ick Delacroix stood in his front yard in the pouring rain, staring down at the limp, sagging, half-dead cherry tree he’d planted last year. Slowly, he fell to his knees in the muddy grass and bowed his head.

He hadn’t cried at his wife’s funeral, or yesterday when his daughter had been kicked out of school, but he had the strangest goddamn urge to cry now—and over this stupid little tree that wouldn’t grow. He pushed to his feet and then turned away from the tree, walking tiredly back up to the house.

But when he was safely inside, with the door slammed shut behind him, he couldn’t forget about that damned tree.

It was all because of yesterday; it had been a bad day— and in the past eight months he’d had enough of them to know.

His Izzy had been kicked out of school.

At the thought, the anger came crawling through him again. When the anger faded, all he had left was shame.

Yesterday, his Izzy had stood in the principal’s office, her brown eyes flooded with tears, her full, little girl’s lips quivering. Her pink dress was stained and torn, and he’d known with a sinking feeling that it had been like that when she’d put it on. Her long black hair—once her pride and joy—was a tangled bird’s nest because no mother’s hand had combed through it.

He’d wondered fleetingly, absurdly, what had happened to all those pretty ribbons she’d once had.

We can’t have her in school anymore, Mr. Delacroix. Surely you see that?

Izzy had stood there, motionless. She hadn’t spoken— but then, she hadn’t spoken in months. That was one of the reasons they’d expelled her... that and the disappearing. A few months ago, she’d started to believe she was disappearing, one tiny finger at a time. Now she wore a small black glove on her left hand—the hand she could no longer see or use. Recently she’d begun to use her right hand awkwardly, as if she believed some of those fingers were “gone” now, too.

She hadn’t looked up, hadn’t met Nick’s eyes, but a single tear had streaked down her cheek. He’d watched the tear fall, hit her dress, and disappear in a tiny gray blotch.

He’d wanted to say something, but he had no idea how to comfort a child who’d lost her mother. Then, like always, his inability to help his daughter had made him angry. It had started him thinking that he needed a drink—just one to calm his nerves. And all the while, she had stood there, too quiet and still for a six-year-old, staring at him with a sad, grown-up disappointment.

He picked his way through the living room, stepping over containers from last night’s takeout. A lonely housefly buzzed lazily above the scraps. It sounded like the roar of a lawn mower.

He glanced down at his watch, blinking until his vision cleared. Eight-thirty.

Shit. He was late to pick up Izzy. Again.

The thought of facing her, letting her down again, seeing that tiny black glove...

Maybe if he had a little drink. Just a short one—

The phone rang. He knew even before he answered that it was Lurlene, wondering where he was. “Heya, Lurl,” he drawled, leaning tiredly against the wall. “I know, I know, I’m late. I was just leaving.”

“No hurry, Nicky. Buddy’s out with the boys tonight— and before you jump down my throat, Izzy’s fine.”

He released a sigh, unaware until this moment that he’d tensed up. “You don’t care that I’m late, and Izzy is fine. So, what’s up?”

Her voice fell to a stage whisper. “Actually, I was callin’ with an interestin’ bit o’ gossip.”

“Good God, Lurl. I don’t give a shit—”

“I met an old friend of yours today—you care about that don’tcha? And I have to say, she ain’t nuthin’ like I expected her to be. Why, to hear you and Kath—oops! I didn’t mean to mention her, sorry—anyway, she was just as sweet as cream butter. I wouldn’t even have known she was rich. She was that everyday. Like Miss Sissy Spacek. I saw her on Oprah the other day and you woulda thought that lady was no differ’nt’n you or me.”

Nick tried to keep up with the conversation, but it was spiraling beyond his control. “Sissy Spacek was in your salon today? Is that the point?”

Lurlene’s musical laugh skipped up and down the scales. “You silly, of course not. This is Mystic, not Aspen. I’m talkin’ about Annie Bourne. She’s back in town, visitin’ her daddy.”

Nick couldn’t have heard right. “Annie Bourne is back in town?”

Lurlene babbled on about haircuts and cashmere sweaters and diamonds the size of grapes. Nick couldn’t keep his focus. Annie Bourne.

He mumbled something—he had no idea what—and hung up.

Jesus, Annie Bourne. She hadn’t been home in years; he knew that because Kathy had waited futilely for phone calls from her old best friend.

