You Are Not a Stranger Here

DEVOTION

THROUGH THE OPEN French doors, Owen surveyed the garden. The day was hot for June, a pale sun burning in a cloudless sky, wilting the last of the irises, the rhododendron blossoms drooping. A breeze moved through the laburnum trees, carrying a sheet of the Sunday paper into the rose border. Mrs. Giles’s collie yapped on the other side of the hedge.

With his handkerchief, Owen wiped sweat from the back of his neck.

His sister, Hillary, stood at the counter sorting strawberries.

She’d nearly finished the dinner preparations, though Ben wouldn’t arrive for hours yet. She wore a beige linen dress he’d never seen on her before. Her black-and-gray hair, usually kept up in a bun, hung down to her shoulders. For a woman in her mid-fifties, she had a slender, graceful figure.

“You’re awfully dressed up,” he said.

“The wine,” she said. “Why don’t you open a bottle of the red? And we’ll need the tray from the dining room.”

“We’re using the silver, are we?”

“Yes, I thought we would.”

“We didn’t use the silver at Christmas.”

He watched Hillary dig for something in the fridge.

“It should be on the right under the carving dish,” she said.

Raising himself from his chair, Owen walked through into the dining room. From the sideboard he removed the familiar gravy boats and serving dishes until he found the tarnished platter. The china and silver had come from their parents’

when their father died, along with the side tables and sitting chairs and the pictures on the walls.

“It’d take an hour to clean this,” he called into the kitchen.

“There’s polish in the cabinet.”

“We’ve five perfectly good trays in the cupboard.”

“It’s behind the drink, on the left.”

He gritted his teeth. She could be so bloody imperious.

“This is some production,” he muttered, seated again at the kitchen table. He daubed a cloth in polish and drew it over the smooth metal. They weren’t in the habit of having people in to dinner. Aunt Philippa from Shropshire, their mother’s sister, usually came at Christmas and stayed three or four nights. Now and again, Hillary had Miriam Franks, one of her fellow teachers from the comprehensive, in on a Sunday. They’d have coffee in the living room afterward and talk about the students. Occasionally they’d go out if a new restaurant opened on the High Street, but they’d never been gourmets. Most of Owen’s partners at the firm had professed to discover wine at a certain age and now took their holidays in Italy. He and Hillary rented a cottage in the Lake District the last two weeks of August. They had been going for years and were perfectly happy with it. A nice little stone house that caught all the afternoon light and had a view of Lake Windermere.

He pressed the cloth harder onto the tray, rubbing at the tarnished corners. Years ago he’d gone to dinners, up in Knightsbridge and Mayfair. Richard Stallybrass, an art dealer, gave private gentlemen’s parties, as he called them, at his flat on Belgrave Place. All very civilized. Solicitors, journalists, the odd duke or MP, there with the implicit and, in the 1970s, safe assumption that nothing would be said. Half of them had wives and children. Saul Thompson, an old friend from school, had introduced Owen to this little world and for several years Owen had been quite taken with it.

He’d looked at flats in central London, encouraged by Saul to leave the suburbs and enjoy the pleasures of the city.

But there had always been Hillary and this house. She and Owen had lost their mother when they were young and it had driven them closer than many siblings were. He couldn’t see himself leaving her here in Wimbledon. The idea of his sister’s loneliness haunted him. One year to the next he’d put off his plans to move.

Then Saul was dead, one of the first to be claimed by the epidemic. A year later Richard Stallybrass died. Owen’s connection to the gay life had always been tenuous. AIDS severed it. His work for the firm went on, work he enjoyed.

And despite what an observer might assume, he hadn’t been miserable. Not every fate was alike. Not everyone ended up paired off in love.

“The wine, Owen? Aren’t you going to open it?”

But then he’d met Ben, and things had changed.

“Sorry?” he said.

“The wine. It’s on the sideboard.”

Hillary held a glass to the light, checking for smudges.

“We’re certainly pulling out all the stops,” he said. When she made no reply, he continued. “Believe it or not, I commented on your dress earlier but you didn’t hear me. I haven’t seen that one before. Have you been shopping?”

“You didn’t comment on my dress, Owen. You said I was awfully dressed up.”

She looked out the window over the kitchen sink. They both watched another sheet of the Sunday Times tumble gently into the flower beds.

“I thought we’d have our salad outside,” she said. “Ben might like to see the garden.”

