“I do,” Emily said, looking into his green eyes. “And I’m not—we’re not. But just because we’re not happy right now . . . I’m not ready to give up. He and I need to talk. We’ve been through a lot and our marriage cracked. But I want to try to put our pieces back together. I owe him that. I owe myself that.”

Rob leaned his guitar into its stand. “You know,” he said, looking up at her, “sometimes the pieces don’t fit back together.”

“I know,” Emily said, taking a deep breath, “but sometimes they do.”

60

When Emily walked out the stage door exit, Ezra was waiting there for her.

“It was powerful,” he said quietly.

“Hm?” Emily said, looking up at him.

“Listening to you play at the benefit last week. It’s part of why I was so thrown. I could feel you in that song. I could feel the rawness of your emotions—your pain and your love and your passion and it . . . it was a part of you I didn’t know, a vulnerability you never shared. It was that times a million tonight. When you sang . . . that was about me, right?”

Emily nodded. “It was. I’m sorry for . . . for screwing up, for making mistakes, for making them worse.”

Ezra slid his arm around her back. “Can we find somewhere to talk? There’s a lot I have to say. Too many words.”

Emily led Ezra down to the beach. It reminded her of the night they got married, of the evening they got engaged, the waves lapping against the shore. The beach, she realized, was always their place. They took their shoes off and sat down on the sand.

“You gave me your journal,” he said.

“I want you to know all of me,” Emily said. “It felt like it was about time I did that. But I didn’t know how you’d feel once you did.”

“You wanted to be whole again,” he said. “You wanted to feel loved.”

The wind lifted her hair and briefly covered her face before it set her free again. “You read it all,” she said.

—

Ezra bent his knees up in front of him. “I did.” He looked at her. “It was so hard for me to connect the story to you, but when I could, when I did . . . What . . . what you said about me . . . it seems like you were trying to tailor yourself to be someone who matched me, who did what I did and valued what I valued. But . . . I’d like to think I’d have loved all of you, Emily, if you’d given me the chance, if I hadn’t been so shocked by what I learned.”

“I—”