Picking his way through the debris in his living room, he went to the fireplace and grabbed a picture off of the mantel. It was one he’d seen daily but hadn’t really looked at in years. A bit faded, the colors sucked away by time and sunlight, it was of the three of them, taken in the last rosy days of the summer before their senior year. Annie and Kathy and Nick. The gruesome threesome.

He was in the middle, with an arm around each girl. He looked young and carefree and happy—a different boy from the one who’d lived in a cramped, dirty car only a few months before. In that perfect summer, when he’d first tasted the rain-sweet elixir called normal life, he’d finally understood what it meant to have friends, to be a friend.

And he had fallen in love.

The photograph had been taken in the late afternoon, when the sky was a deep and unbroken blue. They’d spent the day at the lake, shrieking and laughing as they dove off the cliffs into the water. It was the day he’d first understood it would have to come to an end, the day he realized that sooner or later, he’d have to choose between the two girls he loved.

There had never been any doubt about whom he would choose. Annie had already applied to Stanford, and with her grades and test scores, everyone knew she’d be accepted. She was on her way in the world. Not Kathy. Kathy was a quiet, small-town girl given to blue moods... a girl who needed desperately to be loved and cared for.

He still remembered what he’d told Annie that day. After the life he’d lived with his mother, he knew what he wanted: respect and stability. He wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, to be part of a legal system that cared about the death of a lonely young woman who lived in her car.

He’d told Annie that he dreamed of becoming a policeman in Mystic.

Oh, no, Nicky, she had whispered, rolling over on the blanket to stare into his face. You can do better than that. If you like the law, think big... big... you could be a supreme court justice, maybe a senator.

It had hurt him, those words, the quiet, unintentional indictment of his dreams. I don’t want to be a supreme court justice.

She’d laughed, that soft, trilling laugh that always made his heart ache with longing. You’ve got to think bigger, Nicky-boy. You don’t know what you want yet. Once you start college—

No college for me, smart girl. I won’t be getting a scholarship like you.

He’d seen it dawn in her eyes, slowly, the realization that he didn’t want what she wanted, and that he wouldn’t reach that far. He didn’t have the courage to dream big dreams. All he wanted was to help people and to be needed. It was all he’d ever known, all he was good at.

But Annie hadn’t understood. How could she? She didn’t know the gutters he’d crawled through in his life.

Oh, was all she’d said, but there’d been a wealth of newfound awareness in the word, a tiny unsteadiness in her voice that he’d never heard before. After that, they had lain side by side on the scratchy green blanket, staring up at the clouds, their bodies an infinitesimal distance apart.

It was so simple to him back then. He loved Annie... but Kathy needed him, and her need was a powerful draw.

He’d asked Kathy to marry him just a few months before graduation, but it didn’t matter by then, because Annie had known he would. They tried, after the engagement, to keep their friendship together, but inevitably they’d begun to drift apart. It had become Nick-and-Kathy, with Annie a bystander. By the time Annie left for college, amid a shower of promises to keep in touch, Nick had known there would be no lifelong friendship, no gruesome threesome anymore.

By the time he got back from Lurlene’s, it was almost nine-thirty. Well past a six-year-old’s bedtime, but Nick didn’t have the heart to put her right to bed.

Izzy sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the cold, black fireplace. It had always been her favorite spot in this house; at least, it had been in the old days when there was always a fire crackling behind her, always a wave of gentle heat caressing her back. She was holding her rag doll, Miss Jemmie, in one arm—the best she could do since she’d begun “disappearing.” The silence in the room was overwhelming, as pervasive as the dust that clung to the furniture.

It shredded Nick into helpless pieces. He kept trying to start a conversation with his daughter, but all his efforts fell into the black well of Izzy’s silent world.

“I’m sorry about what happened at school, Izzy-bear,” he said awkwardly.

She looked up, her brown eyes painfully dry and too big for the milky pallor of her tiny face.

The words were wrong; he knew that instantly. He wasn’t just sorry about what had happened at school. He was sorry about all of it. The death, the life, and all the years of distance and disappointment that had led them to this pitiful place in their lives. Mostly, he was sorry that he was such a failure, that he had no idea where to go from here.

He got up slowly and went to the window. A glimmer of moonlight skated across the black surface of Mystic Lake, and a dim bulb on the porch cast a yellow net across the twin rocking chairs that hadn’t been used in months. Rain fell in silver streaks from the roofline, clattering on the wooden steps.

