“What went wrong?” Maggie asked.

“It was a mistake. We went too far, too fast. Laura wasn’t ready to accept that she was gay. She rebelled against it. She rebelled against me. The next day, she hardly said a word to me. She began avoiding me. She was never home. She just shut me out of her life. I was devastated.”

“What did you do?”

“I had never felt so totally alone. When school was over, I ran away. I moved down to the Cities, and I tried to forget about Laura, but I couldn’t. I was still completely in love with her.”

“Did you contact her?”

“Yes, I wrote to her and told her where I was. I told her I was sorry. I asked if we could just be friends, nothing else, nothing physical. That wasn’t what I wanted, and I was kidding myself to think I could be around her at that point without needing to be with her. But I would have done anything to have her back in my life.”

“Did Laura write back?”

“Yes. A few days later, she sent me this long, long letter. About how scared she had been. About how ashamed she was for running away from me. She said she had finally accepted the truth about who she was, and she loved me and wanted to be with me. I don’t have to tell you, I was over the moon. Ecstatic. This was going to be the real deal, our whole lives. Sure, we were naive. We were teenagers. But I’ve never loved anyone like that, ever again.”

“Tell us about the night in the park,” Stride said.

Tish closed her eyes. “I try not to think about that night. I’ve pushed it out of my mind.”

“You have to tell us.”

“It’s too awful. It was the best night of my life, and then just like that, it became the worst night of my life. I couldn’t believe God would be so cruel. So heartless.”

“What happened?” Stride asked.

“Laura and I talked on the phone every night. We made plans to run away. I had an old car, so I told her I would come up to Duluth and meet her. She picked July 4. She said it was her independence day. We said we’d meet on the north beach. It was going to be magical.” Tish gave a sad smile. “For a little while, it was.”

“She found you there?” Maggie asked.

“Yes, I came early to wait for her. She came running out of the trees. She told me what had happened in the field, that someone had attacked her. I knew all about the person who had been stalking her, and I knew how scared she was. I thought we should leave right away, but Laura didn’t want to go back into the woods yet. So we waited. And the longer we were there, the more we forgot about anything else, because we were so happy to be together again. I can’t remember how many times we said we loved each other. Being there on the beach, in the wake of the storm, was like a cocoon. We kissed. We made love. We fell asleep for a little while in the sand in each other’s arms. We never wanted to leave.”