“I had no idea you were from New Hampshire. What part?”

“North Conway.”

“I love it there. I’ve spent a lot of weekends skiing at Cranmore.”

“Me, too. I wonder if we were ever there at the same time?”

He smiled down at her and then dropped her hand so he could put his arm around her.

She liked that even better than the handholding.

“Were your parents supportive when everything happened with Carl?”

“They tried to be, but they were so disgusted with him, and it was hard for me to have to listen to my dad’s tirades when I had my own tirades going on inside. The sad part was that he and my dad were close until then. He used to call Carl the son he never had. He was so, so disappointed. Naturally, he aired that out with me.”

“Which made a bad situation worse for you.”

“It really did. I felt like I’d disappointed him by marrying the wrong guy or something.”

“But you know it was no reflection on you, right?”

“For the most part. I still sometimes think that maybe if I’d done something differently or been a better wife—”

“No.” Paul stopped walking and turned to face her, keeping his hand on her shoulder. “It had nothing at all to do with you. There was something wrong with him if he thought it was okay to have sex with children.”

“Maybe if I’d had more sex with him, he wouldn’t have done what he did with children.”

“Hope, come on. You don’t really believe that. This was all on him.”

“In my heart of hearts, I know that. But sometimes I wonder if I could’ve prevented it somehow.”

“You couldn’t have. It’s not the same, but I had a similar thing happen when I was in college. One of my best friends raped a girl at a fraternity party. I remember being so shocked that he’d been accused of such a thing. I felt like I knew him as well as I knew myself. I defended him—even to the police. I said, ‘No way, no way. That’s not how he rolls.’ And then the DNA confirmed that it was him. I can vividly recall how incredibly shocking it was to realize I didn’t know him at all.”

“I know that feeling.”

With his arm back around her shoulders, they started walking again. “The worst part is that I was at that party and never saw anything amiss. I liked to party with the best of them, but I never blacked out or passed out or anything like that. I paid attention, kept an eye out for my friends. In a way, I felt responsible for what’d happened right under my nose. Took a long time for me to understand there was nothing I could’ve done to prevent or stop something I didn’t know was happening.”