He wished that he had told her he loved her before her hanging day. He wished he had admitted that as soon as he knew, when he thought his life was ending in Curaçao and he realized that she was the miracle who had come to him. As they sat across from one another at the table, he gazed at her, doing his best to memorize everything about her. Her black hair, her gray eyes, the mourning dress she had worn since her daughter’s disappearance with its mother-of-pearl buttons, her throat, her moon-shaped fingernails, her beating heart, her beautiful mouth. There was much he hadn’t told her, hundreds of stories, perhaps a thousand, and it pained him to think that it was quite possible that he never would. He should have told the story of stumbling upon the magnolia, how he’d sunk to his knees and cried, overwhelmed by its beauty. He should have told her that while they were on the Queen Esther he’d wished they would never reach Boston, and how he had worried over her fate in Essex County, and how he would worry about her still.

He stood so quickly the chair skittered backwards and fell to the floor. “If you tell me to go, and you mean it, this time I won’t come back.”

Maria Owens looked away, and he had his answer.