Part I — The Terrace

The summer I came home in two pieces, the ocean wouldn’t shut up. Not the big Hollywood ocean that throws tantrums on cue—this was a steady, small-town Atlantic, blue as a bruise and never finished telling you what it had seen. It huffed around the rocks below my sister’s house and shushed the gulls whenever they got loud. That house—Theresa’s—sat on a bluff above the old boardwalk in St. Lowell, Maine, a town that pretended the war hadn’t ended so it could keep its righteous purpose a little longer.

Theresa had wheeled my hospital bed downstairs into the drawing room because she said the second floor smelled too much like decisions. A French door opened to a sun terrace, ninety feet of salt wind and mercy. I could muscle my chair out there on good mornings. From that terrace, to the left, the harbor crabbed into an old fishing village of cedar-shingle roofs; to the right, the Saint-Low estate climbed the opposite bluff, a gray pile of Gilded Age stone that looked as if it had been shipped, intact, from a feudal quarrel. Locals called it “the Castle,” but only under their breath, and always with a grin.

You could say I had the best view in town—if you didn’t count the fact my legs were on strike. A jeep ended that part of me outside Anzio, and everything since had been apologies.

“Coffee,” Theresa said, setting a mug on the little teak table she’d bullied out of a doctor’s waiting room in Portland. “Also, you’re about to have company.”

“From the Castle?”

“From the King’s Arms,” she said—our only decent tavern, where every rumor in town sent a postcard before it left. “Campaign season.”

And then came the trio, moving along the coast path like a parade that had mislaid its marching band: Captain Carslake—who’d shipped out of Boston as a quartermaster and come home convinced he was the Chamber of Commerce; Theresa at his elbow; and behind them, a girl you couldn’t quite look at straight on, as if staring might break something in you.

“Major John Gabriel—our candidate for Congress,” Carslake boomed, pointing a thumb back toward town as if Washington were a grocery store at the end of Main Street. “You’ll never see his like. He’s the man we need. Slicker than oil? Maybe. But he fought, and the ladies—well, the ladies approve.”

Theresa, prim as a clean ledger line, arched a brow. “Hugh, this is Lady Saint-Low—Eleanor—and her granddaughter, Isabella. They’re throwing their support behind the race.”

Eleanor Saint-Low gave me a nod that felt like the city issuing a permit. The granddaughter—Isabella—gave me something less official and more confusing: a stillness, almost an old-country kind. She perched on the terrace wall like a white bird and looked past me at the water as if she’d been waiting on that particular blue.

Carslake did his glad-handing, promised to return with a station wagon full of envelopes and stamps, and left us with the weather.

“What’s that noise?” Isabella asked after a while.

“The ocean.”

“No,” she said softly, as if embarrassed for me. “That other noise.”

I listened, and then I heard it—the thin, high whistle of someone not strong enough to climb a hill, pretending they were. It was Gabriel, coming from the path in a suit he’d made friends with in the mirror. Up close he wasn’t handsome; he was kinetic, the kinetic you blame later. Black hair clipped close, shoulders compact, a boxer who had taught charm to jab for him. He smiled with his whole face, which made the smile look like a decision.

“Miss Norris,” he said to Theresa in a tone that counted people like chips. “Mr. North.” He turned to me. “Heard about Anzio. Sometimes the world doesn’t fight fair. Scotch?”

He found the bottle on the sideboard because men like Gabriel always do. He poured without asking and set a glass by my hand. Then he planted his knuckles on the terrace wall and looked over the drop like the ocean was his crowd.

“Let’s not lie to each other,” he said suddenly, in the same bright voice. “I’m not their kind.” He flicked his eyes toward the Castle. “My old man was a plumber in Worcester. You know what that buys you? A head full of how things work and a front row seat for who gets to cut the ribbon. These Saint-Lows—nice people. They lend you the garden and take the credit for the weather. I’ll need them to win. So I’ll say ‘thank you, ma’am’ and ‘sir’ and drink their bad sherry. But I don’t forgot what the word ‘common’ feels like when somebody uses it on you.”

