“I have to know exactly what happened to you. I’ve been sick with worry. I have to know.”

“All that knowing—all that wondering . . . wanting to know why you left, why you never came back, why you still loved me. Knowing. Damn knowing.” She bowed her head.

Nick moved toward her again. If he could just touch her. . . . He whispered, scared that she might disappear. “It’s more than just knowing.”

“Well, now I know, don’t I? Yep, found out what I really am.” She looked up at him. “You know, I really, truly thought I was a great person. Good wife, good mother—all of it—the whole package.”

“You are.”

She held up her hand again. “Let me finish. You are so . . . overwhelming, and I have so much trouble separating your feelings from my own. So you have to listen to mine. To me. And I’m still confused about this part—about how something that used to be so good and right could dredge up the most terrible part of me, expose all the rotten pieces of me. Look at me—I never even thanked you for saving my life.”

“That’s it. All the good and right things about us—”

“Nick, stop.”

“Okay, okay.” He loved her; he would grant her whatever she asked of him.

She held her palms upward, as if showing him something she’d hidden in her hands. “You’ve always been . . . too much. Too much of everything. And I remembered that, and the feeling and the knowing, and I got lost. So lost. And I’m trying to find my way back, find out who I really am, because I am definitely not as good as I thought.”

She turned away from him and kicked a pile of clothes from the bottom of the stairs, sat on the bottom step, and dropped her face into her hands.

“So lost,” she mumbled into her palms.

He sat next to her, placed his hand on her knee. “I’m here. You’re not lost.”

“Yes, I am.” She looked up.

Weakness and nausea enveloped Nick as he saw she was gone from him. “No, you’re not. Us, how we were together, that is not lost—that is found,” he said.

“How . . . how can it be? How can that be . . . right?”

“Because we’re supposed to be together.”

“That is a worn-out excuse for what we did.”

He touched her face. “Don’t you still . . . want this?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. I know you do.”

“This time you’re wrong.”

“I can’t be. I felt you. I know.”

“It’s almost like—I don’t know how to explain this—but it’s almost as if in fulfilling all that . . . want, I killed it. And there’s something else. . . .”

“What is it?”

She looked up and for an instant her face was alive again, full—and he thought it was for him, of him, until she spoke.