He leaned across the table. “Don’t you want to know why? Make some sense of this?”

Amy closed her eyes. He wanted to lean forward and kiss the same eyelids he had once kissed goodbye in an airport.

She opened her eyes. “I really do have to go.”

“I’ll walk you back.”

“Okay, yes, that’d be okay.”

They walked in silence under waved cones of gaslight, through darker places where he reached for her back, to steady her, touch her. The click of her shoes echoed over cobblestones and concrete as they wove their way through the streets.

Nick searched for something to say that was not desperate, begging. One more word, touch, promise. With each step he told himself just to be content that she was present, there, alive.

They walked up the front steps of the dorm. The smell of jasmine overflowed the front porch of the dorm as a solid substance he imagined he could see. He inhaled. “Mmm.”

“Jasmine,” she said and closed her eyes, leaned against a pillar. Now was not the time to reach for her. She opened her eyes and under the porch light he saw her face from twenty-five years ago: eager, pliable.

“Thanks for coming tonight, Nick. I do feel better that we can talk—be friends. But you can’t just show up.” She turned to walk in the door.

“I’ll see you next week, at the meeting?” He sounded desperate—as desperate as the night he had asked her out when he had a date with her roommate.

She turned with the door open, light falling in a triangle across the floor. “I don’t know. They don’t really need me if this buckthorn thing works out.” She waved at him and looked like she might say something else, but she turned and went inside, shut the door.

Nick walked to his truck, found the cooler from his morning fishing trip and dug out a lukewarm Heinekin. He popped the top and swallowed the warm amber fluid that he hoped would drown the fresh pain. The scars built over years and years of healing—or denial, he wasn’t sure which—were now open.

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

Amy held two pieces of good news close to her heart. She wanted to savor them and wait for the right moment to share them with her family. First was the discovery of the buckthorn and its possible island-saving import; second was the phone call from Carol Anne, who had said her husband had found out something about the buyer. Jack was home from college for the weekend, and tonight she would tell the entire family—include them, so they could all band together in celebration.

She’d prepared the family’s favorite dinner—homemade fried chicken, mashed potatoes, greens and peach pie for dessert. A bottle of red wine sat sentinel in the middle of the table.