As soon as the water was shallow and gentle enough for him to stand, Arch went straight for Vanessa. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, holding herself. Her whole body shook, her face a blank mask of fatigue—what soldiers call the thousand-yard stare. Arch sat down behind her, covering her with an emergency blanket, enclosing her in his arms.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned, the stranger was pointing up into the air over my head. There it was—the Royal Gorge Bridge, a thousand feet above us. From that distance, the center of it looked like a black thread stretched taut across the sky.

The sun glinted off the windows of a train as it passed over. In the distance, we heard a long, lone whistle. I looked back at Arch clinging to Vanessa, her eyes cold and emotionless, her body warmed by his imperfect devotion, Arch chastened but also exultant.

Recalling that moment years after, I might as well have been standing there again, only now able to describe what I felt then but could not express, even to myself. I knew that no matter how I loved them, however close I might wish to be, I would always remain on the outside of that circle. I knew that theirs was a charmed existence, in ways that went far beyond their privilege. And I was quite certain that Arch would never die.

I called Vanessa before I left to go into the office. I wasn’t confident she’d answer the phone. She picked up on the first ring.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“At the farm,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

“I turned it off.”

“Why? What were you doing?”

I told her what I had found waiting for me in the cellar at Jamie’s place, what I had heard.

“That’s unfortunate,” she said.

“Unfortunate?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I listened to the silence on the other end of the call, trying to imagine what Vanessa was doing, what she was thinking.

“I’m going to tell him,” I said.

“No, you won’t.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because you love him.”

I drew in a breath and let it out slowly.

“Let’s just go,” I said. “You and me. We can go anywhere you want.”

I hadn’t given the words a single thought. They just spilled out.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Neither are you.”

“Vanessa,” I said.

“Don’t say it, Charlie,” she said.

“Don’t say what?” I said.

“That you love me.”

“I do,” I said. “You know I do.”

“I know,” she said. “And you know too.”

“What do I know?”

“That it isn’t enough.”

I wished with all my heart that I could prove her wrong.