“You’re running as a Republican,” I said.

“I’m running as a winner,” he said. “Parties are clothes. What counts is the job.” He looked steadily at me. “What counts is not having to be told by anyone like that what you can and can’t do ever again.”

He had a way of pointing at an itch you hadn’t known to scratch; next thing you knew you were digging at skin. He didn’t stay long. Candidates never do, if they’re any good—they throw a spark and leave you blaming your own curtains for catching fire. As he headed out along the path toward the village, he tipped two fingers to Isabella. She watched him go without moving, the way you watch a storm you don’t intend to run from.

A day later, Theresa found us a practical use. She deputized the Scouts to wheel me to the drill hall for a town rally. Gabriel worked that room like a foreman with a time clock and a promise: he hit the ledger words—prosperity, security, normalcy—and then he climbed down where people kept their wallets. His cadence tugged at a memory of gospel and sales pitch, the American blend that makes you cheerful about things you haven’t checked.

By the time the pledge and the prayer were done, the town had decided he belonged to it, the way you decide a stray dog belongs to you because you’re the one who found it. He came up to the terrace that evening to sip at Theresa’s sherry—the sherry that had seen nothing like his mouth before—and he leaned again on my wall.

“I’ll win if I stay off women,” he said to me in a cheerful monotone, as if reporting on the harvest. “They smell me coming. The ones who know better are the worst. They think they can sand me down.”

“And you want to be sanded down?”

He gave me a look like I’d asked about algebra in a boxing ring. “I want the job,” he said simply. “A soft one. Soft enough to sleep through. A man gets tired of proving he belongs in rooms.”

He left when he saw Isabella floating up the path with a woven scarf and a daffy confidence in the day. She’d stopped by to see the water. She didn’t sit; she settled, like the terrace was a sentence she’d decided how to finish. There was a quiet between us that wasn’t awkward, more like the world was catching its breath.

A gull lay beyond the wall, where the rocks chewed the afternoon. Its wings were folded wrong. Its eye was glass.

“Oh,” she said, small as a child’s last step in hopscotch. “No.”

“It’s only a gull,” I said, getting my chair closer.

“I can’t stand anything dead,” she said, and the way she said it made me wonder if she meant anything else. “It means one day I will be.”

“You and me both.”

“That’s awful,” she said, and her mouth tried out the shape of the word like she wasn’t sure it fit.

“My legs think it’s a relief,” I said. “Sometimes.”

She turned then and really looked at me—at the crutches propped against the wall, at the way the chair had made hollows where my thighs used to be. The pity I braced for didn’t arrive; what came had no name and no edge. “Do you think he’s afraid?” she asked.

“Who?”

“John Gabriel.”

“Of death?”

“Of not dying,” she said after a beat. “Of having to live with himself.”

I laughed then, because I hadn’t said it that well in my own head. She smiled, and for the first time the bone-depth of her beauty felt like an accident she kept walking away from. Then a shadow crossed the terrace; Theresa’s step when she was bearing tea always made that particular winter.

“Isabella, dear,” she said. “You dropped your scarf.”

Isabella snatched at the scarf when it slipped from her lap, quick as guilt, and her hand knocked a small brown bottle that had been hiding in its folds. Pills winked against the stone like a scatter of dull pearls. She sucked in a breath. Theresa didn’t see; she was already back through the French door for spoons. Isabella covered the pills with the scarf and tucked both into that calm, impossible bosom of hers.

“I don’t like to sleep,” she said, almost inaudible. “I’ve been saving them, just in case the day insists.”

I said I understood. I didn’t; I only recognized the cliff.

