Looking back on it now, it all made so much sense. She’d been beating herself up for her decisions and the choices she’d made, but taken in context they weren’t so hard to understand.

She’d spent so many hours believing that she’d made a bad choice, but the truth was that she’d made the right choice at the time. Cliff had been what she needed. Exactly what she’d needed.

In that instant she forgave herself and in doing so discovered that when you stopped beating yourself up for decisions you’d made when you were doing your best and trying to survive, you felt a lot better.

She felt a sense of peace and acceptance that she hadn’t felt before. A certain sympathy for the woman she’d been then, and everything she’d had to face, and also pride because no matter what life had thrown at her she’d found a way through.

She thought about Ashley. A failure? Are you kidding? You’re a survivor. An inspiration.

Her marriage to Cliff had been complicated, but in the beginning at least there had been friendship and hope. Love? She wasn’t sure. Cliff had been there for her at the lowest point of her life, when she’d been bruised and vulnerable. She hadn’t felt lovable, and yet he’d loved her in his own way. It hadn’t been the kind of wild, romantic love she’d shared with Nate, but given the way that had ended, she’d been more than happy to consign that depth of emotion and all the emotional bruises that came with it to the past.

Cliff had been a friend to her, and in return she’d been a friend to him.

Nate rubbed sand from the surface of the shell and then glanced at her. “You’re saying I put you off love?”

In a way he had. “I was young. I didn’t know what to do with all those feelings when you—”

“When I ended it. I didn’t mean for you to leave, Joanna. Not for one moment did I think you’d leave.”

She remembered the way she’d felt when Nate had kissed Whitney. She’d decided right then that she didn’t want to live her life watching Nate kiss his way through a succession of other women and pretending that she didn’t care. Maybe if they’d lived in a city it would have been different. They could have led separate lives, their movements rarely intersecting, but here in Silver Point where everyone knew everyone, she’d be caught in a web of emotional connections.