Hiding her surprise, she studied the photo of the young woman with long dark hair and gentle eyes. “She’s lovely,” Clare said, giving it back to him. The pain on his face made his lie unimportant.

Lost in memories, he ran his thumbs over the frame. “I met her when I was twelve, and her family came to Chatham for the summer. She’d been coming for years, but somehow we’d never met before. She and her sister hung out with us at the beach all that summer, and by the time she went back to Boston, we were best friends.” He turned the frame over. Taped to the back was a yellowed snapshot of twelve-year-old Aidan and Sarah, arm in arm at the beach.

“We wrote letters during the school year, and once in a while, we’d get to talk on the phone. She came back the next summer, and we picked up right where we’d left off. My brothers used to tease me something awful about her, but I didn’t care. She was my favorite person in the world. They liked her, too, but they had to be jerks to me.”

Clare smiled. “Of course they did.”

Aidan put the photo on the table. “By the time we were fifteen, she was my girlfriend. We were stealing kisses every chance we got, and I was desperately in love with her. During that school year, my parents started letting me take the bus into the city one Saturday a month to see her. I lived for those days, and I worked the rest of the month to save the money for the bus fare.”

Clare could see he was struggling to get through the story, so she took his hand.

“Sarah’s dad was a doctor in Boston. He was always very nice to me and took an interest in my education. I hadn’t planned to go to college because my dad wanted me to work with him. But Dr. Sweeny knew I was a straight-A student, and he encouraged me to aim higher. By then Sarah and I were doing a whole lot more than kissing, and neither of us ever looked at anyone else all through high school. The summer before our senior year, we hatched a plan to go to college together. She had her heart set on Yale, so I applied, too. It was a total shock to me—and my whole family—when I got in. My dad was disappointed about the business, but he didn’t try to stop me from going to school, probably because I had three brothers coming up behind me.”

“You went to Yale,” Clare said in a whisper as it set in that this man was so much more than a carpenter.