STANDING IN STOCKINGED feet before the open door of his wardrobe, Owen pushed aside the row of gray pinstripe suits, looking for a green summer blazer he remembered wearing the year before to a garden party the firm had given out in Surrey. Brushing the dust off the shoulders, he put it on over his white shirt.

On the shelf above the suits was a boater hat—he couldn’t imagine what he’d worn that to—and just behind it, barely visible, the shoe box. He paused a moment, staring at the corner of it. Ben would be here in a few hours. His first visit since he’d gone back to the States, fifteen years ago. Why now? Owen had asked himself all weekend.

“I’ll be over for a conference,” he’d said when Owen took the call Thursday. And yet he could so easily have come and gone from London with no word to them.

As he had each of the last three nights, Owen reached behind the boater hat and took down the shoe box. Fourteen years it had sat there untouched. Now the dust on the lid showed his fingerprints again. He listened for the sound of Hillary downstairs, then crossed the room and closed the door. Perching on the edge of the side chair, he removed the lid of the box and unfolded the last of the four letters.

Owen slid the paper back into its envelope and replaced it in the box on his lap. Dust floated in the light by the window.

The rectangle of sun on the floor crept over the red pile carpet.

For most of his life he’d hated Sundays. Their gnawing stillness, the faint memories of religion. A day loneliness won. But in these last years that quiet little dread had faded.

He and Hillary made a point of cooking a big breakfast and taking a walk on the common afterward. In winter they read the paper together by the fire in the front room and often walked into the town for a film in the evening. In spring and summer they spent hours in the garden. They weren’t unhappy people.

From the pack on his bedside table he took a cigarette. He rolled it idly between thumb and forefinger. Would it be taken away, this life of theirs? Was Ben coming here for an answer? He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, then returned the shoe box to its shelf and closed the door of his wardrobe. Ben was married now, had two children. That’s what he’d said on the phone; they’d spoken only a minute or two. Did he still wonder why he’d never heard?

Through the window Owen could see his sister clearing their tea mugs from the garden table. There had been other men she’d gone out to dinner with over the years. A Mr. Kreske, the divorced father of a sixth-form student, who’d driven down from Putney. The maths teacher, Mr. Hamilton, had taken her to several plays in the city before returning to Scotland. Owen had tried to say encouraging things about these evenings of hers, but then the tone of her voice had always made it clear that that’s all they were, evenings.

IN THE KITCHEN, Hillary stood by the sink, arranging roses in a vase.

“I see you made up the guest room,” he said.

She looked directly at him, failing to register the comment.

He could tell she was trying to remember something. They did that: rested their eyes on each other in moments of distraction, as you might stare at a ring on your finger.

“The guest bed. You made it up.”

“Oh, yes. I did,” she said, drawn back into the room. “I thought if dinner goes late and he doesn’t feel like taking a train…”

“Of course.”

Sitting again at the table, Owen picked up the tray. In it he could see his reflection, his graying hair. What would Ben look like now? he wondered.

“Chives,” she said. “I forgot the chives.”

They’d met through the firm, of all places. The Globe had Ben working on a story about differences between British and American lawyers. They went to lunch and somehow the conversation wandered. “You ask all sorts of questions,” Owen could remember saying to him. And it was true. Ben had no hesitation about inquiring into Owen’s private life, where he lived, how he spent his time. All in the most guileless manner, as though such questions were part of his beat.

“I hope he hasn’t become allergic to anything,” Hillary said, setting the chives down on the cutting board. Though Ben had been in London nearly a year, he hadn’t seen much of the place. Owen offered himself as a guide. On weekends they traveled up to Hampstead or Camden Town, or out to the East End, taking long walks, getting lunch along the way.

They talked about all sorts of things. It turned out Ben too had lost a parent at a young age. When Owen heard that, he understood why he’d been drawn to Ben: he seemed to comprehend a certain register of sadness intuitively. Other than Hillary, Owen had never spoken to anyone about the death of his mother.

“I come up with lots of analogies for it,” he could remember Ben saying. “Like I was burned and can’t feel anything again until the flame gets that hot. Or like people’s lives are over and I’m just wandering through an abandoned house. None of them really work. But you have to think the problem somehow.”

Not the sort of conversation Owen had with colleagues at the office.

