The door swished shut as the nurse left. The door clicked again and Amy felt the prickle of someone staring at her. She opened her eyes.

Eliza stood in the doorway, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her long black coat. “Looks like you’re going home.”

“Yes.” Amy’s voice cracked.

“I wanted . . . I was going to stop by sooner, but . . .”

Amy held up her hand. Shame made her want to crawl under the bed, pull her head into her sweater. She could not look at this woman. The skin below Eliza’s eyes was dark, surely stained from a broken heart. My fault. My fault. Amy heard the drumming mantra in her head.

Eliza walked into the room, stood next to the bed. “I know you don’t want to see me, but there are a couple things I want to say . . . a couple things you should know.”

“No, Eliza. It’s not that I don’t want to see you. I can’t. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to . . . I’m sorry.”

“Will you listen to me? If I talk, will you just promise to listen?”

“Yes.” Whatever this betrayed woman asked, she would supply: repentance through acquiescence.

Eliza sat, not removing her coat, on the same chair Phil had been sitting in for the past three days. She took a deep breath as if she were about to jump from a high-dive. “I’ve always known that Nick still loved you, so most of this is my fault. As you probably know by now, I didn’t mail those telegrams twenty-five years ago. I don’t know what made me believe this betrayal would never come back to haunt me, that I could . . . force Nick to love me through such lies—and still have a good marriage. But I did. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Amy sat up, swung her feet to the ground.

Eliza wept, but neither her body nor her voice betrayed the tears falling down her face; Amy wondered if Eliza was even aware of them.

“I believed, still do, that I love Nick better than anyone else can. That I love him more than he has ever been loved. I saw no other option but to save him, for me. Not to save him for any other life, but for one with me. So I used everything I had. I knew that the accident happened in order to bring us together and sending those telegrams would have ruined that. You would have come, I know.”

Amy didn’t answer.

“Amy, you think you know the whole story—I’m the bad one, the evil one who kept Nick from you. There’s more to the story than he told you. I was in the truck when the accident happened. We all were, all seven of us.”