They stopped and watched for a moment. “So, are you ever going to tell me what was in that letter you sent me?” Kate asked, thinking for just a moment how her life might have changed if they’d kept in touch, how his might have.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. Kate waited until he finally shook his head and smiled. “Great plots and schemes from the mind of a twelve-year-old boy. I wanted to move to Atlanta.”

“Really? What happened?”

“The fire happened.”

There was no going back after that. There was nothing to do but let those words sweep them through the years and land them solidly back in the present, older, wiser, different.

Kate finally said, “Don’t you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?”

He shook his head. “You can’t live on a single memory,” he said as he walked away, toward his van.

“Wes,” Kate called. “You haven’t said anything about my offer to help Eby. What do you think?”

“I think it’s very generous,” he said. He got to his van and stopped. “But you can’t save everything, Kate. Sometimes it’s best to just move on.”

Chapter 11

11

Bulahdeen sat on the couch in the sitting room while Kate dusted the bookshelves. It was an afterthought, a last-minute decision that the main house should look presentable in case anyone at the party decided to come inside. Lisette kept the dining room spotless, but the sitting room had an air of neglect, as if Eby had walked out of it one day, to get a cup of Earl Grey or to answer the phone, and had never returned. There was even a book laying open on one of the chairs, a fine film of dust on its pages and a tiny spiderweb along its spine.

Every once in a while, Kate would peer out the window to see if Devin was still on the dock. Today, the last day before the party, Wes was outside scraping the driveway with a grading attachment he’d secured to the front of his van, so that people arriving tomorrow wouldn’t spin out or get stuck in the uneven road when they parked. The dust he kicked up had sent Selma running to her cabin earlier, her handkerchief dramatically over her mouth as if she were fleeing a forest fire. Jack was in the kitchen with Lisette, helping her put the finishing touches on the cake. Eby had disappeared into one of the cabins, as she had for the past few days, while the party preparations were going on, emerging around dinnertime, dust in her hair, as if she’d crawled through a secret passageway, a portal from past to present.