“She is,” I agree, and because he’s said that, I admit, “You may be right about why I stay in New York.” Turning, I lean back against the railing. “But that doesn’t change things. Why I did what I did is beside the point. It’s done. My life is there, yours is here. My father is here, your mother is gone. Two people went out on the boat that night, only one returned. I can badger Dad, but we may never learn anything more. What then?”

He stands right-angled to me. “Then we move on.”

“Can we? Here?” I gesture at the darkness behind. “I look at the dock and remember that night. I look at the firepit and remember two families around it. When I think of summer, it’s all of us on the beach. When I think of the Fourth of July, it’s both families in town. The memories won’t go away. And then there’s the way we fought. We said horrible things—”

“—that were angry and vengeful and wrong. So we botched it once—”

“—not once. Multiple times. We had three weeks of fights before I left.”

“One. We had one. It just went on for three weeks.”

I have to smile. Standing on principle is classic Jack Sabathian. “Fine, one that went on for three weeks, but I couldn’t get through to you and you couldn’t get through to me. It was our first big fight, and we failed.”

“It was about catastrophic events.”

“Life is. And we failed.”

“Okay, but haven’t we grown?”

“Have we?” I ask. On one hand, we’ve both grown tremendously. I’m a professional photographer with a high-functioning daughter, and Jack is a doctor of veterinary medicine with a successful practice. On the other hand, we’re hung up on the same unanswered questions.

“I have,” he insists.

And I think of Robert Frost. Freedom lies in being bold, he wrote. Maybe the only path to freedom from the past is being bold. “Prove it. What are you going to do about the police?”

“Talk with them.”

“And say what?” I ask.