Like a ghost, Charles stepped out of the thick, close brush.

Karen’s heart came to a stop.

There was a strange tentative smile on his lips. He looked at her and took off his sunglasses. “Hello, baby.”

A knifepoint of shock stabbed through her. “Charles…?”

Staring back at her, he nodded.

Karen’s hand shot to her mouth. She didn’t know what to do at first. Her breath was stolen away. She just stared. He looked different. Completely changed. She might not have recognized him if she’d passed him on the street. He had on a khaki baseball cap, but underneath Karen could see that his hair was virtually shaved. He had a stubbly growth over his cheeks, his eyes hidden. His body looked leaner, more built. And tanned. He wore pink and green floral beach trunks, water sandals, and a white tee. She couldn’t tell if he looked older or younger. Just different.

“Charles?”

He stepped toward her. “Hello, Karen.”

She stepped back. She didn’t know quite what to feel. She was a jumble of confused emotions, suddenly seeing the man with whom she had shared every joy and important moment in her adult life, whom she had mourned as dead, and feeling the disgust that now burned in her for the stranger who had abandoned her and their children. She felt herself rear back. Just hearing his voice. The voice of someone she had buried. Her husband.

Then he stopped. Reflexively, she took a couple of awkward steps to narrow the distance. His gaze was tentative, uneasy. She stared through him like an X-ray. “You look so different, Charles.”

“Comes with the territory,” he shrugged, a thin, wiry smile.

“I bet it does. Nice touch, Charles, this spot.” Continuing to walk toward him, absorbing the sight of him, like sharp, uncomfortable light slowly settling into shade.

He winked. “I thought you’d like that.”

“Yeah.” Karen stepped closer. “You always had a good antenna for irony, didn’t you, Charles? You sure outdid yourself here.”

“Karen”—his complexion changed—“I am so sorry….”

“Don’t!” She shook her head. “Don’t you say that, Charles.” Her blood was hot now, the shock over. The truth came back to her, why she was here. “Don’t you tell me you’re sorry, Charles. You don’t understand where sorry even begins.” A powerful current of anger and disbelief roared through her. She felt her fists close. Charles nodded, accepting the blow, removing his sunglasses. Karen stared, teeth clenched, narrowing her gaze into his familiar gray eyes.

She slapped him. Hard, across the face. He flinched, taking a step backward, but didn’t cover up.

Karen hit him again—harder, confusion boiling over into unleashed rage. “How could you? Goddamn you, Charles! How can you be standing here in front of me?” She raised her hand and struck him again. This time in the chest, with her fist, sending him reeling back. “Goddamn you to hell, Charles! How could you do this to me? To us? To Alex and Sam, Charles, your family. It killed us. You took a part of us with you, Charles. We can never get that back. But you, you’re here…. You’ll never know. We mourned you, Charles, as deep as if it were a part of ourselves that had died.” She pounded his chest again, tears of anger glistening in her eyes, Charles now deflecting the blows, which continued to rain on him, but not moving away. “We cried for you every day for a goddamn year. We lit candles in your memory. How can you be standing here, Charles?”

“I know, Karen,” he said, bowing his head. “I know.”

“No, you don’t know, Charles.” She glared. “You have no fucking idea what it is you’ve stolen from us. From Sam and Alex, Charles. And for what? But I know. I know exactly what you’ve done. I know what a lie you’ve lived. I know what you’ve kept from me. Dolphin. Falcon. Those tankers, Charles. That old guy in Pensacola…”

His eyes fixed on her. “Who have you been talking to, Karen?”

She hit him again. “Go to hell, Charles. Is that what you want from me here? You want me to tell you what I know?”

Finally he caught her arm, his fingers wrapping around her wrist.

“You say you know! You don’t, Karen. You’ve got to listen to me and hear me out. I never meant to hurt you like this. God knows, in a million years, I never meant for you to find out. Whatever I did, I did it to save you, Karen. All of you. I know how you must hate me. I know what it must feel like for you to see me here. But you have to do one thing for me, Karen. Please, just hear me out. Because whatever I did, and why I’m standing here now, taking my life in my hands, I did for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes, for you, Karen. And the kids.”

