“Did you?” I said. Because I had to know. The love-starved girl I used to be, so hungry, she demanded that I get her this answer.

He smiled. “Of course. When I came to Brighton, Jesus. I was lonely as fuck-all. Even before. I mean, back in the neighborhood I had friends, girlfriends, my mom. But no one like you. Of course I loved you. I still sold you out. I been waiting years to say I’m sorry.”

It was sweet, but it wasn’t fair. All he’d done was tell the truth.

I leaned in, urgent. “No, I am. You have nothing to be sorry for. It was me.”

We stared at each other, our gazes both so gentle, and this, this forgiveness, it was what I’d tried to buy seven years back. Now I’d come here and found that I’d already owned it. It had been here, waiting, mine all along.

He leaned in, too. Not much. Only an inch, but I recognized it as an invitation. It was for the fifteen-year-old girl who was still alive inside me. That girl had had the best first kiss. The best. But what came after had sucked the sweetness out, ruined it, made it shameful. Shame on top of shame, but no matter what that girl did later, she had deserved that kiss. She hadn’t done one damn bad thing wrong then. Not yet.

I wanted, in that moment, to reclaim it. If I leaned in, too, Tig would meet me in the middle. It was in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. I understood that this was not about true love. This wasn’t about breaking my family in half and claiming some old, other life. This was only about right now. This morning. This moment.

There was another mattress somewhere in the house behind us. Clean, probably with at least three books tumbled in the bedding. I looked at his face, so dear and so familiar. I looked at his ink-smudged hands, clutching his map-of-the-world mug in a house where no woman lived. I could have this. Have him. Just for a single half hour, outside time. I could have it if I wanted it. And God help me, I did. I did want it.

I stood up abruptly, almost knocking over the stool. I passed him, hurrying around the counter to the coffeemaker, even though my mug was still nearly full. I almost ran, like a woman who was desperate for a warm-up. It was too dangerous to stay close to him.

Right now Davis was home, playing with the baby we had made together. Oliver was a morning person. He would be paddling his feet, gurgling, and chatting nonsense with his father. Maddy, not at all a morning person, would be stomping down for coffee with her hair in crazy tufts. The night he had proposed, I’d told Davis, I’m not the kind who’ll ever leave you. Those words had held more than their legal meaning. I’d been saying I was his, that I would not betray him. I wouldn’t make those words a lie. I was getting too good at lying already.

I was sorry for that girl who had loved Tig, but she was gone. I’d tried to bury her in her own meat, I’d tried to starve her out, tried drugging her to death in California. Before I’d found a way to kill her, she had gone into the water. She’d gone into the water, and I’d come up, new.

“I’m married,” I told Tig. I was blushing hard.

“Okay,” he said, smiling.

“Happily. With a baby.”

“Okay,” Tig said, holding his hands up again, palms forward. An easy surrender. “It was just a thought. Nostalgia. Look, I’m letting it go.”

He held the thought up in a pinch between two fingers and then blew on it. I could practically see it fly away.

Still, I stayed where I was, the counter between us. I didn’t want to smell him, so familiar. I was already bargaining with that dead girl in my head. No sex, she told me. Just a kiss. But that was a hard no. I would not play chicken with betrayal, trying to get right up to the line. If I kissed him, I would be no better than Tate Bonasco at a barbecue.

“So why are you asking about Ange? You clearly know her,” he said, changing the subject. He was making it easy for me to be decent, and that was damned attractive, too.

“It’s complicated,” I told him. I set down the coffee I didn’t want by the sink. “I need to leave in less than half an hour, and I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to explain it all, even though I owe you that. I’ve done this morning all wrong. I even sat here and let you apologize to me, which is crazy. You can’t know how much it’s meant to me, to come here and see that you’d already forgiven me. But now I need to apologize.”

He looked almost alarmed. “That’s crazy. For what?”

