We pop the champagne and make a proper toast to Kristine and then another to girl power and great friends.

Kristine is in an unusually frivolous mood, and as she tops off our champagne, she makes lots of jokes. Nic laughs at everything, too. And with Anne sitting to my right, whispering to me that she’s honestly, seriously, going to get that boob job, even if she has to go to Philip’s best friend behind Philip’s back (which I know she’d never do, but I let her talk), I realize I’m really very lucky. I know the best women in the world.

This day is exactly what I needed. I haven’t dressed up and gone out, not even for cocktails, in months. I didn’t drink in the three months I knew I was pregnant and haven’t wanted to drink since the miscarriage. Now the champagne goes straight to my head.

Nic, who rarely drinks more than a glass of anything and doesn’t even finish her champagne at Frenchy’s, becomes our designated driver, as usual. We stop shopping, go straight to the restaurant, and order cocktails and appetizers and, later, dessert.

On the way home, Anne asks me how I am. I tell her I’m fine.

“No, really,” she says, holding my chin in her hand and giving me her penetrating Earth Mother gaze. “How are you?”

She’s drunk, but that’s okay. We’re all a little loopy (except for Nic). “I’m fine.”

“Do you ever think about your surfer guy?”

This is the first time Kai’s been mentioned since… well, the intervention, and I notice everyone has gone quiet. “Yes.”

It’s true, too. Every now and then I see someone, something, that makes me think of Kai and Hawaii—a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses, Reef flip-flops, a certain tattoo, or a really dark tan—and I get this funny fluttery kind of pain. But I can’t live like that, feeling bad. That wasn’t Kai, and that wasn’t how Kai made me feel.

Nic appears to concentrate on driving, but I know she’s listening just as intently when she asks, “So what made Kai so special?”

I’m sitting in the backseat next to an open window. It’s a hot, sunny August afternoon, and my hair is blowing just the way it did in Kai’s truck. I catch my hair in my hand, hold it away from my face, feel the bittersweet ache inside me, the ache extra poignant because for a brief moment in time I was pregnant and carrying his baby.

“Everything,” I say at last, turning from the sun and Hawaii back to Anne and my friends. My shoulders rise and fall and my smile’s crooked because it still hurts. “He made me feel good about me.” I hold Anne’s gaze and try not to cry. “And I felt so good with him.”