“I looked up and there she was . . . like an apparition of the Virgin Mary or something. Long black hair, long skirt. Her mouth was open as if she wanted to scream, say something, but she didn’t. She had a shawl over her head. She looked at me from over her shoulder. I jerked the Range Rover, but it responded in its own time—it was stubborn. We skidded and I heard it, felt it like a ride on the whirly thing at a carnival. All six voices in the truck were screaming or yelling instructions. It was a moment that lasted maybe five, ten seconds, but really lasted days—hell . . . it still lasts. I don’t remember anything after that. I woke up on a metal cot with a piece of foam that was supposed to be a mattress. I had a broken leg, cracked ribs and shooting pain every time I took a breath. Everything I know about the time between the accident and carcel—jail—came from Eliza and the lawyer.”

“Eliza.” Amy’s face paled, moved too far away, fading, and Nick wanted to pull her back. He was losing her. Panic welled up inside him—the same panic as the night he’d awakened in the jail infirmary.

“Listen, please.”

“I am. I’m not going anywhere. I’m listening. What happened to the rest of the students. To Eliza?”

“Sam, another student, broke his arm, and the others had some minor cuts and bruises. Eliza had some cracked ribs. But they all—all except Eliza and the student advisor, Mr. Rivera—went home the next day as planned.”

“I don’t get it. Why were you in jail? Why did Eliza stay?”

Nick looked away, weighing now what to say, how much to tell her, as if his life dangled from the very rope of his words. He hadn’t planned this speech well—or dared to hope she would really listen to him—and he hadn’t decided what to tell her and what not to tell her.

So what he said—the partial truth—became the full truth for her, and now, for him.

“The woman . . . she died.”

“What do you mean?” Amy looked as though she would stand, move, leave. The feeling of abandonment rose again in Nick—the unspoken disapproval when she never came to him. It was true . . . she would not accept this sin of his.

“The woman crossing the street, the one I swerved to miss—I hit her. I have no memory of it—the roll bar of the Range Rover knocked me out, or at least that’s what they told me.”

“Oh, God.”

“We later discovered that she was drunk, and staggering home in the middle of the road, but that was later—a year later. And extradition did not come easy in Costa Rica in the seventies. There was very little communication with the outside world and—”

“And Eliza?”