He knew that Izzy was watching him warily, waiting and worrying about what he would do next. Sadly, he knew how that felt, to wait with bated breath to see what a parent would do next. He knew how it twisted your insides into a knot and left you with barely enough oxygen to draw a decent breath.

He closed his eyes. The memory came to him softly, unintentionally, encoded in the percussive symphony of the rain, the plunking sound of water hitting wood. It reminded him of a day long ago, when a similar rain had hammered the rusty hood of his mother’s old Impala...

He was fifteen years old, a tall, quiet boy with too many secrets, standing on the street corner, waiting for his mother to pick him up from school. The kids moved past him in a laughing, talking centipede of blue jeans and backpacks and psychedelic T-shirts. He watched enviously as they boarded the yellow buses that waited along the curb.

At last, the buses drove away, chugging smoke, changing gears, heading for neighborhoods Nick had never seen, and the school yard fell silent. The gray sky wept. Cars rushed down the street in a screeching, rain-smeared blur. None of the drivers noticed a thin, black-haired boy in ragged, holey jeans and a white T-shirt.

He had been so damned cold; he remembered that most of all. There was no money for a winter coat, and so his flesh was puckered and his hands were shaking.

Come on, Mom. That was the prayer he’d offered again and again, but without any real hope.

He hated to wait for his mother. As he stood there, alone, his chin tucked into his chest for warmth, he was consumed by doubt. How drunk would she be? Would it be a kind, gentle day when she remembered that she loved him? Or a dark, nasty day when the booze turned her into a shrieking, stumbling madwoman who hated her only child with a vengeance? Dark days were the norm now; all his mother could think about was how much she’d lost. She wailed that welfare checks didn’t cover gin and bemoaned the fact that they’d been reduced to living in their car—a swallow away from homelessness.

He could always read her mood immediately. A pale, dirty face that never smiled and watery, unfocused eyes meant that she’d found her way to a full bottle. Even though he went through the car every day, searching for booze like other kids searched for Easter eggs, he knew he couldn’t stop her from drinking.

He rocked from foot to foot, trying to manufacture some body heat, but the rain hammered him, slid in icy, squiggly streaks down his back. Come on, Mom.

She never came that day. Or the next. He’d wandered around the dark, dangerous parts of Seattle all night, and finally, he’d fallen asleep in the garbage-strewn doorway of a tumbledown Chinese restaurant. In the morning, he’d rinsed out his mouth and grabbed a discarded bag of fortune cookies from a Dumpster, then made his way to school.

The police had come for him at noon, two unsmiling men in blue uniforms who told him that his mother had been stabbed. They didn’t say what she’d been doing at the time of the crime, but Nick knew. She’d been trying to sell her thin, unwashed body for the price of a fifth of gin. The policemen told Nick that there were no suspects, and he hadn’t been surprised. No one except Nick had cared about her when she was alive; no one was going to care that another scrawny, homeless drunk, turned old before her time by booze and betrayal, had been murdered.

Nick buried the memory in the black, soggy ground of his disappointments. He wished he could forget it, but of course, the past was close now. It had been breathing down his neck ever since Kathy’s death.

With a tired sigh, he turned and faced his utterly silent child. “Time for bed,” he said softly, trying to forget, too, that in the old days—not so long ago—she would have mounted a formal protest at the thought of going to bed without any “family time.”

But now, she got to her feet, held her doll in the two “visible” fingers on her right hand, and walked away from him. Without a single backward glance, she began the long, slow climb to the second floor. Several of the steps creaked beneath her feather weight, and every sound hit Nick like a blow. What in the hell was he going to do now that Izzy was out of school? She had nowhere to go and no one to take care of her. He couldn’t stay home from work with her, and Lurlene had her own life.

What in the hell was he going to do?

Twice during the night, Annie awoke from her solitary bed and paced the room. Kathy’s death had reminded her how precious time was, how fleeting. How sometimes life snipped the edges off your good intentions and left you with no second chance to say what really mattered.

She didn’t want to think about her husband—I love her, Annie—but the thoughts were always there, gathered in the air around her, crackling like heat lightning in the darkness of her room. She stared at her face in the mirror, studying the haircut, trying to figure out who she was and where she belonged. She stared at herself so long, the image changed and twisted and turned gray, and she was lost in the blurry reflection of a woman she’d never known.

