He’s asking me? Like I’d know? I kept secrets from my sisters about having non-Aldiss thoughts, failed to ask personal questions of a woman I called my best friend, stayed away from the man I loved for twenty years—all in the name of keeping peace. Was any of it the lesser of the evils?

“But I repeat,” Paul says, “Tom was my friend, and now he’s gone. I can argue that he’s been gone for months, even years, but death gives ‘gone’ a new meaning. You know?”

I nod, although I’m nowhere near as philosophical about death as he is.

He lifts an arm toward my shoulder but it falls before making contact. Touching is something he isn’t sure he’s earned, and he’s probably right about that. Like death, perhaps, our connection gives touching a new meaning.

A quiet urgency remains on his face. “I turned seventy last summer. Now a good friend has died, and I think of my own mortality. I think about years I missed and ones I may still have.”

I think of those as well. And it isn’t that I’m brooding about mortality. I’m too young, too healthy, too optimistic. Call me in denial, but no one my age plans to die, least of all someone with a thirteen-year-old daughter. Margo and I joke about this, joke about her taking Joy, joke about a drama-queen daughter being the antithesis of her sons. The joking has a point, though. If anything happens to me, she will be a wonderful mother to Joy, and that is the sum total of my last will and testament.

No. For me, it isn’t about death. It’s about things that I’ve missed and now want.

Paul’s urgency settles into a plea. “Like I say, we have an opportunity. Do we use it or just let it go?”

Chapter 28

Just let it go, begs the part of me that clings to resentment. Granted, that part is shrinking fast, but it isn’t entirely gone. With its dying breath, it wants to stoke the hurt of being ignored by Paul all those years—to shut him out of my life as he did me and deny him the pleasure he might have had if he’d acknowledged our relationship before this.

But that, I realize, would be shooting myself in the foot. Joy has always craved family. I can see how happy she is in Bay Bluff. Even with Dad’s burial so fresh, there she is now, down on the beach holding court with her cousins and Guy. I would never spring Paul’s identity on her so soon. We need to mourn Tom first. Then, when the time is right, we’ll talk.