But I didn’t return to Potsham with that secret, not yet. I couldn’t. Manuel had opened me up to too much vulnerability; left me too susceptible to the possibility of abandoning my quest for revenge and living in his fairytale dream. Charlotte had to pay. How could I simply walk away from what she’d done and leave her without any punishment at all? I couldn’t. So, trying to rid myself of Manuel’s charms I used the money Henry had left me and fucked my way through the Midwest; hop scotching from one gay community to another until I fully tired of the scenes of debauchery and returned to the tidal marshes of Caufield’s Connecticut house two years later. His house was a fine white frame of Puritanism from the 18th century, surrounded by sea grass and cropped in by the dunes that splashed up two hundred feet from the front door. If you wanted an uninterrupted view of the Sound, you had to climb to the uppermost deck of the house and witness it’s majesty from afar, which I did often in the three months I was there.
