“No.” He took Colleen’s face in his hands, kissed her softly. “It all matters. I’m not saying my tragedy mattered more. I’m just telling you that I had one.” His hands dropped to his sides and he was far off for a moment. “It was my fault. They told me over and over that it wasn’t, that the rain and the dark night and the spilled oil on the road contributed.” His attention returned to Colleen. “But it was my fault. I was preoccupied, fiddling with the radio, flirting with her, acting like a fool, and when the car started to skid I overcorrected. And I had been drinking and was set to drink even more that night—not drunk yet but damn well planning on it. I see it in my mind’s eye every day. I remember it every day. I was careless and reckless and inattentive to anything but my own desires. And I will never stop trying to atone for it. I descended into a dark place for a long time—where the drinking was all I did or thought about. So I know how you feel—not the blame, but the inability to forget. You can’t erase something that painful. I know.”

“I am so, so sorry.” Colleen felt a sadness that had nothing to do with her own life. “Isn’t it strange?”

“What?” His voice broke free from the snags of the past. “What’s strange?”

“What memories can be?” Colleen couldn’t express exactly what she meant, but the thought hovered just beyond her consciousness, a gnat buzzing, a realization forming. “Memories are alive, and they can take over; they have their own life apart from us. But what are they really? Just some amorphous, dreamy things that shift with time, almost like ghosts. Still they cause us pain or happiness or they keep us from doing things or cause us to shiver inside and wake us in the middle of the night.”

“Wow.”

“Huh?” Colleen found his face in her sight again; she’d been staring across the river’s blue expanse to the horizon, where green marsh grasses winnowed the sky from the water.

“That was beautiful. What you just said. I want to write it down.”

Colleen tried to laugh, but laughter didn’t want to join the conversation. Instead she offered Beckett a small smile. “I have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s just that memories seem to be all we talk about these days—my siblings and me, I mean. How to save them; what they are; how to record them; how confusing they can be. And what are they, Beckett? Just some chemicals along a neural pathway?”

“No.” He brushed back her hair and ran his finger along her hairline. “They are who we are, little strands of who we are, all tied together.”