Without Blake, she had no one who’d witnessed the past twenty years of her life. No one but Hank who could remember what she’d been like at twenty-five or thirty, no one with whom to share her lost dreams.

Stop it.

She glanced at the clock beside the bed. It was six o’clock in the morning. She sat down on the edge of the bed, grabbed the phone, and dialed Natalie’s number, but her daughter was already gone for the day. Then she took a chance on Terri.

Terri answered on the fifth ring. “This better be important,” she growled.

Annie laughed. “Sorry, it’s just me. Is it too early?”

“No, no. I love getting up before God. Is everything okay?”

Annie didn’t know if things would ever be okay again, but that answer was getting stale. “I’m getting by.”

“Judging by the hour, I’d say you weren’t sleeping well.”

“Not much.”

“Yeah, I pretty much paced and cried for the first three months after Rom-the-shit-heel left me. You need to find something to do.”

“I’m in Mystic; the choices are a bit limited. I suppose I could try my hand at beer-can art. That’s a big seller up here. Or maybe I can learn to hunt with a bow and arrow and then stuff my own kills.”

“It’s good to hear you laugh.”

“It beats crying.”

“Seriously, Annie. You need to find something to do. Something that gets you out of your bed—or into someone else’s. Try shopping. Go buy some new clothes. Something that changes your look.”

Annie rubbed her shorn hair. “Oh, I’ve changed my looks all right. I look like Rush Limbaugh on Phen-fen.”

They talked for another half hour, and when she hung up, Annie felt, if not stronger, then at least better. She roused herself from her bed and took a long, hot shower.

Dressing in a white cashmere boat-necked sweater and winter-white wool slacks, she went downstairs and cooked Hank a big breakfast of scrambled eggs, orange juice, pancakes, and turkey bacon. It wasn’t long before the aroma drew her dad downstairs.

He walked into the kitchen, tightening the gray cotton belt around his ankle-length robe. He scratched his scruffy white beard and stared at her. “You’re up. Are you out of bed for long, or just roving until the headache starts again?”

The perceptiveness of the question reminded Annie that her father had known tragedy and had more than a waltzing acquaintance with depression himself. She pulled some china plates from the old oak breakfront in the corner and quickly set two places at the breakfast table. “I’m moving on with my life, Dad. Starting now. Starting here. Sit down.”

He pulled out a chair. It made a grating sound on the worn yellow linoleum. “I’m not sure feeding a man is a big leap forward.”

She gave him a crooked grin and took a seat across from him. “Actually, I thought I’d go shopping.”

He plucked up a mouthful of egg in his blunt-edged fingers. “In Mystic? Unless you’re looking for the ideal steel-head lure, I don’t know how much luck you’ll have.”

Annie stared down at her eggs. She wanted to eat—she really did—but the sight of the food made her faintly nauseous. She hoped her dad didn’t notice. “I thought I’d start by getting a few books. This seems like a good time to catch up on my reading. Hell, I could get through Moby-Dick in my spare time. And the clothes I brought won’t work up here.”

“Yeah, white’s not a very practical color up here in mud-land. ” He poured a blot of ketchup alongside his eggs and peppered everything. Reaching for his fork, he glanced across the table at Annie. She could tell that he was doing his best not to grin. “Good for you, Annie Virginia.” Then, softer, “Good for you.”

Mystic dozed beneath a bright spring sun. The town was full of activity today, with farmers and housewives and fishermen scurrying up and down the concrete sidewalks, in a hurry to get their errands done while the clouds were slim and spread out beneath a pale blue sky. Everyone knew that those same clouds could suddenly bunch together like school-yard bullies, releasing a torrent of rain so vicious that even a full-grown eagle couldn’t take flight.

Annie strolled down Main Street, peeking into the various stores, a couple of times pushing through a half-open door. Invariably a bell tinkled overhead and a voice called out, Hiya, miss. Fine day, isn’t it? At the Bagels and Beans coffee shop, she ordered a double tall mocha latte, and she sipped it as she moved down the street.

She passed stores that sold trinkets for tourists, hardware, fabric, and fishing tackle. But there wasn’t a single bookstore. At the H & P Drugstore, she picked up the latest Pat Conroy bestseller but couldn’t find anything else that interested her. There wasn’t much of a selection. It was too bad, because she needed a manual for the rest of her life.

