But tonight, even if it was seedy, I wouldn’t have cared because I was slightly tipsy from a rosé slushie with the man I had missed even more than I’d realized. Elliott was guiding me, and I knew where we were going before he even said it. “In the interest of making you feel loving and nostalgic toward me, I thought it was important to relive our first real date,” he said, smiling at me. He was so tan that the creases around his eyes and mouth were a shade slightly lighter than his skin, and his blue eyes sparkled. He had that distinctive look of a man who was made to live beside the ocean, who worked hard but loved every single minute of his life. He looked like a man who had never lost one night’s sleep trying to prove himself to anyone else. And he was causing me to take a hard look at the life I had led, at why I was so darn interested in proving myself. Proving myself to whom? I knew I hadn’t killed my husbands. They knew it. Elliott knew it. Why did I care what all those strangers thought anyway?

We walked up to the reception stand at the Fish Camp. “Hi, Elliott,” said the hostess, who was wearing frayed jean shorts and a tank top, and couldn’t possibly be a day over twenty-three. She wrapped her hair, which was long and wavy and white-white blond, around her finger.

“Hi, Kylie.” He smiled. “I have a reservation for two.”

She looked from Elliott to me and back to Elliott, making a face like I was the day-old fish they threw out. “That’s for you?” She looked at me again. “And you?”

The Fish Camp didn’t take reservations. It wasn’t a table-for-two kind of restaurant. It was the type of place where they lined raw wood tables with newspaper and dumped oysters or shrimp or clams. You ate wherever there was a seat with whoever else happened to be sitting there. In fact, I thought, panic suddenly rushing through me, that would be great. I knew Elliott was trying to create this perfect night for me. And it had been working. Until this moment when I remembered that so much was at stake here.

“We’ll just sit at the community table” burst out of me. Big, scary conversations about why we broke up and whether we could move forward couldn’t happen at the community table. I could put off whatever Elliott had in mind, stay in the purgatory of nondecision that, sure, was hard, but was easier than the hell of another clean break.

Elliott put his arm around me and squeezed, calming me, settling me. Could he read my mind? “No,” Elliott said. “I called ahead.”

“Fine.” Kylie took two laminated menus and meandered to our table, smacking her gum, like this was all so boring she could die.