And I couldn’t be happier. Anything to postpone my arrival at my in-laws’.

A fantasy unspools in my mind as I drum my fingers on the motionless steering wheel. Both Aubrey and Sophie are part of it. We’re at the Wisteria, and we’re roasting marshmallows in the fire pit on the oyster shell–strewn beach. Sophie fixes on Aubrey as I let our little girl attempt to roast her own.

“Keep the stick away from the flame,” I tell her. “We’re going for golden brown, not black the way Mommy likes them.”

“Sorry,” Sophie says, “but burned marshmallows are very yummy.”

“Yummy if you like eating ashes,” I say.

We all laugh as we sit there on bright blue Adirondacks, taking in the evening air and enjoying the spitting sparks of the cedar-and-alder fire. The waves draw closer, and the lapping sound adds a kind of relaxing tranquility to the scene.

“Maybe we can catch some crabs tomorrow,” I say. “Gather some oysters.”

“Crab is good,” Sophie says, sipping from her wine. “No oysters for me, please.”

“Aubrey looks exhausted,” I say. “Let me take her inside, put her to bed. I’ll be back.”

Sophie gives me a smile. “Good,” she says. “I love it here. I won’t move an inch.”

The other cabins are dark when I carry Aubrey back up the steps to the Wisteria. She’s asleep. I feel her warm breath on my face.

In my fantasy I know that something bad is going to happen. I feel a heaviness cover me like a black tarp.

“Night-night,” I say, putting her under the covers.

Aubrey looks up and smiles before shuttering her eyes. I turn out the seashell lamp next to her bed and return to Sophie and the fire on the beach.

“How did we get here?” Sophie asks.

“We drove our cars,” I say, teasing.

She makes a face and signals for more wine. “Funny,” she says. “I mean to this place in our lives when everything seems so perfect but isn’t?”

“I don’t know,” I say as I fill her glass, the firelight flickering off the bottle. “It just happened.”

I look into the fire pit, and for a second I imagine her face in the embers. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I felt that way when I first saw her. I feel that way now. I think I always will. I feel a smile come to my face.

Then I’m back to being alone in my Adirondack facing the placid waters of Hood Canal. No Sophie. No Aubrey.

I don’t want to go inside the Wisteria.

And when I go home, I realize, I won’t want to go inside my house.

Going inside will make it all so final. So empty. So good-bye.

It would be the best time for a cigarette. If I smoked. At work, I admit I find myself a little envious of all of the solitude and thinking time smokers in my group steal from the workday as they trudge multiple times a day to space outside SkyAero’s gates. To a hater, it appears as if they’ve managed to create some kind of homeless camp on the shore of the Duwamish, that sluggish green river that flows into Puget Sound. They think on the way to and from their smoking encampment. They stand on the muddy shore and think.