At last, she found herself standing in front of Eve’s Leaves Dress Emporium. A mannequin smiled down at her from the display window, wearing a bright yellow rain slicker and matching hat. Her awkwardly bent elbow held a sign that read: Spring is in the air. Multicolored silk flowers sprouted from watering cans at her booted feet, and a rake was slanted against one wall.

Annie pushed through the glass door. A tiny bell tinkled at her entrance.

Somewhere, a woman squealed. “It can’t be!”

Annie looked around for the owner of the voice. Molly Block, her old high school English teacher, came barreling through the maze of rounders, her fleshy arms waving.

“Annie?” she said, grinning. “Annie Bourne, is that you?”

“It’s me, Mrs. Block. How are you?”

Molly planted her hands on her wide hips. “Mrs. Block. Don’t make me feel so old, Annie. Why, I was practically a child when I taught your class.” She grinned again, and shoved the wire-rimmed glasses higher on her nose. “It’s grand to see you again. Why, it’s been years.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Molly.”

“Whatever brings you up to our neck of the woods? I thought you married a hotshot lawyer and were living the good life in smoggy California.”

Annie sighed. “Things change, I guess.”

Molly cocked her head to the left and eyed Annie. “You look good; I’d kill to be able to wear that haircut, but I’d look like a helium balloon. That white cashmere won’t last long in this country, though. One good rainstorm and you’ll think you left the house wearin’ a dead rabbit.”

Annie laughed. “That’s the truth.”

Molly patted her shoulder. “Follow me.”

An hour later, Annie stood in front of a full-length mirror. She was wearing a nineteen-dollar pair of jeans (who knew they still made jeans at that price?), cotton socks and tennis shoes, and a baggy UW sweatshirt in a utilitarian shade of gray.

The clothes made her feel like a new woman. She didn’t look like the thirty-nine-year-old soon-to-be-ex-wife of a hotshot California lawyer; she looked like an ordinary small-town woman, maybe someone who had horses to feed and porches to paint. A woman with a life. For the first time, she almost liked the haircut.

“They suit you,” Molly said, crossing her beefy arms and nodding. “You look like a teenager.”

“In that case, I’ll take everything.”

While Molly was ringing up the purchases, she rambled on and on about life in Mystic, who was sleeping with whom, who’d gone bankrupt over the spotted owl fiasco, who was running for city council.

Annie glanced out the window. She listened vaguely to the small-town gossip, but she couldn’t really concentrate. Lurlene’s words kept coming back to her, circling, circling. Kathy died eight months ago. She turned back to Molly. “I heard... about Kathy Johnson... Delacroix.”

Molly paused, her pudgy fingers plucking at a price tag. “It was a true shame, that. You all used to be awfully close in high school.” She smiled sadly. “I remember the time you and Nick and Kathy put on that skit for the talent show—you all sang some silly song from South Pacific. Nicky wore that outrageous coconut bra, and halfway through the song you all were laughing so hard you couldn’t finish.”

“I remember,” she said softly, wondering how it was she’d forgotten it until this very second. “How’s Nick doing since... you know?” She couldn’t bring herself to actually say the words.

Molly made a tsking sound and snipped the price tag from the jeans with a pair of scissors. “I don’t know. He makes his rounds and does his job, I guess—you know he’s a cop, right? Don’t see him smile much anymore, and his daughter is in pretty bad shape, from what I hear. They could use a visit from an old friend, I’ll bet.”

After Annie paid for her new clothes, she thanked Molly for the help and carried her purchases out to the car. Then she sat in the driver’s seat for a while, thinking, remembering.

She shouldn’t go to him, not now, not spur-of-the-moment, she knew that. A thing like this needed to be thought out. You didn’t just go barging into a strange man’s life, and that’s what he was: a stranger. She hadn’t seen Nick in years.

Besides, she was broken and battered herself. What good could she be to a man who’d lost his wife?

But she was going to go to him. She had probably known from the second Lurlene mentioned his name that it was inevitable. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense; it didn’t matter that he probably wouldn’t remember her. What mattered was that he’d once been her best friend, and that his wife had once been her best friend. And that she had nowhere else to go.

