She received calls from Norah, Brenton, Revvy and Reese, all congratulating her on her role as the champion of ill-fated Oysterip Island. Molly had brought home the newspaper and waved it around the kitchen like a flag of victory.

But the island was still lost to development, Nick was lost in his own anguish and she had lost everything positive she’d once believed about herself. Phil was lost to her and she could see nothing good in any of it.

She sat at the kitchen table, staring at her mug of cold tea—the one she’d made an hour ago and not yet drunk a sip of—and she thought of the stashed telegrams in the tampon box. She hadn’t touched or read the notes since coming home from the hospital; it was time to take them out, discard them. They didn’t belong in her home or in her life.

They were crumpled pieces of paper that represented so much more than just a bad Christmas party, a “could-have-been” with an old boyfriend. The telegrams now symbolized the possibility of an entirely different life—one not lived, but one that somehow existed nonetheless: a life with Nick. If all the dark places inside of her had risen to be exposed and destroyed, so must these papers.

Anger swelled, ballooning in her belly, and then sinking into her with an added weight. She ran down the hall into her bathroom, leaned down to the cabinet. She dropped to her knees and threw open the cabinet door hard enough to bang against the wall, dent the plaster. She threw the shampoo bottles, old hairbrushes and unused curling iron onto the tile floor.

She ripped the yellowed papers from the tampon box and held them up to the light: the damned telegrams. How in the hell could three small pieces of paper change destinies, destroy families? She scrunched the papers into a ball. She kicked the cabinet shut, stomped out of the bathroom, back through her home to the kitchen.

She opened the pantry door, then pulled out Phil’s barbecue lighter. She sat down at the kitchen table, plopped the papers next to her tea mug. She smoothed the papers before she read them one last time.

Not once since Nick had returned to her life had she tried to imagine what it would have been like if she’d received these messages twenty-five years ago. She’d only focused on feeling what she’d felt then, in college, letting herself be surrounded by the stored blood and muscle memories of Nick.

Now she attempted to reimagine her life from the day she would have received the first telegram. She tried to picture herself flying to Costa Rica, attempting to save Nick, to release him from jail. What would it have been like if she had been unable to free him? What if even now he was still in jail for vehicular homicide?