Alice smiled in a way that made me know that, yes, people had friends that good. She had friends that good. My friend situation hadn’t bothered me all that much until right this minute.

I’d never really seen grown-up friendships modeled, but I longed for them all the same. My parents had fellow professors they socialized with at university cocktail parties. But their friends were their books, their papers, each other. Bill had been my friend. Then I said what was perhaps truest: “You know, Alice, I think I was making headway, but let’s be honest: People want to distance themselves from you in situations like this, like you have a contagious illness. I don’t one hundred percent blame them.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

Alice and I pulled up in a driveway behind a beautiful two-story home, raised up a floor with a garage underneath. It was only a block or so from my house, the house that, because of my current situation, I couldn’t so much as enter the door of. I had driven by this beachfront beauty many times. The front doors were perfectly symmetrical, and the sides were arranged in what could only be described as wings. The house was massive, and, when I opened the car door, the salt air and rhythmic shush of the waves enveloped me. I had missed this sound for the past few days. I followed Alice wordlessly up the steps, unsure where we were or why. Again, basic not-getting-murdered rules would dictate not going inside. I could hear Oprah urging, from the TV when I was a child, Never let them take you to the second location!

Well, I was a goner because here I was. Second location. Alice opened the back door—no key. I wasn’t surprised. She seemed like a no-key kind of gal. We stepped inside the most beautiful hallway, and I turned to face an open-plan dining room on the right and an elegant chef’s kitchen to the left. Beyond that, the living room stretched the entire width of the house and was really more like two sitting areas, furnished in unstuffy French Provincial style with bleached-wood furniture, oversized cushions, and throws, with a built-in bar on the far-left wall and a shell-covered fireplace to the far right. It looked comfortable. It looked like the kind of place where a woman could curl up with a book and a glass of wine. Wine. Oh, how I missed wine. I certainly wasn’t wasting any of the precious money I had left on wine when I had a daughter to feed and only two weeks of lodging money left. My heart fluttered nervously. I’ll be okay, I thought. Even if I had to get a job I was way overqualified for, I would find something.