It was approaching nightfall by the time Annie gathered the nerve to go see Nick. A winding brown ribbon of road led to the Beauregard house. Towering old-growth trees bracketed the road, their trunks obscured by runaway salal bushes. Every now and then, through the black fringe of forest, she could see a glittering silver reflection of the lake. The last few rays of gray sunlight fell like mist through the heavy, moss-draped branches.

It wasn’t raining, but tiny droplets of dew began to form on the windshield. In this, the land of ten thousand water-falls, the air was always heavy with moisture, and the lakes were the aquamarine hue of glacial ice. Some, like Mystic Lake, were so deep that in places the bottom had never been found, and so remote that sometimes, if you were lucky, you could find a pair of trumpeter swans stopping by on their migratory patterns. Here, tucked into the wild, soggy corner of this secret land, they knew they would be safe.

The road twisted and turned and finally ended in a big circular dirt driveway. Annie parked next to a police squad car, turned off the engine, and stared at the beautiful old house, built back at the turn of century, when woods were solid and details were hand-carved by master craftsmen who took pride in their work. In the distance, she could hear the roar of the mighty Quinault River, and she knew that this time of year it would be straining and gnawing at its bank, rushing swollen and headlong toward the faraway shores of the Pacific Ocean.

A pale yellow fog obscured half of the house, drifting on invisible currents of air from the lake. It crept eerily up the whitewashed porch steps and wound around the carved posts.

Annie remembered a night when this house had been spangled in starlight. It had been abandoned then; every broken window had held jagged bits of shadow and moonlight. She and Nick had ridden their bikes here, ditched them alongside the lake, and stared up at the big, broken house.

I’m gonna own this house someday, Nick had said, his hands shoved deeply in his pockets.

He’d turned to her, his handsome face cut into sharp angles by the glittering moonlight. She hadn’t even seen the kiss coming, hadn’t prepared for it, but when his lips had touched hers, as soft and tentative as the brush of a butterfly’s wing, she’d started to cry.

He had drawn back, frowning. Annie?

She didn’t know what was wrong, why she was crying. She’d felt foolish and desperately naive. It was her first kiss—and she’d ruined it.

After that, he’d turned away from her. For a long time, he’d stared at the lake, his arms crossed, his face unreadable. She’d gone up to him, but he’d pulled away, mumbled something about needing to get home. It was the first and last time he’d ever kissed her.

She brushed the memory aside and fixed her thoughts on the here and now.

Nick and Kathy had fixed up the old house—the windows were all in place, and sunshine-yellow paint coated everything. Hunter-green shutters bracketed each window, but still the whole place looked... untended.

Last year’s geraniums and lobelia were still in the flower boxes, now a dead, crackly bunch of brown stalks. The grass was much too long and moss had begun to fur the brick walkway. A dirty cement birdbath lay on its side amid gargantuan rhododendrons.

And still it was one of the most beautiful places she’d ever seen. The new spring grass was as green as emeralds and as thick as chinchilla fur; it swept away from the building and rolled gently to the blue edge of the lake. Behind the house, swollen clouds hung suspended in a sky hammered to the color of polished steel.

Annie tucked her purse under her arm and slowly crossed the squishy wet lawn, climbing the white porch steps. At the oak door, she paused, then took a deep breath and knocked.

No answer.

She was just about to turn away when she heard the slow shuffling of feet. Suddenly the door swung open, and Nick was standing in front of her.

She would have recognized him anywhere. He was still tall, over six feet, but time had whittled the football star’s muscles to a whipcord leanness. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the dark, corrugated muscles of his stomach tapered down into a pair of bleached Levi’s that were at least two sizes too big. He looked as tough and sinewy as old leather, with pale, lined skin stretched across hollowed-out cheeks. His hair was ragged and unkempt, and something—either time or grief—had sucked its color away, left it the silvery hue of a nickel when struck by the sun.

But it was his eyes—an eerie, swimming-pool blue— that caught and held her attention. His gaze flicked over her, a cop’s look that missed no detail, not the brand-new tomboy haircut or the newly purchased small-town clothes. Certainly not the Buick-size diamond on her left hand. “Annie Bourne,” he said softly, unsmiling. “Lurlene told me you were back in town.”

An uncomfortable silence fell as she tried to figure out what to say. She shifted nervously from side to side. “I’m... sorry about Kathy.”

He seemed to fade a little beneath the words. “Yeah,” he answered. “So am I.”

