“I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry that I kidnapped you. I’m sorry for the way I treated you, in those early days, when I wanted to make sure you would do whatever I said, when I said all those awful things about what I would do to your family. I am sorry, most of all, for what happened the last night.”

“What happened?” She meant only to echo his words, to question the euphemism.

“When I-the sex.” He had clearly misread her tone.

“The rape.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice a somber whisper. “I am sorry that I raped you. In some ways, I am sorrier for that than for anything else I did.”

She sat on the edge of her bed, examined the quilt, the sheets, the shams, all new. Peter, who traveled widely, had wanted to fit their bed with expensive sheets, Frette or even Pratesi. Eliza had argued that their bed should continue to be hospitable to children, children who still spilled things and forgot to put the tops on their markers. She had ordered this carefully mismatched set from a catalog, mixing striped sheets with a riotous quilt. There was already a stain on the dust ruffle, if one knew where to look, and some ink on a corner of a sham, but that came from Peter working in bed. No matter how much money Peter made, no matter how mature Iso and Albie became, they were never going to be a Frette kind of family.

“ Elizabeth?”

Again, that prompt, bordering on a demand. How dare he? What did he expect? That she would say it was okay? That she would offer forgiveness? This wasn’t Albie, using the guest room towels to wipe off Reba’s muddy feet, a typically dreamy, well-intentioned mistake on his part. It wasn’t even Iso, suspected of the crime of subtle bullying.

“Thank you,” she said. “You’ve never said that.”

“I never had a chance to speak to you.”

“I mean-in other, um, venues. You never spoke of it.”

“Other ven-oh, interviews. So you read them?”

“Sometimes.” She had, in fact, avoided them until a month ago, when she had reread everything, trying to figure out how Walter had gotten back into her life.

“I hate to say this, but I was told by my lawyer not to address any of the things where charges weren’t brought. Not even in my own defense.”

“The other girls,” she said, suddenly feeling protective of her little ghosts.

“I’ve never spoken of the other things I was accused of. Not even to you, not even when I wanted to…scare you.”

“No, no you didn’t. But the things I read made it pretty clear-”

“The things you read about yourself-were those true, Elizabeth?”

He had scored a point there, although she thought it unfair. True, Jared Garrett had speculated, with no seeming facts at his disposal, about Walter’s sexual proclivities. He had raised questions of premature ejaculation, necrophilia, pedophilia. It was, after all, impossible to libel a convicted killer.

But the standards for Eliza should have been different. Shouldn’t they?

“I can understand that you don’t want to talk about the crimes with which you were never charged.”

“There was a time,” Walter said, “when they wanted to bury me with every unsolved murder from South Carolina to Pennsylvania. They made my father vouch for my work schedule, went through his files.”

“Yes, but there are still a lot of missing girls…one was from Point of Rocks.”

“That was just a place to cross the river, Elizabeth, nothing more. Elizabeth”-she wished he would stop the repeated use of her name, which made him sound like a salesman, or someone who had just read Dale Carnegie-“I don’t want to go over all of this, I really don’t. I called to tell you that I’m sorry for what I did to you. That’s long overdue.”

And inadequate, Eliza thought. What had she expected? To her, Walter’s attempts to communicate had been a continuation of his long-ago crimes, not a refutation. He held her captive again, violated her again. Despite his letter, she had not really expected an apology, yet he had made one today, clear and unambiguous. What did he expect in return? What did he deserve?

When Iso was small, she had quickly learned to lisp “I sorry,” even as she continued to do the very thing for which she was apologizing. Albie, by contrast, was almost too remorseful, brooding over his misdeeds long after he had been forgiven. A decade or so ago, Peter had written a piece about the nature of modern apologies, stringing together a spate of real and not-so-real ones-the official government acknowledgment of the Tuskegee experiment, a baseball player’s belabored rationale for spitting at an umpire, the ongoing discussion about reparations for slavery. This would have been, in fact, about the same time that Iso was careering through their little bungalow in Houston, throwing out “I sorry” as if it were confetti, her private little parade of destruction rolling past, leaving Eliza to clean up all of the mess. They had tried hard to teach their children the importance of genuine remorse, what it was to say and mean “I’m sorry.”

They had spent less time, Eliza realized now, on the nature of forgiveness. She told her children that when someone was sincerely sorry for a misdeed, he or she must be forgiven. And in the context of a family, that was true. Family members must forgive one another. (Although-another stellar example from children’s literature-Jo did not need to forgive Amy for burning up her manuscript, and Eliza always thought Amy’s near-death experience was a bit heavy-handed on Louisa May Alcott’s part.) But then again-if one doesn’t forgive someone, doesn’t one, in a sense, lose that person forever? And what could be better than to lose Walter in that sense? She was under no obligation to forgive him. Was she?

“I appreciate that. I appreciate that you said it straight out, without any of those weasel words that politicians use.”

“Weasel words. I love that. You always did have a great way of talking.”

She did? No, Eliza wanted to say, that was Vonnie, the writer and star debater. She had been proficient with words, even tidy with them. But creative? She was not one to fish for compliments, and she would never, under any circumstances, invite Walter to praise her, yet she found herself saying wistfully, “I never saw myself that way.”

“Well, you weren’t talky. Thank god. But you used words in an interesting way. I wasn’t a big reader when I met you, but I’ve become one here and words are real to me now. They have, like, shapes. And colors. Some of them are so right for what they are. Dignity, for example. Dignity is like…an older cat on a window-sill, his paws folded beneath him.”

She wanted to disagree. She didn’t want to have any common ground with Walter. But she thought of words in this way, too, and he was onto something.

“That’s a good image,” she said. “Cats are dignified, whereas dogs-”

She stopped herself. Everything she knew about dogs had been gleaned from Reba, who was not at all typical of her species. Besides, she would no more invoke Reba with Walter than she would speak of her children, or her day-to-day life. It was Elizabeth who spoke to Walter, a grown-up version, but Elizabeth nonetheless.

“I never cared for dogs.”

“I remember.” All dogs barked at Walter.

“You know another word I like? Serendipity. I was thinking about that very word when I saw your photo. The magazine used it to describe what people might find at local farmers’ markets. But that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no serendipity in what the earth produces. There’s bad luck, sometimes-droughts and pests. But there’s no serendipity to it. Then I turned the page. Me finding you-that was serendipity.”

“And what does serendipity look like to you?” she asked, keen to change the subject, to move him away from the moment he had found her. She wasn’t sure, in fact, if he was referring to this past summer or a summer long ago.

“I…well…I’m not sure I should tell you.”