“Do you want to talk about it?” her dad asked one day as they strolled along the beach. They were making their way toward the church. Since the construction had started up again, things were moving fast. The crew was massive: framers, electricians, men who specialized in trim carpentry or drywall. There were at least forty trucks on the work site, and people flowed in and out of the building constantly.
“About what?” she asked carefully.
“About Will,” he said. “The way it ended between the two of you.”
She gave him an appraising stare. “How could you possibly know about that?”
He shrugged. “Because you’ve mentioned him only in passing over the past few weeks, and you never talk to him on the phone. It’s not hard to figure out that something happened.”
“It’s complicated,” she said reluctantly.
They walked a few steps in silence before her dad spoke again. “If it matters to you, I thought he was an exceptional young man.”
She looped her arm through his. “Yes, it does matter. And I thought so, too.”
By then, they’d reached the church. She could see workers carrying in loads of lumber and cans of paint, and as usual her eyes sought out the empty space beneath the steeple. The window hadn’t been installed yet—most of the construction had to be completed first to prevent the fragile glass pieces from cracking—but her dad still liked to visit. He was pleased by the renewed construction, but not primarily because of the window. He spoke constantly of how important the church was to Pastor Harris and how much the pastor missed preaching in the place that he’d long considered a second home.
Pastor Harris was always on site, and usually he would walk down to the beach to visit with them when they arrived. Looking around now, she spotted him standing in the gravel parking lot. He was talking to someone as he gestured animatedly at the building. Even from a distance, she could tell he was smiling.
She was about to wave in an attempt to get his attention when she suddenly recognized the man he was talking to. The sight startled her. The last time she’d seen him, she’d been distraught; the last time they’d been together, he hadn’t bothered to say good-bye. Perhaps Tom Blakelee had simply been driving by and stopped to talk to the pastor about the rebuilding of the church. Maybe he was just interested.
For the rest of the week, she watched for Tom Blakelee when they visited the site, but she never saw him there again. Part of her was relieved, she admitted, that their worlds no longer intersected.
* * *
After their walks to the church and her dad’s afternoon nap, they usually read together. She finished Anna Karenina, four months after she’d first started reading it. She checked out Doctor Zhivago from the public library. Something about the Russian writers appealed to her: the epic quality of their stories, perhaps; bleak tragedy and doomed love affairs painted on a grand canvas, so far removed from her own ordinary life.
Her dad continued to study his Bible, and sometimes he’d read a passage or verse aloud at her request. Some were short and others were long, but many of them seemed to focus on the meaning of faith. She wasn’t sure why, but she sometimes got the sense that the act of reading them aloud had shed light on a nuance or meaning that he had previously missed.
Dinners were becoming simple affairs. In early October, she began to do most of the cooking, and he accepted this change as easily as he’d accepted everything else over the summer. Most of the time, he would sit in the kitchen and they would talk as she boiled pasta or rice and browned some chicken or steak in the pan. It was the first time she’d cooked meat in years, and she felt strange prodding her dad to eat it after putting the plate in front of him. He wasn’t hungry much anymore, and the meals were bland because spices of any kind irritated his stomach. But she knew he needed food. Though he didn’t have a scale in the house, she could see the pounds melting away.
One night after dinner, she finally told him what had happened with Will. She told him everything: about the fire and his attempts to cover for Scott, about all that had transpired with Marcus. Her dad listened intently as she spoke, and when at last he pushed aside his plate, she noticed he hadn’t eaten more than a few bites.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” she said. “You can ask me anything.”
“When you told me that you were in love with Will, did you mean it?”
She remembered Megan asking her the same question. “Yes.”
“Then I think you might have been too hard on him.”
“But he was covering up a crime…”