“I love you.” He pushes himself to his feet. “I’ll be home before you know it. Take care of yourself and our baby.”

“I love you, too,” I whisper, but he’s already gone—off like a rabbit released from a trap.

I watch him through the front window, backpack bobbing as he kicks into an easy jog up the drive, and think of my mother. Shoving Chet in my arms and leaving us in a trailer with nothing but crumbs. Ordering me to stop fussing, that she’d be right back. The way my lungs locked up when I looked through the window to see her dropping into some stranger’s car.

Now I sink onto a stool and look around Paul’s big, fancy house—a place with everything I thought I ever wanted, only now it feels empty and cold. It doesn’t take me long to realize why.

In the thirteen months I’ve lived here, I’ve never slept in this big house alone.

Paul and I were on our fourth date, halfway up the trail to High Falls, when he told me about Katherine.

“We met in college, at one of those dives that serves hot wings and PBR in pitchers. She was on a date with some other guy, but I didn’t care. He went to the bathroom, and I slid into his seat. Later she told me they were just friends, but it was obvious they were close. I assumed they were together.” He grinned over his shoulder. “I’m persistent, but then again, you already know that.”

I smiled, thinking back to the first day he walked into the gas station, how he made me ring him up three times—for gas, then for gum, then for a $100 prepay card I knew he’d never use because clearly he was the type of guy who could afford a monthly plan. I promise not to buy one of those, he’d said, pointing to a giant jar of pickled eggs I had to fish out with a ladle, but only if you tell me your name. He was persistent, all right, and already I was smitten. Our fourth date, and I would have followed him anywhere.

“We were married eleven years, all of them happy. Until one day, a Thursday, Katherine went for a swim. Her daily morning ritual, like me and my runs. She went out the back door, me out the front. Do you know her last words to me? ‘The raccoon pooped on the back deck again.’ I wish I could say it was something more poignant, but we talked about raccoon shit. If nothing else, I’ve learned never to leave someone without a proper goodbye.”