She felt someone’s hands on her, pulling her back, and she heard Jules’s voice say Ne regardez pas, ne regardez pas as he shielded her from Lydia’s broken body, holding her while she screamed and screamed. Only later did she realize her screams were only in her head, that standing there by the side of the road, in the middle of the crowd and the yelling and the sirens, she hadn’t uttered a sound.

Later, Kate understood that she had been wrong. It was not finding out the how when it was too late that was unfair. What was unfair was that you never, ever got to find out the why.

Three nights after Lydia’s death, Kate left for Canada. She sat on a plane, a hollowed-out version of herself, watching the clouds through the window, not even registering the fact that she was flying, actually flying. She was wearing the dress that Lydia had liked so much that first night they met. That dress had brought them together, and she couldn’t stop touching it, couldn’t stop thinking that there was some essence of Lydia there, some part of her that Kate had sewn into the fabric without even knowing. When she looked down at her shoes, somewhere over the North Atlantic, she saw they still had a dusting of flour on them from Jules holding her there on the street.

When she arrived back in Thunder Bay, she went straight from the airport to Walter’s house, where his parents directed her to his new apartment in Port Arthur. On her way back to the car, she picked a wild rose from a bush in his parents’ driveway and tucked it into her hair. Her own heart line showed one big love, but she couldn’t let herself believe that. She couldn’t let herself believe that her one big love had died on that street at the age of twenty-one. She couldn’t let herself believe there was nothing more than this.

Now, she examines her palm, that same thick line bisecting her heart line. She has waited decades for that line to break up, to disentangle, to reveal itself as two. It never happened. Even though so much did happen. She married Walter, and had two beautiful, difficult, extraordinary daughters, one tenacious survivor of a son, six mysterious and lovely grandchildren. Their family, their house, their life together. None of this would have happened if Lydia had truly been able to outwit fate. How could she look back on her life and wish that things had been different? How could she reconcile her love for her family with her regret over losing Lydia?

“Would you like another glass of wine?”