She stared off, up toward the gnarled oak branches. “Your mother wouldn’t talk to me. She just kept telling me you decided to stay on to help with the preservation program. The school gave me the same information—like a broken record: ‘He has decided to stay, he has decided to stay,’ over and over. It was all I could get from anybody. I wrote letters to the student P.O. box you gave me—they were returned. I went to your mother’s house—one time, Nick. Imagine the embarrassment. I drove all the way to Gunter, knocked on the door. She told me that, if you decided to stay and not contact me, I should grant you the right to get on with your life. She shut the door on me.”

Tears now fell in a single stream down her right cheek. He placed his lips on the tears that should never have dropped for him. The sky filled with strips of sunset; they needed to walk toward the beach before the light disappeared with the final crest of the sun. It’d be easy to get lost on the island, with its maze of marsh that circled back on itself, and he didn’t have a flashlight or matches. He hurried through the rest of his explanation.

“A year later, when I got out of jail, the first thing I did, my very first call, was . . . to you. I called your house . . . your mother answered.”

“She never told me.”

“I was angry when I called. More than anything I wanted to know why you never came or even sent a telegram back, sent a message . . . nothing.”

“You must have hated me.”

Hated her? All he’d ever done was want her . . . just want her.

“I never hated you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Your mother answered the phone, but I don’t think she knew it was me. It was a bad connection, and I’d been sick with the flu the last month in that hellhole, so my voice was scratchy. Your mother told me you weren’t there, that you’d gone out. I told her I was a college friend and she told me you were out, with your fiancé.”

“Phil.” She exhaled his name.

“And then . . . back then, I thought I knew why you’d never contacted me. I found the reason. All I wanted then was to know why . . . and the fiancé was why.”

“But that wasn’t why.”

“And Eliza was there waiting. In every sense of the word, waiting. And you . . . you had gone on. My misery was more than I can possibly explain to you. My grief was . . . nauseating. So I tried to forget. But, of course, there was no forgetting. I have tried.”

“But now here we are. With different lives, different families—and there is nothing we can do about it.”

“How can you say that?”