“Yes. I was convicted of homicide—of a local, for God’s sake. I was not the most well-liked man in jail. Seems everyone knew her . . . and loved her. It did get me my own jail cell, for safety reasons. Mr. Carreira visited me in jail. Eliza wasn’t allowed in. I would ask him about you and he would give me the most pitiful grimace. It was horrible. And then he’d say, in that Spanish accent of his, ‘No, no, nothing from her yet. Let’s just give her a little while to absorb the information. I’m sure she’ll call us.’ ”

“I’m sorry—so sorry.”

Nick held up his hand. “I do not want to talk about the jail, ever. It took a full year of research, getting to know and live with the locals, before Eliza and Miguel Carreira finally found the man the woman was with that night. They received a signed confession from him that proved she was blitzed, stumbling home through the streets. Eliza and Miguel got the man to testify at what, in Costa Rica, counts as a hearing. Seems the woman was from some big influential family and they didn’t want her name defamed. They dropped the charges.”

“Eliza helped the lawyer? She stayed and did all that to get you out? She loved you.”

“No . . . it was after I got out.”

“No. That’s not possible. She stayed. She didn’t return to school, or family, or her faux-antebellum mansion in Garvey. She stayed in some foreign city for an entire year, or more, to get you out of jail. She loved you then.”

Nick glanced at the ground.

“That was sacrifice. That was . . . love,” Amy said.

“This is not what I want to talk about. Us. That’s what I came here for; us—how this possibly could have happened.” The anger he usually squelched with the preoccupations of his job, of his friends, of the forest and wilderness he loved, or with a good beer or three with his buddies, rose now. He stood with the force of his own rage, kicked the base of the stump, bark scattering at his feet. “This is bullshit. All these wasted years. All this wasted time. And you didn’t even know.”

“No. But I tried to find out. I called the school, your mother, your friends.”

“What did they tell you?” He sat down next to her again.