The next week, scandal hustled in wearing a housewife’s apron. St. Lowell is a small place; when you sneeze on Water Street, Hygiene Hardware knows before you fish the handkerchief from your pocket. Millie Bird—the veterinarian’s wife—missed her footing on the social ladder one afternoon when her husband’s patient got hit by a delivery truck out by the wharf. Gabriel happened to be there. He scooped the bleeding mutt into his arms and carried it to the vet’s office like an ad from the war-bonds page. While he waited on the porch for Dr. Bird—James—Millie stepped out to thank him, her eyes going wide as a hymn catching the second verse. Someone from the sweet shop saw the exchange and kept a better memory than mercy. Later, Gabriel and Millie took a slow walk along the seawall. You don’t do a slow walk in St. Lowell unless you mean to publish it.

By morning, Millie’s smile had been shared by everyone who collected church bulletins for the gossip column. Carslake arrived on our terrace with the story the way a paperboy arrives with a war—understanding none of it, thrilled by all of it. “We’ve got a problem,” he said, giddy as a man who’s discovered a leak he’s sure he can plug with rhetorical chewing gum. “The women are chattering. He needs to cut it with that one. Today.”

Theresa made the practical noises. I made the friend noises, which felt unfamiliar in my own mouth. Gabriel came by that evening, caught my eye, and asked the question that doesn’t admit the answer you want: “Have they got to you yet?” When I told him what the town had seen and what it was going to decide, he stared out at the ocean until the waves stopped being decorative.

“Women suffer all the time,” he said finally, as if he were citing commuter timetables. “You can see it if you watch. They think I can fix it for a while. The trouble is I can only fix one at a time.”

“Stay away from Millie,” I said, trying to hand him the ladder that had nothing to do with saving his soul and everything to do with saving the campaign. He nodded in the way men nod when they plan to disobey you thoroughly.

On a bright, high morning full of ordinary sun, I discovered the thing about bright, high mornings: they make cruelty look cleaner. Gabriel drifted by the terrace in a mood he wore like a belt—visible, useful, and likely to bruise. Theresa was in the kitchen. Isabella was on the wall. Cigarette smoke made lazy hieroglyphs in the air between them. The conversation wandered onto pain—hers theoretical, his owned. “I can stand a lot—more than most,” she offered, as if the claim were a coin she didn’t mind spending. He took her wrist, held it, and brought the lit end of the cigarette down to kiss the tender Bluebeard skin below the thumb.

The sound that came out of me belonged to someone who thought he could still run.

She went white. She did not pull away. The room smelled like meat and shame. He watched her watching him, then flicked the cigarette into the empty fireplace.

“I wouldn’t’ve guessed,” he said softly, almost with respect, which is the meanest word when it shows up late. “I apologize, Lady Saint-Low.”

He left the way a soldier leaves a burned field—no backward glance, no question about the harvest. Isabella looked at the black bead on her skin and then past it to the ocean, as if she weren’t deciding what kind of person to be, just whether to one more time.

Theresa, when I told her, didn’t change color. “You knew he was a brute,” she said.

“It’s her I can’t place,” I said. “What kind of woman lets a man test her with fire?”

“The kind that doesn’t think about what she’s doing while she’s doing it,” Theresa said gently. “And doesn’t think about what she’s done after it’s done. Some people don’t speculate. They accept.”

“Accept what?”

“That they are what they are,” Theresa said, and patted my shoulder like I was a taken temperature. “And that the day will swallow them either way.”

I didn’t know it then, but that’s the closest anyone ever came to telling me how to read Isabella Saint-Low. Everyone else, including me, kept getting mesmerized by the shape of the letters.

Part II — The Barn Dance

Theresa’s social genius, which was part maternal instinct and part quartermaster’s ledger, produced a miracle even she pretended to be bored by: she convinced Eleanor Saint-Low to let the campaign host a whist drive and barn dance on the Castle grounds. That got the ladies with heirloom jewelry into shoes that could tolerate pine planks, and it got the men who preferred beer to sherry somewhere near the cause without scaring them. It also got everyone close to everyone else’s business, and there’s nothing a campaign loves like proximity.