A thousand things, and he should know them. My eyebrows came together,

“Because I never said anything. I let the cops blame you. I sat there, silent, and you lost three years.”

Tig waved one of my three great shames away with a lazy hand, like it was nothing. “What would you have said? Name one thing you could have said to help me.”

Was he being disingenuous? It didn’t seem like him. But maybe he just wanted to hear it. Out loud. I had given it to Roux, those words, and she was using them as weapons, hard against me. They were already in her hands. I could do no more damage to myself here, and I owed him this. Him more than anyone. I stilled my body, cleared my mind. I looked him in the eye.

“I should have told them I was driving,” I said.

He actually laughed. A disbelieving little sound. He shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands out.

“But you weren’t,” he said, and then he saw my face. “You know that, Amy, right? You weren’t driving. It was me.”

11

The thing that stayed with him, the one thing he knew for sure, was that moment on the railroad tracks. On the way to the clearing, I’d eased us over them so carefully that he’d teased me. Pussy move, Smiff. On the way back, rocketing down the inexorable path that would intersect with Mrs. Shipley, we had taken the tracks at such high speed that we’d soared.

Jumping the tracks was his move. He always jumped them. So he thought he’d been driving.

He’d never questioned it, though he did not remember his hands on the wheel, his foot on the gas. His last clear memory was kissing me. We’d pounded down more wine and smoked more, after, and we’d already been wrecked. For both of us, the walk to the car was little more than a slide show. The drive itself was a black patch with that single airborne moment in the middle. The next thing he remembered was weeping on his knees beside the wreckage.

“I had the keys,” I argued. We’d been over this already. “I got in behind the wheel.”

“But you don’t remember driving.” He said it like a challenge.

“Neither do you,” I shot back, and he laughed, a raw, sad bark of sound.

“You never would have taken the railroad tracks like that,” he repeated, but then he jammed his hands into his hair. “If you’d been driving, I would know. Wouldn’t I?”

“No,” I said. “A lot of times people don’t remember car accidents. The mind blanks out trauma, plus we were hammered. We have to look at what we do remember. I had the keys. I got in behind the wheel. I kind of do remember jumping us, now that we’re talking about it.”

He spun on the stool, his fingers steepled, thinking. When he came back around, he gave me a wistful, wry smile.

“I believe that you believe it. I still think it was me. I knew it was me even when I told the cops that you were driving. I said it because my lawyer kept telling me I was going to get tried as an adult. My mom was freaking out, saying your rich-ass parents could get you out of anything, but I’d be screwed. So I caved. I did what they wanted, and my lawyer leveraged it to get me a better offer. God, I felt almost as bad about that as—”

“Tig!” I interrupted. “We were both kids. We were scared, and we felt so guilty.”

“We both lied to the cops. We both thought we did it, and we both blamed the other.” He didn’t sound angry, though. If anything, he sounded relieved. “It’s like the asshole version of that O. Henry story. Where she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain and he sells his watch to buy her some combs.”

That made me smile. I came over and leaned on the breakfast bar across from him. Closer, but not too close. I wanted to offer comfort, but I kept the solid cabinets and countertop between us.

“I was driving.” I said it like it was urgent, and maybe it was, even though I wanted it to be him. I wanted it to be anyone but me, though my heart knew better. There was one thing more I could say to convince him. It was hard to say with him just across the breakfast bar, smelling of mint and copper and history. But he deserved to hear it. “Tig, you kissed me. It was the nicest thing. I was wild with joy, and wine, and wondering. If there was ever a night in my whole life when I would have gunned it at those tracks . . . well, that was it.”

It was true. I could see it in my mind’s eye, how I jumped us, hungry for another weightless, flying moment.

He closed his eyes, as if he were using them to look inward. After a moment he opened them again and met my gaze.

“Okay, Smiffy. Maybe. But we got no got’dam way to know for sure.” He shook his head. “You know what’s weird? It’s easier to forgive you than myself.”