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face—splotchy from crying but peaceful too, as if sleep had been hard-won. An hour ago, Garret had texted Thea to tell her he was bringing Irina home. He didn’t say why.
    â€œWhere’s her bedroom?” Garret mouthed.
    Instead of answering, Thea led him through the house with its very tiny square rooms, low ceilings, and narrow doorways. Nestled in the heart of Newport, not far from Price’s Pier, the downstairs level of the house had been built before the Revolutionary War, and Thea had done what she could to keep its colonial feel: folk art, antiques, original flooring, few embellishments. She wondered: Did her house look like what Garret expected? Had he expected anything at all?
    She was too conscious of him as he trailed her on the stairs in the dark—to have him following, so close, gave her a strange sense of vulnerability and made her want to turn around and walk backward. His hair was glossy, neat, and as blond as when he was a kid, and his skin was so perfect that she wondered if he’d started tanning. He was taller than she remembered. Bigger across the shoulders. All traces of the heart-on-his-sleeve boy she’d fallen so desperately in love with had been usurped by this harder, more unreadable man.
    She, on the other hand, hadn’t seen the inside of a gym in years. What did she look like to him? Childbirth had changed her body, had taken her young woman’s angles and swollen them into more sloping, softened curves. Her skin was older too, she knew. In bad light, there were traces of lines around her mouth and eyes. She’d found her first gray hair this past spring—a shock of white like a lightning bolt against a black sky—and now it seemed they were coming on like armies. She hated that he made her so very conscious of herself, and it wasn’t until they got to the top of the stairs that she realized she’d been holding her breath.
    She bent to turn on the night-light in Irina’s little room. In the soft pink glow, she watched Garret pull back the light quilt on the bed and then bend over carefully to settle Irina down. His hand cradled the back of her head, and though she groaned a little and her eyes fluttered open long enough to see where she was, she didn’t seem interested in waking. She turned her back to them in the semidarkness and curled deeper into the bed.
    Thea pulled the door closed behind them, leaving it open half an inch. She didn’t speak until they were in the kitchen, standing beside the simple wooden table in the center of the small room. And even then, a whisper was the most she dared. “What happened?” she asked. “Is she sick?”
    He shook his head. “She’s been crying for hours.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Garret shifted uncomfortably. “She wanted her and Jonathan to come here. But that’s obviously not an option. Anyway, she finally fell asleep on the ride home. And by that point, I figured she’d rather wake up here than in my condo.”
    â€œWhy didn’t Jonathan bring her?”
    â€œHe doesn’t want to see you,” Garret said.
    Thea stood quietly a moment, not sure what was to come next. Everything had been said—the facts exchanged—and now there was nothing more.
    But Garret made no move to leave. He just stood, looking at her. His eyes were the exact steel blue of the harbor on a fall day.
    Thea felt some shadow of her old feeling for him rising up. Longing. Regret. A wish deeper and bigger than she could name. Don’t hate me anymore, she thought. The Sorensen family believed that Garret had been avoiding her since her marriage to Jonathan. What they hadn’t realized was that she had been avoiding him too.
    â€œWas she good otherwise?” Thea asked.
    â€œFine. I didn’t know she plays soccer.”
    Thea nodded, again at a loss. She wanted him to stay. To talk. To tell her everything that had happened since she saw him last. Let me