His best friend these days was Gus, a seventy-year-old black man who lived down the road. They had met a couple of weeks after Noah bought the house, when Gus had shown up with some homemade liquor and Brunswick stew, and the two had spent their first evening together getting drunk and telling stories.

Now Gus showed up a couple of nights a week, usually around eight. With four kids and eleven grandchildren in the house, he needed to get out now and then, and Noah couldn’t blame him. Usually Gus would bring his harmonica and, after talking for a little while, they’d play a few songs together.

He’d come to regard Gus as family. There really wasn’t anyone else, at least not since his father died last year. He was an only child and his mother had died of influenza when he was two. And though he had wanted to at one time, he had never married.

But he had been in love once, that he knew. Once and only once, and a long time ago. And it had changed him forever. Per-fect love did that to a person, and this had been perfect.

Coastal clouds slowly began to roll across the evening sky, turn-ing silver with the reflection of the moon. As they thickened, he leaned his head back against the rocking chair. His legs moved automatically, keeping a steady rhythm, and he felt his mind drift-ing back to a warm evening like this fourteen years ago.

It was just after graduation 1932, the opening night of the Neuse River Festival. The town was out in full, enjoying barbecues and games of chance. It was humid that night—for some reason he remembered that clearly. He arrived alone, and as he strolled through the crowd, looking for friends, he saw Fin and Sarah, two people he’d grown up with, talking to a girl he’d never seen before. She was pretty, he remembered thinking, and when he finally joined them, she looked his way with a pair of hazy eyes. “Hi,” she’d said simply as she offered her hand. “Finley’s told me a lot about you.”

An ordinary beginning, something that would have been forgot-ten had it been anyone but her. But as he shook her hand and met those striking emerald eyes, he knew before he’d taken his next breath that she was the one he could spend the rest of his life look-ing for but never find again. She seemed that good, that perfect.

From there, it went like a tornado wind. Fin told himrunescape gold farming she was spending the summer in New Bern with her family, because her father worked for a tobacco firm, and though he only nodded, the way she was looking at him made his silence seem okay. Fin laughed then, because he knew what was happening, and Sarah suggested they get some cherry cokes, and the four of them stayed at the festival until the crowds were thin and everything closed up for the night.