“Decker?”

“I was going to say Brian, but, sure, we can start there. How do you feel about your husband?”

Like the time Monica came over and asked me about Decker, I find myself staring out into the traffic on the 405. Every headlight zooming down the highway looks like a shooting star on land.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever have an answer as to why he never told me about this. I know ‘Hey, I knocked someone up once’ isn’t considered table conversation any more than ‘Hey, make sure I’m cremated if I drop dead, okay?’ so I kind of get it. But I’d like to think I was worth the whole truth. So that’s hard. But he was a good guy. I’ll always say that. I’ll always believe that.”

Casey clinks her wineglass against mine as I brush away the start of a single tear.

“And Brian?”

“I think he’s an idiot.”

“Oh, good,” she says, relieved. “Then there’s still a chance for Brilette to happen after all.”

“Excuse me?”

“Charlotte, let me explain something to you. How do I put it? Brian has a thing for you and you’ve got a thing for Brian. And before you start denying that, let me tell you why. Because if you didn’t have a thing for Brian, you’d want to kill him for what he did. You would have started this whole thing off guns blazing telling me how you never want to see or speak to him again before I could set my In-N-Out on the counter and unlace my Dr. Martens. But you didn’t. You were sarcastic about the shit-day you had, him taking your money was the last thing on your laundry list of complaints for the day, and you just summarized how you feel about it all by calling him an idiot, which all of us are at some point or another. Am I wrong?” She holds up her arm, which still has the wristband from the boat party on it, then points at me. I think she’s alluding to the way I acted when deboarding the ship.

“Kidding,” she says. “But it is possible to forgive and look past things. You know?”

“I just have no idea how to look past this—or deal with it at all,” I confess.

“Do what I do,” Casey says. “Get a tattoo.”

Chapter 24

Zareen gave me two weeks off to figure out what to do with the urn. Turns out, I made that decision in a split second. So as the days tick on, what I really think she was giving me was time to make some much-needed progress in other areas of my life. Progress that isn’t as tangible as just turning his ashes over to someone else and checking this debacle off the to-do list.

The longer I am away from my desk, the more evident it becomes that I’m about five years into seeing the world through a lens of how things are supposed to be, not how they are, and that’s not sustainable. At least that’s what I was taught when the worst thing to have ever happened to me unexpectedly reappeared at my door a little over a week ago. No longer can I force-feed my future to fall into place a certain way. No longer can I strip out the difficult people, the hard conversations, the unplanned-for events. No longer can I pretend that mourning and new love cannot coexist.