“Abra please, can’t you tell me? It must have been something, it really must have been, or else you couldn’t have left like that. Was it something I did? I’ve tried to think, it’s like something must have happened and I didn’t even notice it, and it was so big that you left.” He ran a hand through his hair, an old gesture. “Look, I know you’re not coming back. It’s just, I want to know, it would be something you could do for me, if you could just tell me.” He wanted so badly for it to be something specific, so that he could point to it and say, “There, that was the thing,” so that it could be classified and put away. I wished to be able to do that for him, but I couldn’t.

I said wearily, “Stephen, if there had been something, I would tell you, I promise you. It was nothing to do with you, or with Elliott and Katie. It was just me, and believe me I accept that what’s happened to them, and to you, has been because of what I did. But I can’t change it, and I can’t explain it to you.”

We were at the top of the lane and I stopped. Stephen looked down at where he would be walking, and then back at me, not wanting, even yet, to let go. I put out my hand to shake his.

“Good-bye then, Stephen. I hope that only the best happens for you.”

He was angry again — I felt so vague, and what I said sounded formal and polite, I suppose — and pulled his hand away, turned and began to walk, almost march, determined and defiant. I watched him and he didn’t look back, not until he was far away, and then I saw him turn, but he saw I was still watching and so he turned away again, abruptly, and kept on walking and he didn’t look back again and then he was gone.

And still I stood there. I felt scattered, as if I had radiated out over the fields, strands of me like spiders’ webs of hollowness reaching everywhere, and I stood still until I felt all the strands winding back, returning to me, so that finally, slowly, I was no longer scattered but here again, and not until all the strands were secured inside did I move, walking slowly back to the garden. I knelt again, remembering where I had been when the man had first come, and my hands went back into the earth, and I felt more roots and pulled them out.