“Maybe they thought silence was mercy.”
“Perhaps.”
“Was it?”
I thought about the forty years between nineteen and sixty. The relationships I had declined. The birthdays spent alone. The quiet certainty that there was something missing from my life, though I had never admitted what it was.
“No,” I said. “But I understand why they thought it was.”
We drove separately to the cottage.
The road curved through tall pines and bare-limbed birches. It was late autumn, and the lake appeared between the trees in brief flashes of silver. I remembered coming here as a child with my parents, though I had never known the cottage belonged to Douglas’s family.
When we reached the property, I recognized the house immediately from the photograph Lucas had shown me. It was small and pale, with a sloping roof and a porch facing the water. Leaves covered the steps.
Lucas unlocked the front door.
