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Looking back on it, Anna realizes it was her own damn fault for falling so hard.

That having playacted Juliet on the stage, she wanted to experience her own forbidden romance.

One that should have been over when Dante, then eighteen, enlisted in the Army but ended up at Princeton by way of a previously undetected heart murmur.

Instead of stopping things, Anna prolonged them by writing to Dante almost every day.

Florid letters in which she bared her soul—and her desires.

She finally succumbed to them when Dante returned home on fall break.

She remembers everything about that night in shivery detail.

Alone outside his house on an unseasonably warm October night.

His impish suggestion that they go skinny-dipping in the pool.

The way his expression turned lustful when she agreed. And then everything that followed.

The pleasure.

The guilt.

The utter heartbreak when she never heard from him again, not even in the weeks that followed, when tragedy upon tragedy befell her family.

The boy she loved had abandoned her when she needed him most, taking her innocence with him.

By the time her mother was dead and buried, Anna assumed she’d never see Dante again.

Nor did she want to. She knew she was better off without him.

Now he’s back, bantering with her as if none of that had ever happened.

“I’ve never forgiven you, you know,” she says.

“I noticed.”

“You just vanished. If I was so special, why did you disappear like that?”

Dante leans against the counter and looks at her in a way he never did when they were younger. Back then, his gaze always held mischief, lust, or a combination of the two. Now, though, he stares at her with clear-eyed understanding and, Anna hopes, regret.

“The way I treated you was truly awful, and I’m sorry,” he says.

Anna stiffens in surprise. She never expected an apology. Not from Dante Wentworth. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t need to say anything. It’s me who needs to explain why I behaved so atrociously.

When your brother was killed, I wanted to go to the funeral, but my father wouldn’t allow it.

I told him that you and I had been meeting in secret.

That I was falling in love with you. My father didn’t care.

He forbade me from seeing you again. He told me I couldn’t have anything to do with you or your family.

And when your father was arrested, I started to think that maybe he was right, no matter how much I wanted him to be wrong.

Only now do I know the real reason he made me stay away. ”

“Because your father is the guilty one,” Anna says.

“Apparently so,” Dante says. “I know you’ll never be able to forgive him, with good reason. But I hope you’ll eventually find some way to forgive me.”

Anna thought she’d hate Dante for a very long time.

Likely forever. But now that he’s here looking and acting the way he did all those years ago, she barely recalls the hatred.

All she can remember are the times when she thought she loved Dante.

Whether it was really love or merely a teenage infatuation she eventually would have gotten past, well, Anna never got the chance to find out.

Now her mind races with what if s. What if Dante had said this a dozen years ago?

Would that have changed things? Would it have made her life slightly more bearable?

She’ll never know, which is why all she can manage to say is “Maybe. Someday.”

That seems to be enough for Dante, who nods and says, “Right. Good. Until then, help me find some mustard. No man, no matter how hungry, should be forced to consume a dry sandwich.”

“Find it yourself,” Anna says. “I came here to look for something else.”

They switch sides of the car, where Dante opens the door to the pantry and scans the shelves.

The top one holds baking supplies. Flour, sugar, and baking soda, not to mention the food dye used in the Phoenix’s justly famous red velvet cake.

The favorite dessert of Anna’s father, it’s still served in both the club car and the dining room.

The shelf below it bears other tricks of the trade.

Salt and spices, distilled vinegar and canola oil. And, yes, a jar of mustard.

“Sweet nectar of the gods,” Dante says before spreading some on the bread. He quickly adds a few slices of roast beef and takes a mighty bite. With his mouth still full, he adds, “What are you looking for?”

Anna, now on her knees, opens the door to the cabinet beneath the sink. “Poison.”

Dante swallows with an audible gulp. “That’s not funny.”

“Good. Because I’m not joking.”

Anna peers into the dark and musty recesses of the cabinet. In the back, sitting behind a bucket and next to a canister of drain cleaner, is a box of rat poison. Its presence isn’t a surprise. She suspects every train with a galley car has some.

She grabs the box and looks inside. The poison itself is a white powder that’s roughly the size and consistency of table salt. Bringing the box to her nose, she gets a whiff of the same chemical smell she detected in Judd Dodge’s martini glass.

Dante, his sandwich completely forgotten, stands behind her. “Is that—”

“Yes,” Anna says before he can finish the question. “This is what killed Judd.”