She waved the compliment away. “I wasn’t.”
“You were, though.”
“Agree to disagree,” Sarah said, and wondered, for the hundred thousandth time, how far she could have gone if she hadn’t given up, if she’d just kept trying.
“Do you live nearby?” Owen was still looking at her, pleasantly but intently.
Sarah felt her palms start to itch. It’s not fair, she thought, looking at his face, already tanned, his hands, the dark hair on his wrists. Why does he still have to be hot? Couldn’t he have looked old, or completely unappealing; couldn’t he have shown up with some disfiguring rash or a really unfortunate mustache? Except she suspected that even an Owen with pustules or weird facial hair would still look good to her. He would still be the first boy she’d ever loved.
“I have a studio here, but I live in Brooklyn. Park Slope.” She made herself lift her chin, forced herself to say the rest. “My husband and I have two boys, plus a stepdaughter.” Then, without her planning on it, her biggest question—really, her only question for Owen—slipped out of her mouth. “You never came back to Cape Cod.” When they’d parted, at the end of the summer, they had planned on staying together, or at least trying to, even though they were going to different colleges. Sarah had a Motorola flip phone back then and Owen, without a phone of his own, was going to call her as soon as he had his dorm phone number. But he’d never called. Instead, a week after they’d started college, he’d sent her a two-sentence email, telling her he’d met someone, at Duke, presumably during orientation （“Orientation!” Sarah had wept to her mother. “He couldn’t even wait for classes to start!”）， and that he wanted to break up. It’s for the best, he’d written. We should both be free. She’d cried. Then she’d emailed, begging him to call her, thinking that, maybe, if he heard her voice, he’d remember how much he loved her, and how much she loved him. When Owen hadn’t called, or written back, Sarah had been devastated. She didn’t want her freedom, or some boy from BU or MIT or Harvard. She wanted Owen. And Owen, clearly, had no longer wanted her.
For the entire school year, she’d held out hope, ignoring the boys who did want to date her and waiting for summer to come. She thought that as soon as they saw each other, the Cape would work its magic again, and Owen would remember that he loved her. But that hadn’t happened. She’d never seen Owen again. Not on Cape Cod, or anywhere else.
A pugnacious-looking woman with a pug on a pink leather leash came toward them, bugling “Excuse me!” as she approached. Owen and Sarah stepped to the far edge of the sidewalk, where Owen shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I owe you an explanation, but it’s a long story.”
“I’m not in a rush.”
He smoothed his tie again. “The short version is that Sass and Anders got divorced. Then Sass got married again, and her new husband hated Cape Cod. He said you never saw anyone who mattered there. He had a place in the Hamptons.”
“I’m sure your mom liked that.” Owen’s mother, Ballard Moreland Lassiter Renquist, known, for obscure reasons dating back to her childhood, as Sass, had divorced Owen’s father when Owen was five, and had married Owen’s stepfather when Owen was seven. Owen’s biological father, meanwhile, had been on his third marriage by the time Sarah met Owen.
“How are your parents?” Owen asked Sarah, as the traffic surged by them, taxis honking, pedestrians blank-faced and exhausted as they made their way home at the end of the day. “How’s your brother?”
“Sam’s good. He’s out in California.” No point in getting into Sam’s situation now, how he’d gotten married and had then been widowed and was now a stepfather. “And my mother’s well.” She swallowed and wondered how long it would hurt to say out loud. “My dad died just over a year ago.”
“Oh, no. I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how much you loved him.”
Sarah nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She was remembering how Eli had tended to her after her father’s death, bringing her plates of toast and cups of tea, rubbing her back, keeping the boys occupied when Sarah had stayed in her bedroom and cried. Her father had loved Sam, of course, but he and Sarah had enjoyed a different bond. There was something special about a father and his little girl, especially if she was his only daughter. She’d seen it with Eli and Ruby. It had been one of the things that made her love her husband.