Rick sent an enormous arrangement of flowers to the hospital. He was good with flowers. Ordinarily, they could mend any problem. In this case, though, he knew they would not be enough. Still, he sent them. Even if Lacey had not been hurt by that dog, he would have sent them to her, maybe every day for the rest of her life. He owed that to her, and more.

It was Clay who told him what had happened. Rick had called the keeper’s house for the fourth or fifth time, hoping Lacey would finally pick up the phone and let him apologize, but it was Clay who answered and who chewed him out. Clay told him about Lacey being attacked by the dog, and even though Rick could not possibly be responsible for that horrific event, he felt guilty about it.

“She’s really a fine person,” he told Clay. “She didn’t deserve that. And she didn’t deserve what I did to her, either.”

“I hope your father stays in prison for the rest of his life,” Clay said, and hung up on him.

Rick didn’t give up. He called again two days later, wishing that Gina would be the one to answer the phone, but once again, he got Clay on the line. He asked if he could visit Lacey in the hospital and Clay told him that he was the last person Lacey wanted to see. Again, Clay hung up on him, slamming the phone down so hard, Rick’s ear hurt for minutes afterward.

“She won’t see me,” he’d told his mother after getting off the phone. It was the fourth day of her visit with him.

“You can’t possibly blame her,” his mother had said. “You hurt that entire family by trying to save your own.”

He shook his head. “I feel terrible for Lacey,” he said. “At first she really had no romantic interest in me, and that made it so easy. I didn’t want to…you know, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do if she wanted more from me. But that last night, she was starting to talk serious and…I guess it’s best the truth came out. Just not best for Dad.”

There were so many other ways, better ways, he could have handled his desire to get his father released. Sometimes, he realized, when you were caught up in your emotions, you could do really insane things, and that’s what he’d done with Lacey. When he’d learned that his father was up for parole, he knew Annie O’Neill’s family would be asked to write victim’s statements, and that Lacey’s would be most important. He remembered her from that horrible Christmas Eve in the battered women’s shelter. He knew she had been close to him in age and he thought that he could meet her, befriend her without revealing his identity and influence her through seduction. Women had always been attracted to him, despite his disinterest in them. He was ordinarily an honest man, but the deceit seemed worth it in this case. Lacey, though, had turned out to be a different sort of person than he’d anticipated. He could have appealed to her sense of justice, but he didn’t know that going in, and by the time he realized how good she was, how fair-minded, it was too late. He was already well into the game.

Now, though, he feared his plan had backfired. Her statement would be fueled by her anger at him. He’d hurt his father more than he’d helped him.

The only good thing about the week was having his mother with him. What a way to start things off, though, with her learning that her son was a conniving, manipulative scam artist. They’d talked all night long after Lacey left, never mentioning his father, both of them carefully avoiding the topic. Instead, they caught up on each other’s lives. He was impressed by her: she’d made a name for herself, writing an acclaimed book on pain control. She’d gotten a good education, and she was beautiful. His father had held her back, he thought. Not intentionally. Not in any mean-spirited way. But his father had wanted to live in Manteo, and there had been little opportunity for her to blossom there. He didn’t like thinking about the fact that she had done better without her husband than she had with him, but it was probably the truth.

His father had been a simple man, content to sell boogie boards in a shop that catered to tourists, to live in a little village where he knew most of the natives by name and where the simplicity of his life had enabled him to keep his mental illness in check. Rick had always felt that his and his mother’s escape to the shelter had thrown his father’s carefully maintained stability out of balance, and he’d suffered a meltdown.

He’d been a loving father. He’d never said those words, “I love you,” to Rick, although he said them all the time now. But it didn’t matter. His father had taken him on fishing expeditions and never missed a Little League game, and Rick had known how much he was treasured.

He told his mother about getting his law degree and how much he enjoyed teaching. He told her he’d known he was gay from the time he was in elementary school. And he told her about Christian.

“Did he know what you were truly doing here?” she asked.

“No,” he said, once again tapping into his overabundant supply of guilt. “He would have talked me out of it. He’d tell me I was acting irrationally, and I already knew that. I didn’t want to hear him reinforce it.”

Whatever his mother’s feelings about his behavior toward Lacey, that first night she’d been careful to keep them to herself, as if she knew they needed to avoid potentially combustible topics as they got to know each other again.

It wasn’t until their second evening together, when they were preparing dinner in the tiny kitchen of his cottage, that they began to work their way into the difficult topic of his father.

“What is he like?” she asked without even identifying who she was talking about, but he didn’t need to ask her for clarification.

He was washing lettuce in the sink, and he kept his eyes on the task. “He’s contrite,” he said. “He’s been contrite for many years. He was sick, Mom.” He looked over to where she was chopping onions for the chili. “If he could have changed what happened, he would have. He’d give up his own life to change it.”

She said nothing, the chopping and the running water the only sounds in the kitchen.

“I think he needed to live in Manteo,” he said. “He knew he wasn’t well. He told me once that when he had any change of routine, or when he traveled anywhere, even to Elizabeth City, he started feeling scared and out of control.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I mean, I knew it was hard to get him out of Manteo, but I just thought he was being stubborn.”

He waited a moment before he spoke again. “Would you like to see him?” he asked.

“No,” she said quickly. “Whether he’s really changed for the better or not is no longer my business. He’s a part of my past, Fred.” Her hands stopped chopping the onions and she looked at him. “I know he’s your present, though. And your future. I understand that, but I don’t want or need any part of him.”

He nodded, disappointed but not surprised. If she saw his father, she would know how dramatically he had changed. But it was too much to ask of her, just as it had been too much to ask of Lacey to try to forgive the man who had wreaked such havoc on her life.

“Are you still angry with me for going to the shelter that night?” his mother asked.

Rick shook the lettuce leaves dry and began tearing them into pieces over the salad bowl. “I know you thought you had to,” he said. “I know you had information from the neighbors that led you to believe we were in real danger. I just don’t think he would have flipped out the way he did if we hadn’t left.”

His mother scraped the chopped onions from the cutting board into the pot on the stove. “I guess that’s something we’ll never know,” she said.

By the time he drove his mother to the airport in Norfolk, he felt nearly at peace. He may have harmed his father’s chances at parole, and he was certain he would never be given the opportunity to truly apologize to Lacey, but there was one thing of which he was certain: he was never going to lose his mother again. Nothing he did would ever drive her away.