Thirty minutes later, after having left word with Lucy that she’d be gone for a little while, Annie was sitting at one of the long picnic tables at Memorial Wharf, waiting for Mark. It hadn’t taken long for her to realize that Winnie had been right; Annie needed closure for her life from hell, as she’d come to think of the years that had followed him. The years until she’d moved to the Vineyard and begun her new life.

Thankfully, he hadn’t yet left the island; he couldn’t get a boat until the eight thirty.

Annie sat facing the harbor, not wanting to see him approach from Dock Street behind her, not needing to see the swagger in his walk that had first attracted her, that bad-boy kind of walk that had once said, “Come and get it,” and, stupid her, she had. He had swaggered into her life at a time when she’d been sad and scared. She was grateful she was no longer that young woman.

As she waited, she listened to the gulls and watched a few old fishing boats bobbing in the harbor that would soon be filled with sailboats and small, yet dazzling yachts. She began to realize that, in truth, her life had started to change long before she’d moved to the island; instead, it was when Murphy had encouraged her to take the writing course, when she’d helped Annie find the strength that was—had been—inside her all along. What was it that the good witch had said to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? That she’d always had the power, but she’d had to learn it for herself? Annie’s third graders had loved that story; Annie hoped that someday they, too, would learn the truths beneath its words.

“Annie.” Mark walked to the other side of the table and stood facing her. The years had hardly changed him. He still looked youthful and as handsome as he had the day they’d met. His hair was still golden-boy-blond, his body firm and sexy, his skin lightly touched with tan that looked real, not from a booth. Golfing, Annie thought. In Palm Springs. Or St. Kitts. But despite the way he looked, Annie no longer felt a shred of desire.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing toward the bench.

“Do you have a gun?” he asked with a smile that revealed that his teeth were still straight and as white as if he were a model for sparkling toothpaste.

She smiled back because she knew it wouldn’t hurt her. “No gun.” And so he sat. She could have told him who the woman was who’d wielded the twenty-two. But that would have exposed her life to him again, and he did not deserve to know about the happiness she’d found. Yes, she thought, she did have happiness. Some sorrow, but more happiness.

“You look well,” he said.