“Cirrhosis. Let’s talk about something else.” He waved his hand through the air. His dad had made the final descent into the alcoholic’s death. Nick did not want to talk about his dad at all. He had nothing in common with him, never had; the subject of his father embarrassed him.

“Okay, how about your mom?”

“Well, Mom’s still in Garvey, her life revolving around her bridge club, her bingo night. But she is actually better than I’ve seen her since . . . well, she’s slowly come out of her shell.”

“Good for her. Is she still in the old house?”

He had a mental flash of the house he grew up in, the old rural clapboard house that backed up to a rambling forest. He’d loved the house and the land. Three years after he returned from Costa Rica, a strip mall replaced the woods and his mother was offered a beautiful new view of black concrete and screaming children and their mothers off on a family shopping day.

“Mama moved after they built a strip mall behind the house. She never loved that house anyway. It had been Dad’s throne, not hers. She lives in a retirement community where she has her own little place, a nice view of a lake and a porch for reading. She’s . . . happy.”

They walked and talked, catching up on family—who lived where, what had happened over the past twenty-five years. Amy told Nick about her parents’ deaths in a car crash on I-85 on a trip to Atlanta, when the driver of an eighteen-wheeler fell asleep. She told him of the grief and panic that had overtaken her, and how living in her hometown had eased some of the pain—how her children never knew her parents since they were both babies when it happened.

In broad strokes they began to paint the pictures of each other’s lives—fragmented images meant to convey larger murals.

Amy took a deep breath; she looked like she was girding herself for the next question. “So what did you do after Costa Rica?”

He stopped when she asked this; the glow from the gaslight above them licked her hair. He wanted, needed to touch her.

“I left Costa Rica the instant I could. I don’t think I slept there again—that’s how fast I left.”

Amy laughed, punched his arm. “You don’t sleep much anywhere.”

“True. But I left as soon as I could get my papers together—and Eliza was pretty damn organized.”

“Then what?”

“It’s a long story. Essentially Eliza’s dad had arranged for me to get a job with one of his subsidiary companies in Maine, doing reforestation and corporate development plans. We stayed there for fifteen years.”

“But . . .” She looked away.

He turned her face with his hand. “But what?”

“That’s not what you wanted to do.”