I watched from my terrace as bunting went up like permission—strings of patriotic hope fluttering between beams as if wind had ideological commitments. The town staged itself: the Knights of Columbus dragged in a piano that had known better rooms, the bakery’s owner set down sheet cakes with flags piped so carefully you felt like a vandal taking a knife to them, and Millie Bird, pink with purpose, hammered tacks into the “Women for Gabriel” placard until its vowels sounded married.

Gabriel made rounds, transmit-receiving at a pace that would’ve blown a fuse on a lesser man. He had a pint early because he believed in meeting people where they lived, and some of those people lived next to a keg. He also had a way of stepping toward a woman and making you forget there was any other direction a body could turn. Millie, orbiting him without meaning to, proved the dynamo theory. Theresa drifted near enough to draft behind his breeze but stayed one full grammar rule away from flirtation.

Isabella arrived late, pearl-pale in a dress the color of the Castle’s old wedding photographs. When she moved, the dress said she belonged to the same century as the rest of us, but only because she’d allowed it. She didn’t dance; she watched other people do it and looked pleased for them. Robert Saint-Low—Eleanor’s grandson, freshly returned from the Pacific—was due in town any day. Everyone said his name the way you say a word that remembers how to taste champagne. Isabella’s face when people said “Robert” didn’t change. That didn’t mean anything; her face was private property.

Toward midnight, the piano got sentimental and the crowd’s orbit loosened. Through the open barn doors, down the dark cut of the path to the sea, two shapes peeled off from the light and flowed into the hush. I didn’t know who until half an hour later when Gabriel stumped back into the barn with a grin that wasn’t the poster kind. He wasn’t out of breath; he was out of mind. He found me at the edge of the crowd, a loaner scotch in my hand and my bad legs doing their usual impression of stone.

“Told you,” he said, not looking at me, looking past me at a thing he’d finally stolen that no one could lock back up. “She’s got feet of clay same as the rest.”

“Who’s ‘she’?” I asked, though the answer was already banging on the back of my head.

“She’s a woman,” he said, almost carefully. “All right? She’s a woman.”

I had never hated anybody more than I hated him then, including the man in Rome who signed the order that sent our convoy into the road that folded me like a ticket. Because in Gabriel there was no ideology to hate, no sweeping principle, nothing to argue with and defeat. There was only appetite—smart, patient appetite—and if there’s a worse opponent in a democracy than appetite, I don’t know him.

Isabella came up the path moments later, slow and steady, a woman walking after a tune she hadn’t meant to follow. She put her hand onto my shoulder for balance the way you do on a moving bus when you don’t want to draw a stranger into your accident. She sat on the wall, looked at the sea, stood, and went home. She was the same as before and she wasn’t. The difference was the part that mattered and no words did it.

The next afternoon, Dr. Bird swung into the King’s Arms with rage to spend. He didn’t ask who wanted any; he passed it around. He found Gabriel at a corner table, and then he found the floor. Gabriel wasn’t a gentlemanly fighter. He didn’t do “honor” with his fists. He did safety and speed and ugly. Bird came up bloody and came at him again—husbands have a kind of stamina husbands hate themselves for. The room hissed, the bartender climbed onto the bar with a dish towel like it was a flag, and Carslake tried the voice you use with horses. Millie fled two minutes after, eyes like streetlights blown, and ten minutes after that she came in through the back door of the King’s Arms asking the barkeep for a room.

“She’ll stay at the Castle,” Eleanor Saint-Low announced within the hour, steps crisp as rain on porch rail. She had a chauffeur and a car that told you something about people who bought cars when engines were black magic. She had Isabella beside her and a look that told you a woman could still make a decision in this town if she had enough square footage.

“That’ll look like we’re on Gabriel’s side,” Carslake said to me from my terrace, jittery with a tactical victory he was sure he understood.

“It’ll look like somebody’s on Millie’s,” I said.

The day ended with the moral calculus still balancing itself. The next began with the arithmetic different: Gabriel won. Not the country—this wasn’t the movie where land changes hands because our side learned its lines—but our district, by inches. He dragged himself to my terrace for a drink he didn’t want and stared at the ocean like it had betrayed him.