He picked up the cloth and wiped it again over the reflective center of the tray. Owen and his sister were so alike.

Everyone said that. From the clipped tone of their voice, their gestures, right down into the byways of thought, the way they considered before speaking, said only what was needed. That she too had been attracted to Ben made perfect sense. Hillary crossed the room and stood with her hands on Owen’s shoulders. He could feel the warmth of her palms through his cotton blazer. Unusual, this: the two of them touching.

“It’ll be curious, won’t it?” she said. “To see him so briefly after all this time.”

“Yes.”

Twenty-five years ago he and Hillary had moved into this house together. They’d thought of it as a temporary arrangement. Hillary was doing her student teaching; he’d just started with the firm and had yet to settle on a place. It seemed like the beginning of something.

“I suppose his wife couldn’t come because of the children.”

Her thumbs rested against his collar. She was the only person who knew of his preference for men, now that Saul and the others were gone. She’d never judged him, never raised an eyebrow.

“Interesting he should get in touch after such a gap,” Owen said.

She removed her hands from his shoulders. “It strikes you as odd, does it?”

“A bit.”

“I think it’s thoughtful of him,” she said.

“Indeed.”

In the front hall, the doorbell rang.

“Goodness,” Hillary said, “he’s awfully early.”

He listened to her footsteps as she left the room, listened as they stopped in front of the hall mirror.

“I’ve been with a man once myself,” Ben had said on the night Owen finally spoke to him of his feelings. Like a prayer answered, those words were. Was it such a crime he’d fallen in love?

A few more steps and then the turning of the latch.

“Oh,” he heard his sister say. “Mrs. Giles. Hello.”

Owen closed his eyes, relieved for the moment. Her son lived in Australia; she’d been widowed the year before. After that she’d begun stopping by on the weekends, first with the excuse of borrowing a cup of something but later just for the company.

“You’re doing all right in the heat, are you?” she asked.

“Yes, we’re managing,” Hillary said.

Owen joined them in the hall. He could tell from the look on his sister’s face she was trying to steel her courage to say they had company on the way.

“Hello there, Owen,” Mrs. Giles said. “Saw your firm in the paper today.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, something about the law courts. There’s always news of the courts. So much of it on the telly now. Old Rumpole.”

“Right,” he said.

“Well… I was just on my way by… but you’re occupied, I’m sure.”

“No, no,” Hillary said, glancing at Owen. “Someone’s coming later… but I was just putting a kettle on.”

“Really, you don’t have to,” Mrs. Giles said.

“Not at all.”

THEY SAT IN the front room, Hillary glancing now and again at her watch. A production of Les Miserables had reached Perth, and Peter Giles had a leading role.

“Amazing story, don’t you think?” Mrs. Giles said, sipping her tea. The air in the room was close and Owen could feel sweat soaking the back of his shirt.

“Peter plays opposite an Australian girl. Can’t quite imagine it done in that accent, but there we are. I sense he’s fond of her, though he doesn’t admit it in his letters.”

By the portrait of their parents over the mantel, a fly buzzed.

Owen sat motionless on the couch, staring over Mrs. Giles’s shoulder.

His sister had always been an early riser. Up at five-thirty or six for breakfast and to prepare for class. At seven-thirty she’d leave the house in time for morning assembly. As a partner, he never had to be at the firm until well after nine. He read the Financial Times with his coffee and looked over whatever had come in the post. There had been no elaborate operation, no fretting over things. A circumstance had presented itself. The letters from Ben arrived. He took them up to his room. That’s all there was to it.

“More tea?”

“No, thank you,” Owen said.

The local council had decided on a one-way system for the town center and Mrs. Giles believed it would only make things worse. “They’ve done it down in Winchester. My sister says it’s a terrible mess.”

“Right,” Owen said.

They had kissed only once, in the small hours of an August night, on the sofa in Ben’s flat, light from the streetlamps coming through the high windows. Earlier, strolling back over the bridge from Battersea, Owen had told him the story of him and Hillary being sent to look for their mother: walking out across the fields to a wood where she sometimes went in the mornings; the rain starting up and soaking them before they arrived under the canopy of oaks, and looked up to see their mother’s slender frame wrapped in her beige overcoat, her face lifeless, her body turning in the wind. And he’d told Ben how his sister—twelve years old—had taken him in her arms right then and there, sheltering his eyes from the awful sight, and whispered in his ear, “We will survive this, we will survive this.” A story he’d never told anyone before. And when he and Ben had finished another bottle of wine, reclining there on the sofa, they’d hugged, and then they’d kissed, their hands running through each other’s hair.

