Emily’s husband, Eric, took the kids back to their cabin on the lake while Emily and I had coffee and red velvet cake with cream cheese icing out on the deck. They had bought a pile of books. They let the kids pick three each, and I gave each of them one as a gift.

“So you’re here on vacation?” I asked. The gulls called out in the distance, two sailboats meandered by, and a couple had a picnic on a rowboat.

“Yes. But”—she grinned at me—“I think we’re going to move here.”

“You are?” I was cheered by that but dismayed, selfishly. How could I live with the guilt of what I’d done to her if I saw her all the time?

“Don’t you want me to move here?”

She’d seen it. That flash on my face. “Yes, of course I do. Where do you live now?”

“We’re in Silicon Valley. Smart One”—that’s what she called her husband—“developed a few apps and now we’re looking to get out of the traffic and noise and crowds, and Smart One needs a break. He’ll invent another app or two, but he says he wants to do it without being bumper-to-bumper. So we’re at the cabin and looking for homes.”

“I can’t believe it. Oh, my gosh. I would love to have you back here.”

We chatted a bit longer, then Emily said, “I know I told you that when I was a teenager I got into drugs. And alcohol.”

“You told me some, not much. You asked if I did drugs, told me you did.”

“I did. I was aching for my mom. I think all my grief, and that trauma of losing her, of Gavin killing her . . . it came out in my teens. I was so lonely. My grandma . . .” She paused. “She was kind and loving to me. She put me in an expensive rehab three times. She understood, though. She understood why I did drugs. She was hurting, too. She’d lost her daughter. My mother was her only child, and I was her only grandchild. Anyhow, she became sick, terminally sick, and I finally got my head together. I went to outpatient rehab meetings and I took care of her. I took her to all her appointments, her treatments, her surgeries, but there wasn’t any hope, right from the start. She was eighty-six. She died when I was twenty-one. I lived in her house and I was so lost, so alone.”

“I’m so sorry, Emily.”