“You just didn’t answer him.”

The man paused again. And then added, “At all.”

The man paused again. And then continued his argument. “And that’s … killin’ someone’s hopes and dreams the long, slow, painful way. ’Cause they’re still there, just hangin’ on. They never really go away.”

The man kept his gaze fixed on the woman, making sure she was hearing him. And when he was sure that she was, he went on: “And that’s kinda like givin’ somebody a little less air to breathe. Every day.”

The man paused. And then concluded his rumination.

“Till they die.”

The man’s gaze remained fixed on the woman. She was looking at the ground, arms still folded tightly against her body.

And he felt like he had made his point. And he felt like she had heard him.

And the woman raised her head and looked down at the man. He was so small he almost looked like a little boy. A bald little boy.

And then she looked up at the stars.

And processed the extremely unhelpful information the man had just shared with her.

And then shrugged her shoulders and nodded her head and didn’t know what to say, because what the man had said was absolutely true, she supposed. She had never thought about what she had done to Daniel in such morbid terms. But, as morbid as they were, they were probably pretty accurate ones.

And then she wondered if she had killed Daniel in a long, slow, painful way.

And hoped she hadn’t.

And suddenly felt like she was in a horror movie—and she was the monster.

And suddenly she felt unwelcome.

And felt like she needed to get out of there—and go back to where she had come from. So she said, “Okay, well … thank you,” and took hold of the handle of her wheelie suitcase and started to go.

“For what?” called the man, asking the question as if it were a challenge.

The woman realized that she had only thanked the man out of habit. And that she didn’t really have anything to thank him for.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, shrugging. And she continued down the driveway back toward the Road to Somewhere/Nowhere. And stopped when she realized she had no idea where she was going to go.

Maybe she could get a room at Ma Dudley’s. It was nearly two miles away, though. Which’d be a long walk in those shoes.

She thought about asking the man for a ride there.

But she had imposed on him enough already.

So she started to go again. To Ma Dudley’s, she guessed. And as she left, the man said, “Goodbye, Hope.”

The woman stopped and turned to the man and said, “Goodbye.” And was about to go again, but before she did, she said, “I am so sorry to have bothered you! I really am.”

And she started to go again.

And couldn’t believe how completely not-as-planned the evening had gone. She thought that she was going to come back and find Danny. And he would take her back, and they would live happily ever after. Which may sound romantic—but it actually isn’t. It’s sentimental. Because sentimentalists think everything’s going to work out just fine. And romantics think everything is going to fall apart. Most people become romantics by the time they’re as old as the woman was. Because most things fall apart. But not much in the woman’s life had fallen apart. So the woman hadn’t yet become a romantic. She was still a sentimentalist.