Being cast into this limbo, this unending limbo, was a torture to Henry, as both Costanza and Andrew must have known. He was never given the chance to say to either of them, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told that one particular untruth about Costanza knowing all along about you boys—fine, not that untruth; that lie. But I was overwhelmed and afraid. He didn’t have a chance to say to them, How could you just disappear from my life, both of you? Or: I understand your anger—which he didn’t, he couldn’t, completely; but he was willing to try understanding on, just to see how it felt, or if it would change the way he thought, if it would stop him from waking in the middle of the night, sick and trembling with anguish and rage. He didn’t have a chance to speculate, for Costanza’s benefit in particular, if maybe the drugs had colored (darkened) her thinking, possibly even driven, somehow, her dramatic decision to abort the cycle and just vanish. These hormones are powerful, he might have said. I once had a patient who stabbed her husband in the thigh with a dessert fork merely because he questioned whether it was too soon to pick out a color for their baby’s room …

He realized, as he thought this, that he might be looking to give her an out. If he gave her an out, might she see her way to giving him one? Is that what he was looking for? Not to feel guilty, not to feel responsible?

As time unspooled, Henry was willing to look back over the whole arc of his behavior to see how he might have conducted himself differently. He was willing to listen, to try to explain. Yes, he was open to that. He thought he was open to that. He also, desperately, wanted to hear what Costanza had to say. He could do none of this on his own. All he could do was suffer, and that was what he had done.

The woman next to him on the bench didn’t even glance at him when she picked up her bags and moved on. He might as well have been invisible.

Henry went on staring at the sea. When he found himself counting the boats on the water, he recognized that he was trying to postpone the inevitable. He would have to turn around and look at the house, really look at it. It was the next step in this journey, perhaps the last one he had worked out with any certainty.