He cleared his throat and folded his hands tight in his lap. This was far more excruciating than he’d ever imagined it would be—and he’d imagined it plenty of times. Thousands of times, to be honest. What he might say. What she might say. If either of them would have anything at all to say. “Sorry,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“What I did to you was unconscionable. I know it’s no consolation, but I thought of you so many times. I wanted to write to you or call you or something, but what does one say in that situation? ‘I’m really sorry I left for the school year and never came back?’ Would that have made anything better?”

“It helps to know you thought of me.”

“Oh God, Luke, how could I not think of you? Those summers… The time we spent together... Other than when my kids were born, it was the most magical time of my entire life.”

No, he decided, this was far more excruciating than anything he’d ever imagined. “If that’s how you felt, then why—”

“I was an idiot.”

Shocked by her bluntness, he gave up any pretense of trying not to stare at her. The thick strawberry blonde hair he’d loved running his fingers through was shorter than it used to be, but the summer freckles that had popped up on her nose after long days in the sun were still there. The bright blue eyes that had been so tragically sad last summer seemed to have recovered some of their sparkle.

“I had this idea, you know, of how my life should be. Who my husband should be. What he would do for a living. Where we would live. I was a snobbish fool.”

“I suppose the boy you’d left behind on the island, who worked at a marina and never made it to college, didn’t quite fit the bill.” Luke tried like hell to keep the bitterness out of his tone, but after so many years of suspecting what had driven her away, hearing confirmation of what he’d most feared was hardly a balm on the still-open wound.

“I know there’s nothing I can say to change what happened all those years ago, but I want you to know I regretted the way I treated you. I always regretted it.”

Hearing that didn’t help as much as he’d thought it would.

She looked down at her hands. “Sometimes I wonder if what happened… to me… was payback...”

“Don’t say that. No one deserves what happened to you.”

“Karma can be such an awful bitch,” she said ruefully. “Maybe I asked for too much, you know?”

“I can’t believe in a God or any higher power who’d take the lives of innocent children to pay their mother back for being cavalier with the feelings of an old boyfriend.”

Sydney winced. “Cavalier. Ouch.”