“I don’t have a puppy in my arms,” he said from behind me, pleased with his own restraint.

“Good, because—”

“I’ve got him in a basket.”

Thirteen

I DEVELOPED A strategy for dealing with Diana: one-word answers only.

It turned out, I was right all along. She didn’t just want me to help her with groceries and stairs. She wanted to hang out. She wanted to be friends.

She wanted forgiveness.

She claimed she was just glad to have me around, but her actions made it clear that she wanted more. Wherever I was, she’d show up there. If I tried to read a book in the living room, she’d read a magazine in the living room. If I was making a snack in the kitchen, she’d make a pot of tea. If I took a stroll down to the rock jetty, she would coincidentally be in the mood for a stroll of her own.

She was companionable. She was low-key. But she failed to comprehend something important: I didn’t want to be her friend.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

In the years after she left, I built my entire life on a foundation of routine and order and low drama. That meant setting schedules and keeping to them. It meant going to the same place and eating the same things and following the same routines over and over. It also meant doing everything in a careful, controlled, regimented way.

And that was before I’d even moved here. Now I’d turned everything inside out. I had ten times more chaos than I could handle. The last thing I needed was to hash out old disappointments with a woman I’d already given up on.

I was here to be helpful, and pleasant, and do my duty. I was not here to play Bananagrams, or to learn the art of crochet, or to bare my soul. To anybody.

But Diana didn’t get it.

“Answer a question for me,” she said one night as I tried to escape after dinner to practice a little parkour.

“Busy,” I said, at the door.

“You’re always busy.”

“Sorry.”

“There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

I just shrugged and gestured toward the road. “Working out.”

The house was so tiny that those nighttime escapes had become a kind of salvation. I’d jog the narrow streets of the jetty and then on into town and around the coast, vaulting, leaping, climbing, and swinging. It did make it feel like the whole town was a playground.

Usually, by the time I got home, Diana was fast asleep with her white noise machine running. But on this night, she waited up. When I walked back in, she was perched in the living room like a spider.

“Come talk to me for a minute,” she said.

“I’m not really a big talker,” I said.

“You used to be.”

“I used to be a lot of things.”

I sat down, as requested, but I chose the chair closest to the stairs, and I perched at the edge, ready for my quick getaway. As I sat, she studied me. “I want something from you,” she said.

I met her eyes. “What?”

“I want you to forgive me.”

Well, that was blunt. “We don’t always get what we want.”

“I don’t want you to do it for me. I want you to do it for you.”

I drew in a long breath. “We’re not going to be friends, Diana.”

“This isn’t about being friends.”

“Kinda seems like it is.”

She frowned at me. “I’d like to be your friend, I would. I can’t deny it. In addition to loving you—I’ve always just really, really liked you. So I’m not going to pretend like I feel the same way about you that I would about some stranger off the street. But that’s not what I mean when I say I want you to forgive me.”

I waited.

“This is about something far more fundamental than that.”

I waited again, as long as I could, before finally giving in and asking, “What?”

“This is about you finally setting down all that anger you carry around with you everywhere you go.”

She wasn’t wrong. I did carry anger around. Maybe not everywhere—but almost.

And it was a lot heavier than you’d think.

I could have lied then, I guess. Or gone up to bed. Or even fled back out the front door into the night. But I just didn’t. Did I want to set down all that anger?

Of course I did.

I let out a long sigh before saying, “I just don’t know how to do that.”

She leaned a little closer, waiting for more.

I’d already started. Might as well finish.

“I always kind of thought that forgiveness would come with time,” I said. “That the bitterness would slowly fade like a scar until I couldn’t even really find it anymore if I looked. But that’s not what happened. It didn’t fade. It hardened. Other things around it faded, but the memory of the day you left is still as sharp as if it just happened. I can still see your car pulling out of the driveway. I can hear the pop of the tires as they rolled over those seeds from that Chinese tallow tree. I can see the side of your face, absolutely still like a wax figure as I banged on the window. I can feel every emotion I experienced that day in slow motion. If anything, the memories have gotten stronger.”

Those memories were tied to other memories, of course, and there was no way I was going to share anything more with her. But what I was saying was true enough. “I know that forgiveness is healthy. I know the only person you hurt when you hold on to bitterness is yourself. But I literally wouldn’t even know how to start. How do you forgive people? How does it even work?”

These were meant to be rhetorical questions.

“You’re in luck,” Diana said then. “I happen to be kind of an expert on forgiveness.”

“Who have you had to forgive?” I asked. As far as I could tell, she was far more likely to be the victimizer than the victim.

“Myself, for starters,” she said. “And then lots of other people. You don’t get to be my age without disappointments. My parents, in some ways. Various friends. Your dad.”

“Dad?” I said, like, Please. “Dad is perfect.”

“He’s hardly perfect.”

“He was good to you.”

“Yes, he was.”

“He was good to you, and you cheated on him.”

She snapped to attention. “I never cheated on your dad.”

I gave her a look, like, I know all about it.

“Is that what he told you?”

“That’s what he told Aunt Caroline. I just overheard him.”

“I did not cheat on your father,” she declared again.

“You left him for another man,” I said, like, Case closed.

“Yes. But I didn’t cheat.”

I couldn’t help it. I crossed my arms.

“The semester I came up here as a visiting professor, I was desperately lonely,” she said then. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with Wallace. But I sat by myself every day at lunch—the art teachers were a strangely snobby crew—and he started sitting with me every day. He was terribly funny. And charming. He wore these gray cable-knit sweaters, and he had the most wonderful gravelly voice. He always smelled like gingerbread. I don’t know how to describe it. We just had a spark. The more I saw him, the more I wanted to see him. His wife had left him not too long before we met, and we were both just so … alone. He very quickly became the best thing in my life up here. And I’m sorry to say it, because your dad is a really good person, but as much as I did love him, I was never really in love with him. I married him because he was practical and helpful and good—but not because he ever swept me off my feet. I’d never felt that feeling in my life before I met Wallace. I didn’t even know it existed. It was like being caught up in a windstorm. But I never slept with him or even kissed him in all that time. We held hands a few times—passionately—but that was it.”