smile. “If you love me and—”

“Nyck, I love you.”

“If you love and want me then hang onto that and wait. Wait while I figure this out. I can do this. Desenrascanco. All right?”

“Astrid,” Liisa said sharply from the step of the train.

“Hang on,” Kennet whispered. “Drop all that other shit and just hang onto me. All right?”

She nodded. Short, curt and brisk. A dazzling smile as the wind caught the brim of her hat and she pressed it down with her gloved palm. She moved away from him. A wave of dizzy nausea as the reel of Kennet’s life story began to reverse.

This was how it began and ended. A book opening, pages turning backward, the book closing. A train pulling in. A handshake. A train pulling out.

If resfeber was the nervous excitement before a journey began, what was its opposite? What happened when you turned resfeber upside-down?

Saudade, he realized. Longing for things lost. A golden time that will never come again.

A Better Man For It

Kennet numbed the pain of Astrid’s absence with work. He got a second job. Then a third. Then ditched all of them for a more lucrative position down at Pine Camp, expanding the military training site. He boarded in Watertown and came home on weekends. He pinched his pennies until Abe Lincoln howled, socking everything away for the golden time he believed would come back.