Or him. I can see now that I never could have had him. Not in any of the ways I have imagined. Eventually, I would have destroyed him because I loved him too much to ever let him go.

That’s the truth I have always been too afraid to tell.

“She was driving that night,” Eileen whispered when they’d both finished reading the entry. “That’s what my mother was talking about, how she took care of it. How we needed to protect Clare. Because it wasn’t Adam driving drunk that night; it was Clare.”

“And Clare never knew that?” Simon asked.

Eileen shook her head. “I don’t think so. We had just been out here for Christmas the year before. I don’t think Clare could have been so—I don’t know—just herself, I guess, if she’d known it was her fault.” She pointed to the date of the journal entry. “I really think my mother must have said something at that visit, or at least sometime right around then. That was about the time her Alzheimer’s started getting really bad. It makes sense that she could have let it slip during one of her episodes. Exactly like she did today with me.”

Eileen tried to imagine what it must feel like for Simon, sitting there now, poring through Clare’s thoughts about her life. She couldn’t help wondering about her own husband, his private thoughts. She didn’t want to know them.

“Henry will be here soon,” she interrupted his reading. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

Simon turned to her and then picked himself up from the floor. He seemed older, completely exhausted. “Thank you,” he said, crossing the room to meet her. “For coming, for listening…for helping me try to figure all this out.” He ran his hand through his already disheveled hair. “I really don’t know if I could have made it through the last few days without you here.”

She leaned in and gave him a hug. “Are you going to be all right here? Alone?” She looked at the journals spread all over the floor and realized that he was in real danger of losing himself in Clare’s past. She pulled away from him and looked him in the eyes.

“Probably not,” he said, looking around Clare’s study. “It was always really just her house, and she let me live here with her, but it never felt like home for me.”

“Will you go back to New York?”

He nodded. “I have a flight booked for Monday morning. I figured it was best if I didn’t linger here.” He stared down at Clare’s journals. “I’ll come back later in the year. I need some time right now, before I…deal with all this.”