Matthew couldn’t make his feet move. All he could do was stand there, breathing shallowly, a little afraid that all of this could break like glass at the merest touch. At a breath. The boy who looked like him stood at the shore, blond hair glinting in the sun, the hem of his jeans wet with saltwater. Laughing. In that one image, Matthew saw the whole of his life; past, present, and future. It was one of those moments—an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world—that changed a man’s life.

“You’d better go, Matthew,” Leni said. “Our son is not very good at waiting for what he wants.”

He looked down at her and thought, God, I love her, but his voice was gone, lost in this new world in which everything had changed. In which he was a father.

They had come so far from their beginnings as two damaged kids, he and Leni. Maybe it had all happened the way it needed to, maybe they’d each crossed their own oceans—hers of damaged love and loss, his of pain—to be here again together, where they belonged. “Good thing I am.”

He saw what those words meant to her.

“I wanted to stand by you. I wanted—”

“You know what I love most about you, Leni Allbright?”

“What?”

“Everything.” He took her in his arms and kissed her with everything that he had and all he hoped to have. When he finally let go, reluctantly, and drew back, they stared at each other, had a whole conversation in breaths taken and expelled. This was a beginning, he thought; a beginning in the middle, something unexpected and beautiful.

“You’d better go,” Leni finally said.

Matthew walked carefully across the pebbled beach toward the boy standing at the waterline.

“Hurry up,” MJ said, waving Matthew over to the big purple starfish. “It’s right here. Look! Look, Daddy.”

Daddy.

Matthew saw a flat charcoal-gray stone, small as a new beginning, polished by the sea, and picked it up. The weight of it was perfect, the size exactly what he wanted. He held it out to his son, said, “Here. I’ll show you. How to. Skip rocks. It’s cool. I taught your mom. The same thing. A long time ago…”

*   *   *

“HE ALWAYS BELIEVED you’d come back,” Mr. Walker said, coming up beside Leni. “Said he’d know if you were dead. That he’d feel it. His first word was ‘her.’ It didn’t take us long to know he meant you.”

“How do I make up for leaving him?”

“Ah, Leni. It’s life. Things don’t always go the way you expect.” He shrugged. “Matthew knows that, better than any of us.”

“How is he, really?”