If Only

The ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo takes an hour and forty minutes, which Tomas Fuentes had always considered the perfect length for a journey: long enough to drink a coffee and watch the islands slide past, short enough that nothing much could happen. He had made the crossing perhaps thirty times since moving to Vancouver for work three years earlier. Nothing much had ever happened.

On a bright Saturday in October, he was standing at the rail on the upper deck when a woman beside him said, "Tomas?" in a voice he had not heard for fifteen years but recognized before he had even turned around. Kate Morrison had cut her hair short and wore glasses now, but she still tilted her head when she was surprised, exactly as she had on the morning they met, in a bookshop in Valparaiso, when he had tried to recommend a novel he had never read.

For a moment neither of them knew what to do. Then she laughed and hugged him, briefly, the way you hug someone whose place in your life you have not yet worked out. "What on earth are you doing in Canada?" she asked. "I live here," he said. "In Vancouver. Since 2023." She stared at him. "You live in Vancouver," she said slowly. "Of course you do."

He knew what she meant, and so did she. Fifteen years earlier, at twenty-six, they had been engaged. She had finished her year in Chile and was going home to Victoria, and she had asked him to come with her. He had said yes, and then, three weeks before the flight, he had been offered a job at a copper mine in the Atacama, the kind of job young engineers dream about. He had told himself it was only for two years. He had told her she could wait. She had not wanted to wait, and he had been too proud to ask her twice.

They found two seats by the window and bought some terrible coffee. Kate told him she was a teacher now, in Nanaimo, and that she was on her way home from visiting her sister. Her husband, Dev, built boats. Her son, Liam, was fourteen and currently somewhere on the lower deck, pretending not to know her. Tomas told her about the mine, and the bridge project in Santiago after that, and the job that had eventually brought him here. He did not mention that he had never married. She did not ask.

"Can I tell you something stupid?" he said, somewhere past Gabriola Island. "For years I used to think, if only I'd got on that plane. If only I'd said no to the mine. I wish I'd been braver, I wish I'd been less proud. I had a whole list." Kate turned her cup around in her hands. "I had one too," she said. "I wished you'd called. I wished I'd asked again. For about two years, I wished I'd never walked into that bookshop."

"And now?" She thought about it seriously, the way she had always thought about questions, as if they deserved a proper answer. "Now I hardly think about it. If you'd come, I wouldn't have met Dev, and there'd be no Liam, and I'd rather not live in a world without Liam, even when he's pretending I don't exist." She smiled. "I do wish you'd said goodbye properly, though. That part I still mind."

Tomas looked out at the water. It was true: he had not said goodbye properly. He had written her a long, careful email full of reasons, and then he had stopped answering. "I'm sorry," he said. "I should have said that fifteen years ago." "Yes," said Kate, "you should have. But it's nice to hear it now."

When the ferry docked, a tall boy with headphones appeared and, with enormous reluctance, allowed himself to be introduced. Kate wrote her email address on a napkin and said Dev would want to meet the man who had once recommended a novel he had never read. Tomas watched them walk down the ramp together, arguing about something. Standing there in the cold, bright air, he realized that, for the first time in fifteen years, he did not wish that anything had been different. He only wished, a little, that the crossing had been longer.