“All right, Charles.” Karen sniffed back tears. They moved out of the sun, near the brush. They sat down in the sand, cooler there. “You’ve always been able to charm me, haven’t you, Charlie? Let me hear your best shot at the truth.”

He swallowed. “You say you know what I’ve done. The offshore trading, Falcon, Dolphin Oil…It’s all true. I’m guilty of all of it. I ran money for years I never told you about, Karen. I ran into some problems. Liquidity problems. Big ones, Karen. I had to cover myself. I panicked. I concocted this elaborate fraud.”

“Those empty tankers…You were falsifying oil.”

Charles nodded and sucked in a breath. “I needed to. My reserves were so low, if the banks found out, they would call in my loan agreements. I was leveraged up eight to one, Karen. I had to create collateral. Yes.”

“Why, Charlie, why? Why did you have to do these things? Didn’t I love you enough, Charlie? Wasn’t I there for you? Didn’t we have a good enough life together? The kids…”

“It was never that, Karen. It had nothing to do with you.” He shook his head. “You remember years ago when I got overleveraged and Harbor was about to go under?”

Karen nodded.

“We would have been totally underwater. I would have had nothing, Karen. I would have ended up on some trading desk again, with my tail between my legs, trying to work myself back. I would’ve spent years paying off that debt. But it all came at a price, Karen.”

“A price?”

“Yeah.” He told her about the funds he’d been overseeing. “Not the birdshit little accounts I had at Harbor.” The private partnerships. Falcon. Managed offshore. “Billions, Karen.”

“But it was dirty money, Charles. You’re a money launderer. Why don’t you call it what it is? Who did this to you, Charles?”

“I’m not a money launderer, Karen. You don’t understand—you don’t judge these kinds of funds. You run them. You manage the money. That’s what I do, Karen. It was our way out. And I took it, Karen, for the past ten goddamn years. I didn’t know where the hell it all came from or who they fucking robbed or stole it from. Just that it was there. And you know what? I didn’t care. They were accounts to me. I invested for them. It was the same, the same as the Levinsons and the Coumiers and Smith fucking Barney. I’ve never even met these people, Karen. Saul found it all for me. And what do you think, there aren’t others? There aren’t people doing this every day, respected people who come home every night and toss the ball with the kids, and watch ER, and take their wives to the Met. People like me! It’s out there, Karen. Drug financiers, mobsters, people siphoning off their country’s oil pipelines. So I grabbed it. Like anyone else would have. It was our way out. I’ve never laundered a penny, Karen. I just managed their accounts.”

Karen looked at him—like a laser, looked through him. The truth, like some haze in the sky, melting away. “You didn’t just manage their accounts, Charlie. That sounds so good, doesn’t it? But you’re wrong. I know…. This is what Jonathan Lauer wanted me to know, Charlie. After you so conveniently ‘died.’ But now he’s dead, Charlie. For real. He’s not coming back on some island. Like you…He was set to testify at some hearing a few weeks back, but he was killed, run over, just like that innocent boy in Greenwich, Charlie.”

Charles averted his face.

“The one you went to see, Charlie, after Grand Central, when you stole that person’s identity. The kid you helped kill, Charlie. Or did kill for all I know. I have no fucking idea.

“What was he going to do, Charlie, turn you in? Blow your little scam out of the water? You’re not some money launderer—you’re a whole lot worse, Charlie. These people, they’re not coming back. Not to mention how many thousands were ruined or murdered in the name of all this money you so sacredly invested. Oh, Charlie…what the hell did you do? How did you lose your way? This was your big way out, right, baby…? Well, look at you! Look at what the hell it’s done.”

Charles stared at her, eyes pleading. He shook his head and moistened his dry lips. “I didn’t do that, Karen. What you think. I swear. You can hate me if you want, just hate me for the things I’ve done.” He took off his cap and ran his hand over his shaved scalp. “I didn’t kill that boy, Karen. No matter what you think. I went up there to try to save him.”