“I don’t know,” he said quietly. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

Theresa furrowed her brow, bewilderment making her surroundings surreal. “Did he say anything to you before he went out?”

Jeb shook his head. He was ashen, his eyes downcast as if hiding something. Absently Theresa looked around the kitchen. Everything was tidy, as if it had been cleaned moments before she arrived. Through the open bedroom door she saw Garrett’s comforter spread neatly across the bed. Oddly, two large floral arrangements had been placed atop it.

“I don’t understand—he’s all right, isn’t he?”

“theresa,” jeb finally said with tears forming in his eyes, “they found him yesterday morning.”

“Is he in the hospital?”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Then where is he?” she asked, refusing to acknowledge what she somehow knew.

Jeb didn’t answer.

It was then that her breathing suddenly became difficult. Beginning with her hands, her body started to tremble. Garrett! she thought. What happened? Why aren’t you here? Jeb bowed his head so she wouldn’t see his tears, but she could hear his choking gasps.

“Theresa . . . ,” he said, trailing off.

“Where is he? ” she demanded, leaping to her feet in a surge of frantic adrenaline. She heard the chair clatter to the floor behind her as if from a very great distance.

Jeb stared up at her silently. Then, with a single deliberate motion, he wiped the tears with the back of his hand. “They found his body yesterday morning.”

She felt her chest constrict as if she were suffocating.

“He’s gone, Theresa.”

*  *  *

On the beach where it had all begun, Theresa allowed herself to remember the events from one year earlier.

They had buried him next to Catherine, in a small cemetery near his home. Jeb and Theresa stood together at the graveside service, surrounded by the people whose lives Garrett had touched—friends from high school, former diving students, employees from the shop. It was a simple ceremony, and though it began to rain just as the minister finished speaking, the crowd lingered long after it was over.

the wake was held at Garrett’s house. One by one, people came through, all offering their condolences and sharing memories. When the last few filed out, leaving Jeb and Theresa alone, Jeb pulled a box from the closet and asked her to sit with him while they looked through it together.

In the box were hundreds of photographs. Over the next few hours she watched Garrett’s childhood and adolescence unfold—all the missing pieces of his life that she had only imagined. Then there were the pictures of the later years—high school and college graduations; the restored Happenstance ; Garrett in front of the remodeled shop prior to its opening. In every one of them, she noticed, his smile never changed. Smiling with him, she saw that for the most part his wardrobe hadn’t, either. Unless the photo had been taken for a special occasion, from early childhood on, it seemed he’d always dressed the same—either jeans or shorts, a casual shirt, and Top-Siders without socks.

There were dozens of photographs of Catherine. At first Jeb seemed uncomfortable when she saw them, but strangely, they didn’t really affect her. She felt neither sadness nor anger because of them. They were simply a part of another time in his life.

Later that evening, as they sorted through the last few pictures, she saw the Garrett she’d fallen in love with. One shot in particular caught her eye, and she held it in front of her for a long time. Noticing her expression, Jeb explained that it had been taken on Memorial Day, a few weeks before the bottle had washed up at the Cape. In it Garrett stood on his back deck, looking much the same as he had the first time she’d come to his house.

When she was finally able to put it down, Jeb gently took it from her.

The following morning he handed her an envelope. Opening it, she saw that he’d given it back to her, along with a number of others. With the pictures were the three letters that had first enabled Theresa and Garrett to come together.

“I think he would want you to have these.”

Too choked up to respond, she nodded a silent thank-you.

*  *  *

Theresa couldn’t remember much about her first few days back in Boston, and in retrospect she knew she didn’t really want to. She did recall that Deanna was waiting for her at Logan Airport when her plane touched down. After taking one look at her, Deanna immediately called her husband, instructing him to bring some clothes to Theresa’s because she planned to stay with her for a few days. Theresa spent most of the time in bed, not even bothering to get up when Kevin came home from school.

“Is my mom ever going to be okay?” Kevin asked.

“She just needs a little time, Kevin,” Deanna answered. “I know it’s hard for you, too, but it’s going to be okay.”

Theresa’s dreams, when she could remember them, were fragmented and disorienting. Surprisingly, Garrett never appeared in them at all. She didn’t know if that was an omen of sorts or even if she should attach any meaning to it. In her daze, she found it difficult to think about anything clearly, and she went to bed early and remained there, cocooned in the soothing darkness for as long as she could.

Sometimes upon awakening, she experienced a split second of confused unreality when the whole thing seemed like a terrible mistake, too absurd to have actually occurred. In that split second, everything would be as it should. She would find herself straining for the sounds of Garrett in the apartment, sure that the empty bed meant only that he was already in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper. She would join him in a moment at the table and shake her head: I had the most terrible dream . . .

Her only other recollection about that week was her relentless need to understand how this could have happened. Before she left Wilmington, she made Jeb promise to call her if he learned anything else about the day Garrett had gone out on Happenstance . In a curious twist of reason, she believed that knowing the details—the why —would somehow lessen her grief. What she refused to believe was that Garrett had sailed into the storm without planning to return. Whenever the phone rang, her hopes rose in the expectation of hearing Jeb’s voice. “I see,” she imagined herself saying. “Yes . . . I understand. That makes sense. . . .”

Of course, deep down, she knew that would never happen. Jeb didn’t call with an explanation that week, nor did the answer come to her in a moment of contemplation. No, the answer eventually came from a place she would never have predicted.

*  *  *

On the beach at Cape Cod, one year later, she reflected without bitterness on the turn of events that had led her to this place. Ready at last, Theresa reached in her bag. After removing the object she had brought with her, she stared at it, reliving the hour in which her answer had finally come. Unlike her recollection of the days immediately following her return to Boston, this memory was still unshakably clear.

After Deanna had left, Theresa had tried to reestablish a routine of sorts. In her confusion over the last week, she’d ignored the aspects of life that nonetheless had gone on. While Deanna had helped with Kevin and kept the house up, she’d simply piled the mail that accumulated in the corner of the dining room. after dinner one night while Kevin was at the movies, Theresa absently began to sort through the pile.

There were a few dozen letters, three magazines, and two packages. One package she recognized as an item she’d ordered from a catalog for Kevin’s birthday. The second, though, was wrapped in plain brown paper without a return address.

This second package was long and rectangular, sealed with extra tape. There were two “Fragile” stickers—one near the address and the other on the opposite side of the box—and another sticker that said “Handle with Care.” Curious, she decided to open it first.