He knelt by my chair and laid his head in my lap. “I am so sorry I stayed away,” he said. “And I’m sorrier that even when I was here, I wasn’t really here at all.”

“You had a lot on your mind,” I said, unable to resist stroking his hair.

“Bex, am I a…runner-awayer?” he asked. “That cannot be the right word. I wish I hadn’t drunk that last ale.” He sat up to look at me. “We ran away to Scotland. I ran away to Cornwall. I don’t want to be a person who keeps running away from things. But I got spooked. Everything those kids said about their feelings that day at New Mentality are things that I feel, too, sometimes. I couldn’t stop thinking about how they couldn’t stop thinking about whatever they were anxious about, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about how maybe everything I was going through meant that I was headed toward…wherever my Mum is, and then I couldn’t stop thinking that if it happened to me, too, then maybe…” He gulped. “Maybe you chose wrong.”

“Oh, love,” I said, scooting down to the floor with him. “A lot of people are depressed or have anxiety and it doesn’t go to that place. All those kids were doing so much better! That was the whole point of that visit. They were getting help, and it was working.”

“Exactly.” Nick looked serious. “After I spent a few days with Mum, I thought, No. This won’t be me. She didn’t have a choice. But maybe I still do,” he said. “I don’t have the answers, but we are the problem like Maria that I want to solve, and I don’t know how I thought I was supposed to do it alone.”

“You know I can’t resist you when you quote The Sound of Music.”

He sat back on his heels and nearly tipped over. “I miss you. I love you,” he said, steadying himself. “You’re the one thing in my life that I want to choose again and again. We do better together.” He smiled broadly. “And on that tip, I’ve had a brilliant idea, Rebecca.”

“Do tell, Nicholas,” I said, plucking a very sticky eyelash out of my lower lid. “Is my mascara amazing right now?”

“It is all under your eyes. You look like Batman,” he said. “And you might remember from our first Halloween how sexy I find Batman.”

“You were Batman. I was Darth Vader,” I said.