"I'm sorry," I said, and was surprised to find I meant it.
"Don't be." He looked at my hands. "I keep thinking. If I'd been ahead of you, instead of behind. If it'd been my car that stopped first. Would I have gone in? All the way?" He shook his head slowly. "I don't know. I'm thirty-nine years old and I don't know. You know. That's the whole difference, isn't it. You found out, and I never will."
He went down the stairs. I didn't see him again until the following Monday.
Talia called me on Saturday. She'd gotten my number from Bethany, who'd gotten it from Winona, and she asked, in a careful voice, whether I would meet her, and where, and I said she could choose, and she said, "The pond."
So at ten o'clock on a cold bright morning in the middle of October, I drove my mother's Buick up 71 and took the Polaris exit, and on the curve of the ramp, past the end of the guardrail — they've extended it since, by about forty feet, with a new section of shining galvanized steel — I felt my hands go slick on the wheel, and kept driving. I parked behind the hotel. She was already there, standing at the chain-link fence on the far side, in a puffy blue coat, with her hands in her pockets, looking at the water.
We stood beside each other at the fence for a while without speaking.
"I drove here," she said finally. "On 71. First time. Bethany offered to bring me and I said no." She let out a breath that smoked in the air. "I had to pull over twice."