“I can’t do this,” Ben had whispered as Owen rested his head against Ben’s chest.

“Smells wonderful, whatever it is you’re cooking,” Mrs. Giles said. Hillary nodded.

For that moment before Ben had spoken, as he lay in his arms, Owen had believed in the fantasy of love as the creator, your life clay in its hands.

“I should check the food. Owen, why don’t you show Mrs.

Giles a bit of the garden. She hasn’t seen the delphiniums, I’m sure.”

“Of course,” he said, looking into his sister’s taut smile.

“I suspect I’ve mistreated my garden,” Mrs. Giles said as the two of them reached the bottom of the lawn. “John it was who had the green thumb. I’m just a bungler really.”

The skin of her hands was mottled and soft looking. The gold ring she still wore hung rather loosely on her finger.

“I think Ben and I might have a weekend away,” Hillary had said one evening in the front room as they watched the evening news. The two of them had only met a few weeks before. An accident really, Hillary in the city on an errand, coming to drop something by for Owen, deciding at the last minute to join them for dinner. When the office phoned the restaurant in the middle of the meal, Owen had to leave the two of them alone.

A weekend at the cottage on Lake Windermere is what they had.

Owen had always thought of himself as a rational person, capable of perspective. As a school boy, he’d read Othello.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on. What paltry aid literature turned out to be when the feelings were yours and not others’.

“Funny, I miss him in the most peculiar ways,” Mrs. Giles said. “We’d always kept the chutney over the stove, and as we only ever had it in the evenings, he’d be there to fetch it.

Ridiculous to use a stepladder for the chutney, if you think about it. Does just as well on the counter.”

“Yes,” Owen said.

They stared together into the blue flowers.

“I expect it won’t be long before I join him,” she said.

“No, you’re in fine shape, surely.”

“Doesn’t upset me—the idea. It used to, but not anymore.

I’ve been very lucky. He was a good person.”

Owen could hear the telephone ringing in the house.

“Could you get that?” Hillary called from the kitchen.

“I apologize, I—”

“No, please, carry on,” Mrs. Giles said.

He left her there and passing through the dining room, crossed the hall to the phone.

“Owen, it’s Ben Hansen.”

“Ben.”

“Look, I feel terrible about this, but I’m not going to be able to make it out there tonight.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, the meetings are running late here and I’m supposed to give this talk, it’s all been pushed back. Horrible timing, I’m afraid.”

Owen could hear his sister closing the oven door, the water coming on in the sink.

“I’m sorry about that. It’s a great pity. I know Hillary was looking forward to seeing you. We both were.”

“I was looking forward to it myself, I really was,” he said.

“Have you been well?”

Owen laughed. “Me? Yes. I’ve been fine. Everything’s very much the same on this end… It does seem awfully long ago you were here.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Standing there in the hall, Owen felt a sudden longing. He imagined Ben as he often saw him in his mind’s eye, tall and thin, half a step ahead on the Battersea Bridge, hands scrunched into his pockets. And he pictured the men he sometimes saw holding hands in Soho or Piccadilly. In June, perhaps on this very Sunday, thousands marched. He wanted to tell Ben what it felt like to pass two men on the street like that, how he had always in a sense been afraid.

“You’re still with the firm?”

“Yes,” Owen said. “That’s right.” And he wanted to say how frightened he’d been watching his friend Saul’s ravaged body die, how the specter of disease had made him timid.

How he, Ben, had seemed a refuge.

“And with you, things have been well?”

He listened as Ben described his life—columnist now for the paper, the children beginning school; he heard the easy, slightly weary tone in his voice—a parent’s fatigue. And he wondered how Ben remembered them. Were Hillary and Owen Simpson just two people he’d met on a year abroad ages ago? Had he been coming here for answers, or did he just have a free evening and a curiosity about what had become of them? What did it matter now? There would be no revelation tonight. He was safe again.

“Might you be back over at some point?” he asked. He sensed their conversation about to end and felt on the edge of panic.

“Definitely. It’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Judy and I were thinking of bringing the kids—maybe next summer—and I remembered you rented that place up north. Is there a person to call about getting one of those?”

