“Absolutely not. Go on.”

“I can’t really explain what it is to destroy a house like this. Architecture is like a picture or a journal of lost time. You can’t just tear homes down because they’re inconvenient.”

“I know, Amy.”

While she talked, he gathered specimens and placed them in plastic bags, labeling each one. He lifted plants to the sun, rubbed them between his fingers, studied them with a concentration he’d once shown toward her. She had once seen the promise of this man, but she’d been deprived of the full blossoming. She had once listened to him talk of doing exactly this; she’d seen him learn, and now she experienced the fruition of his dream. In the subtle island sun, in the dense maritime forest thick with endangered barrier-island creatures and memories of their own past, she watched him.

He turned to her and touched her arm. “Look at us.”

“What?”

His smile was full and warm. The shadow of a palmetto branch licked the side of his face like smudged charcoal and she tightened her fist to stop herself from touching him.

“We’re doing what we always said we would,” he answered. “Working together.”

She swayed as the wind murmured through the palmetto tree, moving the shadow across his face. She reached for his arm and he pulled her to him and held her. His body was a fortress of strength, stronger than she remembered, yet diminished in what it meant to her. There were other arms now, other strength.

She pushed him away. “Don’t, Nick. This can’t be about . . . that. It’s about the island and the—”

“I know, the house. But something we said then—something we said we’d do—it didn’t go away because, look, here we are doing it.”

“Weird coincidence.”

“No such thing as coincidences. There are so many things I need to tell you, things you don’t know.”

“Not now.”

She turned away and walked up the weed-clogged path. Nature’s cacophony blended with his words and confused her. She didn’t know what to believe, why he was here, why she was here. She’d been content to watch him pick up the plants, laugh with the others, his hair riding the wind. But there was more, and she felt it as cumbersome as any incoming storm system.

She pulled the camera from her satchel, then snapped pictures of the house. Nick came to her side and they climbed the stairs to the rotting front porch.

He pushed at a sagging board over a window. “Amy, it wouldn’t be that hard to get in.”

“If they found out we went in the house, they would press charges. I want to save this house, but I do not want to lose my job and force my family to bail me out of the Chatham County jail.”