The more he spoke, the stupider he sounded. She was disarming him, one weapon at a time. He reached within himself for one last piece of ammunition: direct eye contact, assurance.

“Tomorrow night I work at Hank’s Pool Hall. I get off at ten.”

“And?”

“You’ll go out with me tomorrow night. Please.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but another voice said the words: “Nice beginning to my formal. Perfect. Just perfect.”

Amy turned. “Carol Anne.”

“Nice turtleneck,” Nick told Carol Anne, who wore a black sweater with ostrich feathers around the neck and a long silver skirt; it was all he noticed about her.

Carol Anne glared at him, but he felt no heat from it. None. “What in the living sorority formal are you doing asking my roommate out?”

“Please forgive me. I met—”

“He was joking with me. Nothing big, Carol Anne. I met him at that party when I couldn’t find you. We were joking about movies, stuff like that.”

“You didn’t tell me about him.”

“No, you were too busy telling me about him.” Amy laughed and walked away, not even looking back as she said, “Have a great time tonight.”

And the metal door slammed.

This memory was a brick on his neck—aching. He must be seeing things outside on the dock. Amy didn’t even wear that cross anymore. He didn’t often visit these memories where each detail, if probed, was still as sharp as the needle that had sewed their relationship together. She had a quote, an old quote she used to say about their relationship . . . something about being sewn together. He would ask her. He would ask her a lot of things. Nothing else mattered except this second chance he was now being offered—even if it was through his daughter’s boyfriend.

Eliza had talked him into coming to the lake house this weekend, her tears and pleading accomplishing the intended job. Or maybe he hadn’t really needed to be talked into it. Either way, now he just wanted to know Amy again, the spaces of her: the dents between each vertebra, the soft spot below her anklebone, the curve of her earlobe. And now another desire rose—to find out why she had never come, to find out what had caused her to abandon their promised life together.

By the time he’d been released from the hellhole they called a jail, he had sufficiently buried all the good of Amy and had only found, when probed, fury at her broken promises.

He glanced out to the lake—there it was again, a flash. Amy. Now she was here—all her goodness lucent and evident again. He couldn’t fool himself into bitterness and hatred when she was present.