“Really?” Still breathing humiliatingly hard, he picked up a smooth stone and chucked it into the pounding surf. “You had a funny way of showing it, cutting off years of friendship without a word, without so much as a ‘fuck you, Joe.’”

She squeezed her eyes shut tight at that. “Does it help to hear me say I regret it?”

“Not really.”

She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “I should have had more than two glasses of champagne.” Then she sighed and looked at him. “Why doesn’t it help to hear it?”

“It was a lifetime ago.” He’d gotten over it. Mostly. “We were just kids.”

“Yeah. Kids.” She wriggled her toes, including the one with a tiny little crystal ring on it that looked incredibly sexy.

“You moved on,” he said. “And then so did I.”

She nodded at that, sadly, and though he didn’t understand why, he felt an urge to draw her into his arms. He wanted to stroke away her pain. He wanted to do more than that too, but that would be the mother of all mistakes because with her, one touch would never be enough. “What happened at the opening?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing made you cry?”

The waves were white and frothy by moonlight, and she didn’t take her eyes off them. “I wasn’t crying.”

“You looked like you were having a panic attack.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Did someone hurt you?”

“No.”

“Did someone say something to you?”

“No.”

He began to wish he’d had two glasses of champagne. “Red. Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“It’s nothing. It’s me.” She threw up her hands in the way she’d always had of talking with them. “I…don’t fit in here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been gone too long.” The light wind whipped her hair around them. The ends hit his chest and arm. He used to fantasize about having her hair brush over him, but in his dreams she’d always been naked.

“I don’t have a place here,” she said.

“You have a place wherever you make it for yourself.” When she only stared at him, confused, she broke the heart he hadn’t realized she could still touch. “You used to be good at that,” he said. “Being happy anywhere, doing anything.”

She picked up a rock, threw it. “I guess being back is harder than I thought.”

“Because you never dealt with it.”

She chucked another pebble, her back to him now. “It.”

“The fire. Your dad’s death.”

He saw her flinch. Her shoulders were ramrod straight. “It’s hard to deal with an event you can’t remember,” she said softly.

He felt the surprise reverberate through him, and he pulled her around to face him. Her eyes were shadowed, troubled, and there he saw the shocking truth. “You really don’t remember the fire?”