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“I came here to tell this story,” Harrison said. “I didn’t know it when I drove here, but I know it now. Agnes would be proud of me, don’t you think?”

“Harrison.”

“And the best part,” Harrison said. “I haven’t even told you the best part yet. After the funeral, Stephen’s father drove to Kidd for the graduation. Don’t you remember? There was a tribute to Stephen at the ceremony? After graduation, Mr. Otis came to my room and said he wanted to see where Stephen had died. That he knew that I was the last one to see him alive, and that I would know the place.”

Harrison leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped in front of him. “We drove in Mr. Otis’s car. I didn’t know what to say. I had everything to say and yet nothing. I led him to the house. We parked the car in the driveway. We walked through the sand dunes at the side of the house and then out to the seawall. I just stood. I was shaking.

“Here? his father asked.

“I nodded.

“There was nothing you could have done, son, he said to me. He called me son and put his hand on my shoulder. Trying to comfort me. I was screaming inside. It wasn’t true, I wanted to tell him. There was everything I could have done.”

Harrison hoped Nora would not echo Stephen’s father or say—as so many women might have done—You did the right thing. Empty absolution akin to a sin in Harrison’s book, a book that strangely had more blank pages the more there was to add to the ledger.

It was crap that confessing a thing relieved one of guilt, Harrison thought. How convenient to think so, how utterly deluding. Confessing a thing, he knew now, made the thing more real.

And how sordid and sad this tale he had confessed. Harrison could not remember Stephen now, not precisely who he’d been. He had images and photographs, some few stills at home, more in the yearbook, where Stephen Otis was ghoulishly omnipresent. Captain of the baseball team. President of the senior class. Class clown. Some images of Stephen Harrison had actively tried to bury. Lying on a bunk with Nora. Wading into the water. Others, Harrison savored. Catching a grounder on a hop close to his chest and leaping with a throw home that saved a run and won the game. But Stephen—the essence of Stephen—was gone, just like the essence of Harrison’s father was gone, recalled now only through anecdote or photographs. The man himself had vanished.

Harrison heard a faint rustle on the bed behind him. It was time for him to go. The classy move would be to stand and leave without a backward glance, without the few exchanges that could only be banal, that would cheapen all that had gone before. But Harrison knew he’d told the story badly, perhaps making more of it than there was at the time, using threads of pure emotion for his tale, so that leaving without a word might be stagy or false. Friend to friend, Harrison ought to comfort Nora. Ought to say, at the very least, I’m sorry.

Nora put her hands on Harrison’s shoulders, and he flinched. Two warm delicate entities with the energy of bombs. Signaling what? Forgiveness? Or was this meant simply to be a calming gesture, to soothe, to still conversation, her ear as attuned to the banal as his was.

The hands moved inside his collar, electrifying Harrison, and then around and along the skin of his chest until her head rested on his shoulder, her cheek next to his ear. The decision—to clasp her hands in a firm no and allow her to remove them; or to turn and kiss her mouth, an emphatic yes—was made in a split second. Harrison stood and held the girl, now a woman, after twenty-seven years of intermittent imaginings, the reality so vivid it made his breath tight. He kissed her, the kiss more mature as well, speaking of years of experience he would have to imagine now for the rest of his life.

Nora disengaged herself and walked to the door. Harrison thought, for one heartbreaking moment, that she meant to leave him, as she often did, but instead, she locked it. When she turned to him, no funny half smile on her face, his heart took off