She wanted to be there, she said, when it was over — not in a cemetery in the city, under a stone Nia would visit out of duty, but in the water where she had been happiest, where the two of us had promised ourselves to each other under the stars a lifetime before the war.

She made me promise.

And I promised, the way you promise anything to a dying wife, meaning it with my whole heart and having no idea yet how hard it would be to keep.

It took me two years.

Two years of pennies and twenty-dollar Fridays, two years of a coffee can on the refrigerator, two years of not being able to face it.

But I was keeping it now.