“What’s the point?” he asked the water. “A man gets what he’s chased and all he’s got is breath running out. I’ll get fat in Washington. I’ll shake hands like a disease. You think there’s a point, North?”

“I think some people will stop you from doing your worst.”

He laughed, not kindly, and went along the path to drink with the Castle because there are some theaters you perform even if you’ve learned nothing from rehearsal.

I didn’t sleep the night after the election. The day ran on inside my head like one of those wind-up toys that won’t fall off a table, just keep tracing the edge. The ocean sat in the dark doing its easy work. At 2 a.m., glass knocked against glass: a tap at the French doors. When I snapped on the lamp, Isabella already had the latch. She slid into the room like a rumor that had finally decided to stand up.

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” she said, as if we’d already agreed on terms.

“To me?”

“To this,” she said, her voice gentle and unhelpful. “To what I am here.”

“Where are you going?”

“With John,” she said. She didn’t make the name smaller to make it easier to lift. “We’re leaving before anyone has time to say the words out loud.”

“What about Robert?”

“Robert is strong.”

“Do you love Gabriel?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and her eyes turned to the far corner where the curtain breathed. “I don’t think the answers to those questions know me either.”

She bent down and kissed me on the cheek in the shy way a woman kisses a child who has done something brave and permanent with his crayons. Then she was gone, and so was the part of me that thought I understood how anything worked.

St. Lowell did what New England towns do when the holy order gets kicked in the chest: it baked pies and shook hands harder and went to church with its chin up. Eleanor didn’t say Isabella’s name for a week and then said it as if it were a sermon subject. Robert packed his suitcase for a trip that didn’t happen. Gabriel telephoned in his resignation from a town I couldn’t place on a map without a generous ocean. He blamed the party and the town and himself in an order that shuffled to suit his need. Carslake came to my terrace with a face full of somebody else’s failure and lit a cigarette he didn’t enjoy.

“We knew what he was,” Eleanor said to me the only time we talked about it. She stood on the terrace, small in a coat that had known better winters. “We also knew what we were. It’s stupid to pretend otherwise just because the harvest was bad.”

Theresa didn’t say “told you so,” which is love in eight letters.

I kept sitting on that terrace for months until the edges of the sun I’d been using as an excuse wore out. I was almost used to the chair, and then I heard about a doctor in Slovakia—Záhrad, to sound like you’d done your homework—who was teaching legs to remember without miracles. I went because “no” had started sounding like a sermon I’d heard too many times. Six months later, I could crutch; a year later, I could walk like a man who’d learned to be grateful for sidewalks. Theresa cried when I took the first step from her car to the porch without leaning on anybody but weather.

Then I met him again.

Part III — The Letter

It was late fall in Bratislava, a city that had not forgiven itself for several wars ago. The café’s patio tilted toward a river with too many borders in it. I had done the clinic exercises and a little extra for the nurse who wrote hope on the wall with her eyes. I was planning several dinners to prove to myself I had returned to a world where dinner mattered. I was not planning on Gabriel’s voice across the tables.

“Doris,” he said, which was never my name but told you something about where he kept you in his filing system. “How about that.”

He looked like he’d traded charm for safety somewhere on a bad road and got shorted. His face was puffy, his appetite had eaten three meals from the same plate and called it variety, and his eyes had learned the language of morning-after. But the thing in him that had moved rooms was still there, only tired and slightly nauseated.

“You’re walking,” he said, not glad, not mean, just taking inventory. “I figured you’d given up.”

“Why would you figure that?”

He shrugged. “Men get tired.”

“Women don’t?”

“Some do,” he said, and stared across the river at countries.

He wanted to buy me a beer; I wanted not to share air with him. He asked if I wanted to see her; I told him I didn’t need to want that. He gave me poor directions to a better tragedy.

