“That’s right you don’t. What that is, is years of trying to write out what happened in my life, long afternoons, midnights, long hours, chewing on a pen-tip, trying to get things right. Because it seemed like it was all I had. Some way to get it out of me and before me in a way I could see it. That would make sense to me. Something I could touch, could review.”

“Why’d you burn it up?”

“Why boy, because I got you. Because you’re the one I can give it to. Because you’re the single one needs it as bad as I do.”

“I don’t want all this. Some single answer is enough.”

“You’re close,” Mebane said. “You’re closer than you think. You been adding two and two and you just about got it. Except you got that extra one thrown in and you’re still trying to make her fall in and add up to four. But she’s a sum all of her own. Part of this but her own also. The same way you are.”

“You lost me there.”

Mebane scowled at him. “There is always some other one that keeps us hopeful. That makes us believe things can change. Or at least keep us smoking onward, intent on reaching the next bend. The place where it all comes together. Where it all makes sense.”

Foster leaned back in his chair and looked at the old man beside him. Mebane creased and white, his eyes up to a high glitter, a chatter of iris and pupil. Foster said, “You’re talking about love, aren’t you?”

Mebane said, “Sometimes it can be love I suppose. Or at least start out that way. Othertimes—”

“Othertimes what?”

“Othertimes, I don’t know what to call it. Something that eats at you, that burns at you, that consumes you. That you can’t touch. That you can’t even see. But that is with you every livelong day. It’s a fair thing to call it a passion. But you got to recall, passion is one of those things that is individual, complicated, as many-faced and -sided as a person. As the person that bears that passion. Do you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“Listen. Your grandmother. Leah. I’m going to call her Leah. That’s how I knew her, how I thought of her. You never met her. Is that all right with you? If I call her Leah?”

Foster was silent.

“There you see. It’s coming now. And you know it don’t you? What you came after. What you thought you wanted to know.”

Foster was very still. He said, “Tell me.”

“I killed her, boy. It was me. Yes.” He held up his hand palm out. “As sure as if I’d followed her back up there to those Vermont woods and tied the rope myself. I did.”