“I wish I could have written,” she said. “I wanted to tell you and Matthew about MJ, but…” She took a deep breath. “We were afraid they’d arrest us if we came back.”

“You could have trusted us to protect you, but we don’t need to talk about what happened back then.”

“I abandoned him,” she said quietly.

“He was in so much pain he didn’t know who he was, let alone who you were.”

“You think that eases my conscience? That he was in pain?”

“You were in pain, too. More than I knew, I guess. You knew you were pregnant?”

She nodded. “How is he?”

“It’s been a rough road.”

Leni felt acutely uncomfortable in the quiet that fell between them. Guilty.

“Come with me,” he said, and took her by the arm, steadying her. They walked past the lodge’s cabins, past where the goat pens used to be, and across a sheared hayfield, into a stand of black spruce.

Mr. Walker stopped. Leni expected to see a truck, but there wasn’t one. “Aren’t we going to Homer?”

Mr. Walker shook his head. He led her deeper into the trees, until they came to a slatted boardwalk, lined with gnarly branch railings on either side. Just below it, on a lip of land surrounded by trees, was a log cabin that overlooked the bay. Geneva’s old cabin. A wide wooden bridge led from the boardwalk to the front door. No, not a bridge. A ramp.

A wheelchair ramp.

Mr. Walker walked on ahead, his boots thudding on the ramplike bridge.

He knocked on the door. Leni heard a muffled voice and Mr. Walker opened the door and led Leni inside. “Go on,” he said gently, pushing her inside a small, cozy cabin with a wall of windows overlooking the bay.

The first thing Leni saw was a series of large paintings. One of them—a huge work-in-progress canvas—was propped on an easel. On it, an explosion of color; drops and splatters and streaks that somehow—impossibly—gave Leni the impression of the northern lights, although she couldn’t say why. There were strange, misshapen letters in all that color; she could almost make them out but not quite. Maybe it said, HER? The painting made her feel something. Pain first, and then a rising sense of hope.

“I’ll leave you two,” Mr. Walker said. He left the cabin and closed the door at the same time Leni saw the man in the wheelchair, sitting with his back to her.

He executed a slow turn, his paint-splattered hands agile on the wheelchair, maneuvering himself around.

Matthew.