“I know how much you loved her.”

He looked as if he were going to say something, and she waited, poised forward, but in the end he said nothing, just cocked his head and swung the door open wider.

She followed him into the house. It was dark—there were no lights on, no fire in the fireplace—and there was a faint musty smell in the air.

Something clicked. Brilliant white light erupted from a shadeless lamp; it was so bright that for a moment she couldn’t see anything at all. Then her eyes adjusted.

The living room looked like someone had dropped a bomb on it. There was a scotch or whiskey bottle lying beside the sofa, a drop of booze puddled at its mouth; open pizza boxes littered the floor; clothes lay in heaps and on chairbacks. A crumpled blue policeman’s shirt hung across the television screen.

“I don’t seem to spend much time at home anymore,” he said into the awkward silence. Reaching down, he grabbed a faded flannel shirt from the floor and put it on.

She waited for him to say something else, and when he didn’t, she glanced around. The sprawling living room was floored in beautiful oak planks and dominated by a large brick fireplace, blackened by age and smoke. It looked as if there hadn’t been a fire in the hearth in a long, long time. The few bits and pieces of furniture—a faded brown leather sofa, a tree-trunk end table, a morris chair—were scattered haphazardly around the room, all wearing tissue-thin coats of dust. A stone archway led into a formal dining room, where Annie could see an oval maple table and four scattered chairs, their seats cushioned by red and white gingham pads. She supposed that the closed green door led to the kitchen. To the left, an oak staircase hugged the brightly wallpapered wall and led to a darkened second floor.

Annie felt Nick’s gaze on her. Nervously, she picked an invisible lint ball from her sleeve and searched for something to say. “I hear you have a daughter.”

Slowly, he nodded. “Izzy. Isabella. She’s six.”

Annie clasped her hands together to keep from fidgeting. Her gaze landed on a photograph on the mantel. She picked her way through the rubble on the floor and touched the photo. “The gruesome threesome,” she said, smiling. “I can’t remember this one....”

Lost in her own memories, Annie vaguely heard him pad out of the room. A moment later, he was back.

He came up behind her, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on the back of her neck. “Would you like a drink?”

She turned away from the fireplace and found him directly behind her, holding a bottle of wine and two glasses. For a second, it startled her, then she remembered that they were grown-ups now, and offering a glass of wine was the polite way to entertain a guest. “A drink would be great. Where’s your daughter? Can I meet her?”

An unreadable look passed through his eyes. “She’s staying with Lurlene tonight. They’re going to see some cartoon at the Rose theater with Buddy’s granddaughters. Let’s go sit by the lake.” He grabbed a blanket from the sofa and led her out of the house. Together, not too close, they sat down on the blanket.

Annie sipped at the glass of wine Nick had poured for her. Twilight slipped quietly through the trees in blood-red streaks. A pale half moon rose slowly upward, spreading a blue-white veil across the navy-blue surface of the lake. Tiny, silvery peaks rippled against the shore, lapped against the pebbly ground. Memories sifted through the air, falling like rain to the ground around them. She remembered how easy it had once been with them, as they sat together at sporting events, watching Kathy cheerlead at the sidelines; how they’d all squeezed together in vinyl booths to eat greasy hamburgers and fries after the games. They’d known how to talk to each other then—about what, she couldn’t recall—but once she’d believed she could tell him anything.

And now, all these years later, with the bumpy road of their separate lives between them, she couldn’t think of how to weave a fabric of conversation from a single thread.

She sighed, sipping her wine. She was drinking more than she should, and faster, but it eased her awkwardness. A few stars came out, pinpricks of light peeking through the purple and red twilight sky.

She couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “It’s beautiful—”

“Nice stars—” They both spoke at the same time.

Annie laughed. “When in doubt, mention the weather or the view.”

“We can do better than that,” he said quietly. “Life’s too damned short to spend it making small talk.”

He turned to her, and she saw the network of lines that tugged at his blue eyes. He looked sad and tired and infinitely lonely. It was that, the loneliness, that made her feel like they were partners somehow, victims of a similar war. So, she put the small talk aside, forgot about plundering the shared mine of their teenage years, and plunged into intimacy. “How did Kathy die?”

He sucked down his glass of wine and poured another one. The glittering gold liquid crested at the rim of the glass and spilled over, splashing on his pant leg. “She killed herself.”