“No. We should have had all the time in the world, but she was here one minute and gone the next. Who knew that would happen?” I look around, seeking comfort in the sun-soaked glory of the square. Tables are clean and waiting—glass-top rounds outside Small Plates, square-top woods at The Deli, long picnic tables, like Jack’s, fronting the Clam Shack. The door to the bookstore has just opened. Another car pulls into the lot with the crackle of tires on gravel. I smell the sea and bacon, and it is rich to me in the way of childhood memories. But my mother’s childhood memories were elsewhere.

“She wouldn’t have wanted to come back here,” I say as much for my own sake as for Jack’s. Lord knew we had debated long and hard, but bringing her back just didn’t make sense. “Margo and I were both gone, and Annie wasn’t about to visit her grave. My father always overshadowed her, and after—well, after—people didn’t know what to say to her, so she was a victim of that night, too.” I feel the same sense of resignation now as I felt then. “We buried her with her parents in Illinois.”

Jack sets down the coffee and flexes his hand. It wants to touch me—pure habit again, I know, because I feel it, too. Our relationship was a physical one, and it went beyond sex. We touched easily and often, satisfying a need that no one else in our lives filled.

Times have changed. But his eyes don’t seem to remember that. Their warmth makes me want to cry.

“Was she finally happy?” he asks.

Swallowing, I managed to say, “Yes. Finally fulfilled.”

“That’s good.”

I take a minute to recompose myself, thinking of my mother and Jack. My stomach clenches around the memory, causing an involuntary grunt. “You’re being very generous. She wasn’t particularly nice to you.”

“She thought her husband was having an affair with my mother. How was she supposed to act?”

I could more easily understand if Jack hadn’t looked just like Elizabeth’s husband. “Like it wasn’t your fault?”

Tearing his eyes from mine, he looks down and gives a sad laugh. “Like human nature forgives and forgets?” His thumb glides back and forth over the drinking hole on the lid of his coffee. He takes a drink and lowers the cup, then, seeming to realize, offers it to me. I take a sip and hand it back, by which time he is staring into the distance. “But I’m a fine one to talk.”

About forgiving and forgetting? And here he is outside Sunny Side Up, which is pretty much the headquarters of his nemesis. “So you’re just … hanging out here on your way back from work?”

He shrugs.

“Do you know my father is inside?” I ask.

“Sure do. I have spies.”

“Spies?”