Her building was a throat of narrow stairs and walls that made mold into a religion. The room was clean where it could be, which is to say in intentions and in corners that vacuuming hadn’t reached yet. She sat on the floor with a length of silk in her lap, needles nested in a small saucer like ideas she might try if the day were longer. She looked up. The first thing her eyes did was take a picture of me walking; the next thing they did was let the picture go.

“Hugh,” she said, and my name sounded like a December hymn on a Sunday you hadn’t expected to be holy. “You’re mended.”

“I’m told this is what mending looks like,” I said. “It’s mostly patience and the right strangers.”

“I’m glad,” she said. She didn’t stand; she also didn’t apologize for not standing. She was wearing a blue sweater that had been told it could be a dress if it tried.

“What are you doing here?”

“John is doing something in Záhrad,” she said, and the sentence didn’t know how to end. “Something that needs patience.”

“Patience has better uses.”

She smiled at that, quickly and closely, like a person who had learned you shouldn’t laugh too loud near sleeping dogs. “He won’t marry me,” she added after a moment, as if she were telling me the weather. “We’re not good at paperwork.”

“You could have married Robert.”

“I could have been married to Robert,” she said, and the grammar saved us from lying about love. “It would have been being part of something that had already decided its shape.”

“And you have to decide your own?”

“I have to be mine,” she said, simply.

“Are you happy?”

“As happy as I was at the Castle?” She thought for a breath. “No.”

“Come home,” I said. “Theresa will find a way to forgive you while pretending she hasn’t. Eleanor will pretend not to forgive you while some small corner of her feels relief that you didn’t get crushed in her machine. Robert will get strong again and marry a woman who knows what to do with that. Come home.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I am here,” she said. “And because he is here.”

“He’ll be somewhere else tomorrow.”

“So will I,” she said. “That’s the trouble with both of us.”

“You have a choice.”

“No,” she said, gentle as a mercy. “I don’t think anyone does, not really. I think we are our choices before we choose them. And then we learn the word.”

I called her “fool” because there are words you have to throw in the air just to hear who they hit on the way down. She looked at the floor. He stood in the doorway then, breathing too much, angrier than any idea he had. He looked at me as if wondering which bone to insult first. I left because I don’t do men like that anymore, and because if I had stayed I would have ruined what extra pieces of me the Slovakian doctor had taught to stand.

A year later the letter arrived. Theresa brought it out onto the terrace as if it were a small animal that needed the sea. I knew the hand before I turned it over. Men like Gabriel don’t so much write as carve.

North,
You’ll want to know. She died last night. Influenza. There’s a run of it in the city. I got it first. Told her to get out. She wouldn’t. Had to nurse me. Then she got it, and she died, and I didn’t.

You’ll like that part. Maybe you’ll hate it worse. I don’t know. We were good together. We never fought because she didn’t know what fighting was except when somebody made a fight happen and even then she didn’t sign her name to it. She knew what I was. So I had to break her so I wouldn’t have to see it in her eyes every morning. You understand that? You don’t.

You’ll never forgive me. She tried to save me anyway. She died trying. So she loved me. That’s what I’m taking out. The rest is for you.

I won’t be long.
Your friend and enemy,
John Gabriel

He did not die that week. A telegram from a man who owed me nothing told me he staggered through another fever and then caught a train to somewhere that would have him, which is a larger set of places than you’d believe.

Theresa read the letter with her hands held the way women who have been left too many times hold their hands—open, as if to show they aren’t hiding anything worth leaving for. She didn’t say “poor girl” or “of course” or “well then.” She said, “Bring me a sweater,” because the afternoon had slipped and the wind had its coat off.

We sat there while the ocean finished one story and began another that sounded a lot like the first.

“Three men loved her,” Theresa said at last, so quietly the wind almost kept it. “Robert, and that vile man, and you.”

“And did she love any of us?”

“I don’t think that’s how she was built,” Theresa said. “She loved the world’s fact. She took it into her and made no bargains with it. She saw what hurt and allowed it to hurt. She saw what was beautiful and allowed it to be beautiful. She loved anyone who suffered the same.”