“The cottages?… Yes, of course.”

“Yeah, that would be great. I’ll try to give you a call when we’re ready to firm up some plans.”

“And Judy? She’s well?”

“Sure, she’s heard all about you, wants to meet you both sometime.”

“That would be terrific,” Owen said, the longing there again.

“Ben?”

“Yes?”

“Who is it?” Hillary asked, stepping into the hall, drying her hands with a dishcloth. A red amulet their mother had worn hung round her neck, resting against the front of her linen dress.

“Ben,” he mouthed.

Her face stiffened slightly.

“Hillary’s just here,” he said into the phone. “Why don’t you have a word?” He held the receiver out to her.

“He can’t make it.”

“Is that right?” she said, staring straight through him. She took the phone. Owen walked back into the dining room; by the sideboard, he paused.

“No, no, don’t be silly,” he heard his sister say. “It’s quite all right.”

“A BEAUTIFUL EVENING, isn’t it?” Mrs. Giles said as he stepped back onto the terrace. The air was mild now, the sun beginning to shade into the trees. Clouds like distant mountains had appeared on the horizon.

“Yes,” he said, imagining the evening view of the lake from the garden of their cottage, the way they checked the progress of the days by which dip in the hills the sun disappeared behind. Mrs. Giles stood from the bench. “I should be getting along.”

He walked her down the side of the house and out the gate.

Though the sky was still bright, the streetlamps had begun to flicker on. Farther up the street a neighbor watered her lawn.

“Thank you for the tea.”

“Not at all,” he said.

“It wasn’t bad news just now, I hope.”

“No, no,” he said. “Just a friend calling.”

“That’s good, then.” She hesitated by the low brick wall that separated their front gardens. “Owen, there was just one thing I wanted to mention. In my sitting room, the desk over in the corner, in the top drawer there. I’ve put a letter in. You understand. I wanted to make sure someone would know where to look. Nothing to worry about, of course, nothing dramatic… but in the event… you see?”

He nodded, and she smiled back at him, her eyes beginning to water. Owen watched her small figure as she turned and passed through her gate, up the steps, and into her house.

He stayed awhile on the sidewalk, gazing onto the common: the expanse of lawn, white goalposts on the football pitch set against the trees. A long shadow, cast by their house and the others along this bit of street, fell over the playing field. He watched it stretching slowly to the chestnut trees, the darkness slowly climbing their trunks, beginning to shade the leaves of the lower branches.

In the house, he found Hillary at the kitchen table, hands folded in her lap. She sat perfectly still, staring into the garden. For a few minutes they remained like that, Owen at the counter, neither of them saying a word. Then his sister got up and passing him as though he weren’t there, opened the oven door.

“Right,” she said. “It’s done.”

They ate in the dining room, in the fading light, with the silver and the crystal. Roses, pink and white, stood in a vase at the center of the table. As the plates were already out, Hillary served her chicken marsala on their mother’s china. The candles remained unlit in the silver candlesticks.

“He’ll be over again,” Owen said. Hillary nodded. They finished their dinner in silence. Afterward, neither had the appetite for the strawberries set out on the polished tray.

“I’ll do these,” he said when they’d stacked the dishes on the counter. He squeezed the green liquid detergent into the baking dish and watched it fill with water. “I could pour you a brandy if you like,” he said over his shoulder. But when he turned he saw his sister had left the room.

He rinsed the bowls and plates and arranged them neatly in the rows of the dishwasher. Under the warm running water, he sponged the wineglasses clean and set them to dry on the rack. When he’d finished, he turned the taps off, and then the kitchen was quiet.

He poured himself a scotch and took a seat at the table. The door to the garden had been left open and in the shadows he could make out the azalea bush and the cluster of rhododendron. Up the lane from where they’d lived as children, there was a manor with elaborate gardens and a moat around the house. An old woman they called Mrs. Montague lived there and she let them play on the rolling lawns and in the labyrinth of the topiary hedge. They would play for hours in the summer, chasing each other along the embankments, pretending to fish in the moat with a stick and string. He won their games of hide-and-go-seek because he never closed his eyes completely, and could see which way she ran. He could still remember the peculiar anger and frustration he used to feel after he followed her to her hiding place and tapped her on the head. He imagined that garden now, the blossoms of its flowers drinking in the cooler night air, the branches of its trees rejuvenating in the darkness.

