Hallie blew her nose and wiped her face. “What if he was calling for us? Crying out for us on the ocean? What if he . . .”

Colleen stood. “You’re making this worse. I can’t bear to think of him in misery. I can’t bear to think of him gone. I can’t.” She shoved open the door and burst into the hallway, running past the beeping rooms and hushed nurses’ station, shoving open the door to the emergency stairwell and taking those stairs two by two as she held on to the railing, until she blew outside. She took in long deep gulps of the air her dad would never breathe again, that of his beloved Lowcountry.

Colleen sank onto a wooden bench in the hospital garden and stared in a trance at the tiny manufactured waterfall that cascaded over fake rocks covered in mildew and moss.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way—before his party, and before they’d given him the memory book. Before she’d chosen her last words and held his hand. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

Did anything ever end the way we wanted it to end?

With a shattered champagne bottle? Or a stroke? Or an Alzheimer’s-induced delusion?

With a jolt, she sat upright. Had he done it on purpose? Deliberately taken his life, with the sea in his veins, by powering his boat as far as he could toward the other side of the ocean, the other side of his memory?

He couldn’t have.

Or he could have.

What had the social worker said about closure—that it was a myth?

Colleen must admit that she had no idea of her dad’s intentions. This was a man she knew with all her heart and somehow didn’t know at all. Perhaps some things weren’t ever meant to be known; perhaps questions were all anyone was ever truly left with.

Chapter Thirty-three

Time is veiled eternity.

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

ONE DAY BEFORE THE PARTY . . .

Far off, a clang of metal on wood, a boat coming into the dock, startled Colleen awake in her childhood bedroom, her heart pumping fast and hard in fear. Dad—he was back. He’d known where he was going; he knew what to do and how to do it. It had all been a bad dream: the search; the hospital; his failing body.

Colleen bolted upright and a searing pain shot through her wrist; a thick weight held her arm to the bed, and when she looked she saw why: a bright blue cast.

It hadn’t been a dream at all.