I look back once more as I get to the front door. She’s still there, but she’s looking away from the house, toward the woods. I wonder if she sees it too, every time she comes here, Bella and me, half-buried under leaves and mud. I bet she’s thinking what they all must have been thinking back then. Why did Bella have to be the one who died?

He comes to the door after my third knock: Sean Lewis, still stupidly handsome. More so, I think. Age suits him. Ten years has added muscle and character. The intensity that was so odd at seventeen is sexy at twenty-seven. You would always give this man a second look if you saw him out. But then you’d see it, the simmering anger and something else lurking, and maybe then you’d go back to your boyfriend and feel safer and a bit happier. But he also looks tired and so much like his father, it makes the words I came to say stick in my throat. My dad, the man Julia left them for, is inches shorter, thinner, plainer. A quiet man, so bloody ordinary. But no one would feel uneasy looking at my dad. He was a man to feel safe with and I know Julia did. Greg—he never looked like someone’s father, he never looked safe.

I have another flash of memory—sharp and bright and loud. Me and Sean, dancing at the wedding, but not out on the lawn with everyone else, swaying instead in the trees at the edge of the wood that bordered our garden. Is that real?

Sean looks at me and shock is replaced by a half-smile. He reaches out like he’s going to hug me and I recoil. My instinct is to run, just like it was back then, and my reaction stalls him. His face floods with color and the smile disappears, replaced by the more familiar blankness I was never able to read.

“Tess? God—you were not who I expected to find on my doorstep.”

After the wedding, after Bella died, Jack and Sean disappeared again. Jack had already moved out of Dean House by then and Sean never came back to visit. Neither of them ever came back to stay. Has Julia even seen them since?