She gasps as I lay out everything that happened in Montana and how it felt to reconnect with Nicholas only to have him be torn away from me so abruptly.

She listens with her hand over her mouth as I tell her about going to see his mother and then Ricky and then my mother and taking the trip to Maine and finding Pink Eye, a recovered gangbanger living the life of a psychology professor and family man.

“This is one hell of a story, Olive,” she says, opening another bottle of wine. I take a bite of a cracker, nodding my head.

“And you should know,” I add.

“Have you ever thought about writing it down?” she asks.

“Writing? I don’t know. I love to read novels but I don’t know if I could write one.”

“Many writers won’t agree with me but I believe anyone can learn to write.”

“Really?”

She nods.

“It’s all about paying attention to details. The events and the plot points are one thing but what makes someone a writer is how they tell the story. You and I would tell the story in two completely different ways because the details that I would pay attention to and include are different from those you would include.”

I tilt my head to one side, not really understanding what she’s getting at.

Aren’t all the details the same?

Like events in a sequence?

When I ask her about it, she laughs and shakes her head.

“No, not at all. Even the way you told me the story of what happened since you left my house, you included all of these descriptions about what you went through and how you felt about everything that was going on. You described what the motel looked like where you found Solly. You practically showed me the forest where Nicholas was camping and the way the water glistened in the sunlight.”

I sit back against the upholstered chair.

Is she really serious or had she just had too much to drink?

“All of those things tell me that you have the mind to be a really good writer. And what’s more, you have the perfect story to tell.”

I bite the inside of my lip, thinking over what she had just said. She knows most of what happened now, except what occurred before.

She doesn’t know how I met Nicholas; the debt, the obligation, the promise to spend a year with him.

All of that seems like it happened a million years ago and yet just yesterday at the same time.

“Anyway, I don’t want to pressure you, of course. I just wanted to encourage you to think about it. Writing is really, really hard but it gives you this enormous sense of purpose and accomplishment. You create a world and these people who didn’t exist before and you bring them all into existence.”