He held a cell phone in his hand and from where she stood Colleen saw the earpiece dangling from his ear to the cell. He laughed and simultaneously opened the back door to his truck. Two little girls, both in tutus and T-shirts, spilled out and ran for the back door, small backpacks—a pink one shaped like a pig with pointy ears where the pockets would open, and a red one designed as a ladybug—flopping on their shoulders. Walter hollered good-bye and I love you to them and returned to his call. The girls were inside before Colleen could register their faces and decide which one was Rosie, which one was Sadie.

There stood the man who was supposed to be her husband. Those little girls—they were both she and Hallie as children, and they were also the children she was meant to have had with Walter; they represented a life lost with the man who drove the pickup and laughed on the phone. They were her nieces; her sister’s children; Walter’s daughters.

His hair was thick and tousled; nothing there had changed. His dark curls caught in the breeze and tangled as he skimmed them back from his forehead. His jeans and boots hinted that he’d come from a work site, dark mud on the side of his left leg. His red T-shirt declaring Littleton Construction was tight on a body that had not gone soft, not one bit. It was the smile, the damn smile, that left Colleen momentarily unnerved. She anticipated feeling the particular grief of her insides folding up, closing inside of her like a shell, but it didn’t come.

His voice slid past her, the words unintelligible but the sound familiar. Then Walter climbed back into the truck, still talking, and drove off. Just like that. She didn’t throw rocks at his truck, cry or lose her breath. She merely stood still, waiting for her heart to find its rhythm again, and then she walked inside the Lark.

The pub’s back room had always felt like a secret, a place only the family and employees were allowed, where boxes and dirty glasses and bottles were untidily shoved onto shelves and into bins. Shane was bent over a box, yanking off the tape with a zipping sound, and Colleen wanted to tell him that she’d just seen Walter and the world hadn’t tilted off its axis, that she was breathing in and breathing out and that was just that.