Pain passed across his face in an expression I can only call pinched, his features drawing in on themselves and then pulling apart. “I told her that so she could have a happy life with my brother. I told her those lies so she could get on with her life and be with my brother. I never stopped loving her. Not once.” He took in a breath and exhaled the next words. “Do you really want to hear this?”

“More than you can imagine.”

“I did everything I could to convince her that I truly loved her; I begged her to wait for me. But she didn’t. She slept with my brother.”

“I know,” I said.

“So you can imagine how I’d have trouble believing in her broken heart, right?”

“This is the saddest part, though,” I said. “You hate her.”

“No, I loved her. Listen, waiting is hard. I know that. The waiting time is the time when anxiety destroys anything you believe. Waiting is the time when you lose faith, when you give in to fear and feel like you have to do something, anything, to fix the pain. If she just would have just waited … but maybe it was too much to ask of her. Knowing her, it was too much to ask of her to wait on me while I was out of the country.”

“But if you trust enough …”

He stared off and then returned my gaze, returned to the story. “When I came back from Africa, she came to see me. I’d written her letters from Africa until I got the telegram that my brother had married her and they were having a baby. I’d given up hope for us, and then she sat there, her hands folded in her lap, tears staining her face. She told me she wanted me. But of course I knew about the baby … .” He stopped and stared at me. “About you. I knew about you and about my brother.”

“Yes, me.” I paused. “You know she only read your first couple letters, right?”

He nodded. “Yes, she told me. I asked her and she said that in the beginning—when I first left—she hadn’t believed in me, and by the time she did believe—it was too late. Too late.”

“Too late to believe. My God.”

“Yes,” he said. “So whose heart do you break? Your brother’s or your lover’s? Those were my two choices.”

“Impossible choices,” I said.

“I chose to save my brother. I still, to this day, don’t know what was right and what was wrong. Or even if there is a right or wrong. I just chose. And then I lied. She needed to go home to my brother. And she did.”

“All these choices,” I said. “All these choices we make when we’re broken.”