“The funny thing is, I thought I had forgiven you a long time ago,” Luke says. His face is bathed in the lavender-orange twilight. “All this time, I was congratulating myself on being such a big person that I could forgive you for turning your back on me. And now that I see you, I’m tempted to say that I did forgive you a long time ago. But the truth is that I haven’t. I wish I had, but I haven’t.”

Asher remembers the faces of the congregation that day Jimmy and Stephen had come to church. That’s who he had been, all those years ago.

“Still, I ought not have intentionally worried you. That was wrong, and I knew every single day that it was. I should have called and let you know I was alive instead of sending those postcards just to make you play a guessing game.”

“Those postcards helped me change myself.”

Luke has found a piece of green sea glass in the sand and now he is smoothing it between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the ocean.

“What have you done all this time?” Asher has a hundred questions, but they all sound generic.

“Living. Working,” Luke shrugs. “Just like everybody else. When I left home”— Asher notices that Luke still refers to Tennessee as home —“I didn’t have enough money to go far, so I wound up in Louisville. Thought there might be more open-minded people up there, at least, even if it was just three hours away. And there were. I got a job down on the docks, cleaning boats, and I started to think about what to do with my life besides just have a good time. Nothing ever did seem like enough for me.”

Luke dancing in the kitchen. Luke reading down by the river, talking about far-off places.

“I remember,” Asher says.

“And that led me to going to seminary. Just wanting to feel like there was something bigger than me. Just to prove to myself that the church we’d been raised up in wasn’t the be-all and end-all of belief. Once I started taking those classes, I figured out who I really was.”

“And who was that?”

“Somebody who loved the mystery of it all. Right out of seminary I got sent to a church in Grand Haven, Michigan—in wintertime it was the most lonesome place I’ve ever seen—and then there was an opening for an assistant rector here in Key West—”

“The place you always wanted to go,” Asher says. He had never heard anybody from Tennessee utter the name of this place except for Luke.

“And a warm place after those winters up there. So I had to take it,” Luke said. “Seemed too perfect.”

“That’s why I came here, when we ran off. Because you loved it. And because of the postcards.”