From the front room, he heard a small sound—a moan let out in little breaths—and realized it was the sound of his sister crying. He had ruined her life. He knew that now in a way he’d always tried not to know it—with certainty. For years he’d allowed himself to imagine she had forgotten Ben, or at least stopped remembering. He stood up from the table and crossed the room but stopped at the entrance to the hall. What consolation could he give her now?

Standing there, listening to her tears, he remembered the last time he’d heard them, so long ago it seemed like the memory of a former life: a summer morning when she’d returned from university, and they’d walked together over the fields in a brilliant sunshine and come to the oak trees, their green leaves shining, their branches heavy with acorns.

She’d wept then for the first time in all the years since their mother had taken herself away. And Owen had been there to comfort her—his turn at last, after all she had done to protect him. At the sound of his footsteps entering the hall, Hillary went quiet. He stopped again by the door to the front room.

Sitting at the breakfast table, reading those letters from America, it wasn’t only Ben’s affection he’d envied. Being replaced. That was the fear. The one he’d been too weak to master.

Holding on to the banister, he slowly climbed the stairs, his feet pressing against the worn patches of the carpet. They might live in this silence the rest of their lives, he thought. In his room, he walked to the window and looked again over the common.

When they were little they’d gone to the village on Sundays to hear the minister talk. Of charity and sacrifice. A Norman church with hollows worked into the stones of the floor by centuries of parishioners. He could still hear the congregation singing, Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Their mother had sung with them. Plaintive voices rising. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green? Owen could remember wanting to believe something about it all, if not the words of the Book perhaps the sorrow he heard in the music, the longing of people’s song. He hadn’t been in a church since his mother’s funeral. Over the years, views from the train or the sight of this common in evening had become his religion, absorbing the impulse to imagine larger things.

Looking over it now, he wondered at the neutrality of the grass and the trees and the houses beyond, how in their stillness they neither judged nor forgave. He stared across the playing field a moment longer. And then, calmly, he crossed to the wardrobe and took down the box.

SITTING IN THE front room, Hillary heard her brother’s footsteps overhead and then the sound of his door closing.

Her tears had dried and she felt a stony kind of calm, gazing into the wing chair opposite—an old piece of their parents’ furniture. Threads showed at the armrests, and along the front edge the ticking had come loose. At first they’d meant to get rid of so many things, the faded rugs, the heavy felt curtains, but their parents’ possessions had settled in the house, and then there seemed no point.

In the supermarket checkout line, she sometimes glanced at the cover of a decor magazine, a sunny room with blond wood floors, bright solid colors, a white sheet on a white bed. The longing for it usually lasted only a moment. She knew she’d be a foreigner in such a room.

She sipped the last of her wine and put the glass down on the coffee table. Darkness had fallen now and in the window she saw the reflection of the lamp and the mantel and the bookcase.

“Funny, isn’t it? How it happens.” That’s all her friend Miriam Franks would ever say if the conversation turned onto the topic of why neither of them had married. Hillary would nod and recall one of the evenings she’d spent with Ben up at the cottage, sitting in the garden, talking of Owen, thinking to herself she could only ever be with someone who understood her brother as well as Ben did.

She switched off the light in the front room and walked to the kitchen. Owen had wiped down the counters, set everything back in its place. For a moment, she thought she might cry again. Her brother had led such a cramped life, losing his friends, scared of what people might know. She’d loved him so fiercely all these years, the fears and hindrances had felt like her own. What good, then, had her love been? she wondered as she pulled the French doors shut. Upstairs, Owen’s light was still on, but she didn’t knock or say good night as she usually did. Across the hall in her own room, she closed the door behind her. The little stack of letters lay on her bed. Years ago she had read them, after rummaging for a box at Christmastime. Ben was married by then, as she’d found out when she called. Her anger had lasted a season or two but she had held her tongue, remembering the chances Owen had to leave her and how he never had.

Standing over the bed now, looking down at the pale blue envelopes, she was glad her brother had let go of them at last. Tomorrow they would have supper in the kitchen. He would offer to leave this house, and she would tell him that was the last thing she wanted.

Putting the letters aside, she undressed. When she’d climbed into bed, she reached up and turned the switch of her bedside lamp. For an instant, lying in the sudden darkness, she felt herself there again in the woods, covering her brother’s eyes as she gazed up into the giant oak.