I sit outside on a bench and watch people, looking for faces I recognize. I see all the same types, but not the same people. It’s the next crop of college kids. The faces who fill in for the ones who have left. I know it’s ridiculous to look for who I’m looking for, but I have a flash of a perfect happy ending in my head. Of Adam and me raising Max together, making pancakes for him in the morning. And then the more I think of it, the less it feels like our ending. That’s not the life I want for Max, those lies I’d still have to tell.

Adam was my port in the storm and maybe I was his. It’s easy to fall in love with someone when you need them, but that doesn’t make it real or right. I don’t think how we were in our time together is how we’d always be. There’s a way you hold yourself in when love and need get tangled. It’s hard to know what would last and what would wear too thin to keep.

I hope the thing Adam remembers about me isn’t the part where I left. I hope what he remembers is that for a moment we shared a bright little corner of life. That’s how I will choose to remember him. But I want to believe that love can exist on its own. I want Max to believe that too.

I stop looking for Adam and I just look. Watch the wind scrape dry leaves across the concrete and the way the light comes through the bare tree branches. I watch this guy with a wiry red beard, sitting at a table by the window at Juna’s, reading a battered paperback, chewing on his bottom lip. And then I see Carly, through the window. Her hair is long now, black and past her shoulder blades. She’s wearing a blue dress and she has a big green tattoo winding its way up her arm into her sleeve. I can’t tell what it is. A snake, maybe. A vine. She looks like a mermaid or a superhero or a warrior. She looks beautiful. She pours coffee for the paperback guy. He says something to her. She throws her head back and laughs a real laugh. The kind you can’t fake. And I love that she looks so happy, so different and new. Like maybe she doesn’t hurt the way she used to. Maybe I don’t have to either.

I walk back toward my car. On the way, I stop in Woolworth’s and buy a big envelope, the yellow kind with the metal clip to close it.