“That’s not much comfort,” I said.

“It is the only kind that outlasts the day,” she said, and stood, and went inside to get dinner started because grief fries better in the familiar pan.

I walk now. Not far, not without leaning on something that doesn’t mind being leaned on. On certain afternoons you can find me down by the seawall where Millie Bird had her walk and didn’t know what it was yet. I look up at the Castle and ask it if it misses anybody it pretended not to notice. I look out to where the Atlantic lies down and pretends to be soft so it can get you to close your eyes.

On very good days, I forget to be angry. On most days, I don’t.

I keep imagining a different letter—one she would’ve written if she believed language could do the work it promises. I don’t let myself write it. I’ve learned how dangerous it is for a man to put words in a woman’s mouth, especially a woman who taught you silence with more tenderness than your best teacher ever found.

So, instead, I walk the long length of the boardwalk with my bad legs getting better at being bad. I say her name once at the end of the pier, to hear what the wind makes of it. It makes of it a sound I don’t own.

Back home, Theresa puts on the kettle because she believes nothing terrible can stand against steam. We sit. We tell the dog that does not exist he is a good boy. We go quiet when the windows turn black enough to throw our faces back at us and ask if we’re improving.

Sometimes, when sleep is arguing with me about whether it’s worth doing, I think about that cigarette ember on Isabella’s wrist, the neat burned coin of it. It’s the smallest thing I can remember about the whole mess and the thing my head won’t stop visiting. That red point pressing onto skin, her not pulling away, the apology that followed like rain after the roofs had been sold to pay for umbrellas.

There are explanations for all of it. They have to do with class, and appetite, and small towns, and the thumping middle of the twentieth century, and how we scraped at our futures with words like “choice” and “freedom” and “love” until we could see our own faces in the metal. There is also the possibility that nothing explains anything, not the way you want it explained. Some people are themselves like weather—arrive, work on you, go out over the water, and do it to someone else before they’re done.

The terrace is empty now most mornings. Theresa’s house belongs to a young family with a tidy stroller and a dog that doesn’t bark at waves yet. The Castle keeps its profile, a comfortable ruin that still remembers the mirror. Robert moved to Boston and started a furniture business that sells people the idea of sturdiness. Carslake decided he’d been a Democrat all along and died believing it. Millie remarried a man who knew how to use his hands and stop when asked. I send them all my quiet.

When I want to see Isabella and not fall to pieces, I don’t go to the terrace or the barn or the café in Bratislava. I go to the harbor at five in the morning when the fishermen are tying on their day. I watch their bodies understand the work. I hear the gulls practice hunger and the sea practice lies. I wait until the eastern seam of the world comes unstitched and light gets down on its knees on the water and promises us one more try.

That’s when she looks most like herself to me—there and not there, beautiful for a time and gone before the vase has cooled. I don’t forgive anyone in those minutes; I also don’t ask to be forgiven. I let the day pretend it’s new. I let the water tell its long, repeating story. I let my bad legs carry me the length they’ve decided on, which is longer than yesterday and shorter than I wish. I go home smelling like salt and something finished.

And because a man who has been tempted that long by a cliff needs a trick to keep him honest, I keep the bottle empty on a shelf near the window. The pills are gone. The sunlight reaches through them every morning and makes shapes on the floor that look like answers if you don’t get too close.

When the wind is in the south and the stone at the Castle lets go of its heat with a sigh, I pour two fingers of something that has outlived its label and drink to the notion almost no one wants and almost everyone needs: that the moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are the same length after all. That a person’s beauty and a person’s use take their turn on the same clock, and that neither one owes you change back for the other.

I drink to the fact that she loved us the way she loved pain and rain and bread and dawn: by letting us be what we were long enough for the world to show us the bill.

And then I sleep, and if I dream, I don’t tell anyone, because sometimes the kindest work a man can do for a woman is to shut up and remember.