She grinds her cigarette into the ground.

“Nina sensed that someone was out to get her,” I say.

“Well, I wasn’t out to get her. I merely didn’t want her to drop me in it, leaving me to face the consequences on my own. She swore to me that she wouldn’t leave anything incriminating, but I knew what she was like. She needed to confess, however cryptically. I suggested she talk to a priest. She said she had, but it hadn’t helped. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.”

“I thought that whoever-it-was was after me now instead, so it’s a relief to know that it was you.” I tell her about the messages, the plaque, the photo, the wedding flowers.

“Those were definitely not me.” She sighs. “I’m happy enough to be rude to your face. I don’t need to hide behind snide notes and actions. But, Marie, what did you expect? Really? Of course people will naturally judge. How can they not?”

“How can you stand there and say that after what you’ve done?”

“I don’t make the rules. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. It doesn’t sit right with me. I loved Charlie. You—but Nina especially—knew how much I blamed myself because of the argument that night. I initially thought that he was upset, that he’d wandered off after you’d left him at the party.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “If I could change anything, I would. It was horrific. A real-live nightmare that never left us. It will never leave me.”

“What happened?”

She sighs. “We took the boat out. We lost control. Charlie fell overboard, nothing to do with us.”

“And you just left him?”

“There was no way he wasn’t dead.”

“What do you mean?”

“We looked for him. He was gone. I’m not going into any more details. It’s too painful. Anything we did, we had no choice.”

“Really? Why did you use the words incriminating and confess when you said that you didn’t want Nina to drop you in it? And why did you cover it up if was totally a tragic accident?”

“Really, Marie. I’m telling the truth. They are just words, I didn’t mean anything in particular by them. We were so young—teenagers still, really—we were in a foreign country, scared that we could get accused of all sorts of things. We panicked. Please, get rid of what she wrote, for all our sakes. You won’t want your child tainted with this either, and they will be, trust me. Nothing stays secret anymore. Nothing.”

“This has.”

“Only if we keep it that way. Look, if it helps in any small way, Nina was saving up money to donate anonymously to his extended family. Only, there is hardly anyone apart from an aunt and a cousin, apparently. I don’t have any details about them, though. She was unable to track them down so she said I was to use it for charity. I’ll pass it on to you.”