“What did you do after that? After I wasn’t on the plane? Run and marry Phil?”

“That’s not fair, Nick. Not fair at all. You don’t want to hear what I did after that. If you wanted to hear, or know, you would have called—or come back. If you wanted to know what I did after you didn’t come out of that door, you should have tried to find out then . . . not now.” The anger rose, still braided with the old want, and she desperately wished they would separate themselves so she could be purely angry.

He laid his hand on top of her knee. “I couldn’t find out. I was—”

“What? A little preoccupied with Eliza . . . with the rain forest, with maybe a little tequila and—”

“In jail.”

His words were a string attached to her lungs: he pulled the air from her chest. She bent toward him. “What?” she thought she said, but wasn’t sure if she actually spoke aloud—the world adjusting to a new rotation after the assumption that it had spun the other way.

“What for? What happened? Why—why didn’t you tell me? Call me?”

The ancient oaks were larger, the birds louder, the bark rougher, the heat heavier.

“Do you want to hear the story?”

Her answer was a hinge on a doorframe that opened the way to what came before and after his explanation, yet she had no choice. Her phone call to him a week ago had been the decision, the rest a river of knowing she couldn’t stop.

“Yes.” The word felt familiar, rich wine on her tongue.

He grasped her face in his hands, pulled her toward him. He moaned and ran his finger down her cheek, across her bottom lip. She closed her eyes and saw a dolphin fin streaking across the crevice of memory that he had opened with his touch.

A pool of yearning settled in the bottom of her stomach.

Torn pieces of sunlight whispered through aged moss, landed on the shattered log. The sea pounded on an unseen shore just steps beyond the dense forest. Each crest and retreat of the waves matched her heartbeat—a beat she once believed was sure and steady, a heart cleansed of Nick. But he resided in the unseen—the syncopated space between each beat; the secret she didn’t hear, but knew existed.

She rested her head atop her knees and waited. She was now ready to hear what he had to say. Or she believed she was ready.

“All this time—all of it—I’ve been thinking of what to say to you. So many things to say to you.” He touched her mouth.

Her hands fluttered in the air, butterflies with nowhere to land.