Two days later, Kate saw Sullivan coming up the walk, hands in his pockets, head down. She didn’t know what had alerted her to his approach, but something made her turn and look as she dried her hair with a towel, skin prickling from the cool air coming in the open window. She pulled on a sweater, wondered if there were time for her to leave out the back door, if he would see her hurrying over the curve of the hills rising behind the cottage, if he would follow her this time, if it mattered. She’d already spent hours trying to sort it out with no success.

One moment, she told herself that it was simply that reality was setting in, as it had to, eventually. Better it happened now than later, when the pain would cut too deep. She’d only suffered a scratch. It hadn’t even broken the skin, had it? If he didn’t want to see her anymore, it was for the best. What could have come of it, really, if she’d stopped to ask herself, taken the time to contemplate, rather than letting down her guard? Being with him might have been a mistake, and if so, she would learn from it. Maybe one of these days she’d stop picking the wrong men. She’d stop letting such things matter so much.

The possibility of escape beckoned: She could be out the door before he reached the threshold. She could take to the road again and be gone.

The next, she considered all she’d be leaving behind:

Bernie.

And Oona, Moira, Denny, Niall, William, Aileen, yes, even her, the memory of Colleen.

And Sullivan. Yes, Sullivan Deane.

She looked at her things in the bag—in the three weeks she’d been there, she hadn’t moved them into the dresser. The arm of her hoodie dangled from the zip compartment, begging to be taken out and folded neatly. She wouldn’t do it, but she didn’t force it inside either.

She listened for his knock, even though she felt shaky and unsure. Bernie’s voice, a low murmur, Sullivan’s reply in a deeper timbre. She couldn’t make out what they were saying. A pause. Footsteps coming upstairs. Not his, Bernie’s—she moved briskly, lightly. His would have been heavier. A tap on the door. “Kate? Kate, you have a visitor.” As if they both didn’t know who it was.

He waited for her in the garden near the tulips, red petals spattered on the pavers as if there had been an explosion, when the only blast had come from the wind, the wind that seemed to stir everything up—the ghosts, the memories.

He had his back to her. Her eyes lingered on the line of his shoulders, his spine. The sun cast his shadow toward her, as if he were the arm of a sundial and she the number, marking time. It changed again when the breeze dragged the clouds over the sun, extinguishing the light, the shadow play between them gone and the chill settling on them once again.

“We need to talk.” He turned toward her, hands in his pockets, fingering loose change.

“So now you’re ready? You weren’t when I stopped by the other night.” She moved neither toward him nor away. She would stay where she was, keeping a margin of graveled earth between them.

“I didn’t expect to see you there.”

“That much was clear.”

“You don’t understand,” he tried again, a note of impatience creeping into his voice. “Everything’s been happening so quickly. Us too.”

“Yes.” That was true. She’d felt it herself.

“Kate—” He made a futile gesture with the hands that had touched her just days before. “Do you want to walk? I feel like we’re stuck in one place, standing here like this.”

“All right.”

It would be better to have some privacy if they were to continue the discussion. She sensed Bernie hovering at the kitchen sink under the pretext of doing dishes, the window ajar to let in the air—and their conversation.

“We’ll stay away from Greegan’s Face,” he said with a hint of the old teasing. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw you there.”

“It must have been quite a view.” She smiled in spite of herself.

“It was.”

In the silence that fell between them, the land asserted itself again—the clatter of broken rock and shell on the path, the hum of bees in the field daisies, the cries of goshawks overhead.

“It can’t be all fun and games, you know,” he said.

“It doesn’t have to be—but we shouldn’t shut each other out when things get hard either,” she said.

“I know.” He paused.

“You can tell me anything. I thought you knew that.”

He searched for the right words. “You see, last year, I lost someone very dear to me,” he began. “And I—”

“Yes?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“I didn’t know if I could ever feel that way about someone again,” he said.

He told her about London. She listened, watching his face. He kept his eyes on the hills as he talked.

She touched his arm when he was done. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s still a part of me that’s struggling with what happened,” he continued. “I thought I was getting past it, but then when I started to feel closer to you, it all came up again, the nightmares too. And yet, after everything that’s gone on over the past few days, the one thing that is clear to me now is how much I want to be with you. Does that make any sense?”

“Yes,” she said after they’d walked a certain distance. “I lost some people who were important to me too. It’s been hard for me to trust again. I guess I have a fear of being left.” She told him about her father, her mother, and Ethan. She nearly lost her footing on the scree, adding, “It seems like we’re both trying to regain our balance.”

“Maybe we can help each other find it. Can we be patient with each other? Can we try making it up as we go along?” He stopped and turned her toward him.

She looked into his eyes and nodded. She didn’t feel the chill of the wind any longer or hear the calls of the hawks hunting in the fields below, low green hills that seemed to go on forever, one after another, into the very heart of the country.