Grady keeps talking but she is done trying to hear him. She is looking at me when she says the thing I thought she would say—the thing I thought she would come to all along. The reason I went to Nicholas, the reason I did what I did. She says it to me alone. She has given up on the rest of it. With time, I’m going to have to build that back. I’m going to have to do whatever I can to help her build that back.

“I just want to go home,” she says.

I look at Grady, as if to say, you heard her. Then I wait for the thing he has no choice but to do.

To let us go.

Two Years and Four Months Ago

“Show me how to do it,” he said.

We turned on the lights in my workshop. We had just left the theater, after our non-date, and Owen asked if he could come back to the workshop with me. No funny business, he said. He just wanted to learn how to use a lathe. He just wanted to learn how I do what I do.

He looked around and rubbed his hands together. “So… where do we start?” he said.

“Gotta pick a piece of wood,” I said. “It all starts with picking a good piece of wood. If that’s no good, you have nowhere good to go.”

“How do you woodturners pick?” he said.

“We woodturners go about it in different ways,” I said. “My grandfather worked with maple primarily. He loved the coloring, loved how the grains would turn themselves out. But I use a variety of woods. Oak, pine, maple.”

“What’s your favorite kind of wood to work with?” he asked.

“I don’t play favorites,” I said.

“Oh, good to know.”

I shook my head, biting back a smile. “If you’re going to make fun of me…” I said.

He put his hands up in surrender. “I’m not making fun of you,” he said. “I’m fascinated.”

“Okay, well then, without sounding corny, I think different pieces of wood appeal to you for different reasons,” I said.

He moved over to my work area, bent down so he was eye to eye with my largest lathe.

“Is that my first lesson?”

“No, the first lesson is that to pick an interesting piece of wood to work with, you need to understand that good wood is defined by one thing,” I said. “My grandfather used to say that. And I think that is definitely true.”

He rubbed his hand along the piece of the pine I was working with. It was a distressed pine—dark in color, rich for a pine.

“What defines this guy?” he said.

I placed my hand over a spot in the middle, blanched to almost a blond, totally washed out.

“I think this part, right here, I think it could turn out interesting,” I said.