“My nephew. He’s two. I guess you never met him, huh?”

“You literally just said he was born after we broke up.”

“Right.”

Just as the conversation was about to irretrievably slip into a black hole, Finn appeared behind Zadie. “Cute reunion.”

“Finn! Holy shit!” Joel jumped to his feet to greet her. “Man … last time I saw you, you were only this tall.” Joel held his hand out, palm side down. Then, realizing that it was basically level with Finn’s scalp, he added clumsily, “You looked a lot taller from down there.”

Finn pinched her lips around a laugh. “I bet.”

“Cool hat,” Joel said, pointing to the oversize sun hat perched on Finn’s head.

“Thanks! I like yours, too. Is it the same one?”

“Yep. Got a bunch of new patches, though.” He pulled off the hat, revealing a sweaty, matted head of hair, and pointed to a patch that looked like an alligator. “I got this one in Florida from an airboat captain.”

Finn leaned in to get a better look. “Cool. How many states you got left?”

“Six. Hawaii, Alaska, Minnesota, Delaware, and one of the Dakotas … North, I think.”

“Nice. Hey, remember that dance we used to do?”

Zadie cringed. She remembered.

Joel waved Finn off dismissively, turning his back to her. “Nah. My dancing days are behind m—” Then he spun back around suddenly and began doing a dance that resembled the Running Man being performed by the cast of West Side Story, replete with finger snaps. Finn joined him, laughing, and Zadie hid her face in her hands until the humiliating public display was over.

“We still got it!” Joel held up his right hand and the two high-fived. “So what are you guys doing here, anyway?”

“We’re trying to find our mom,” Finn said.

Joel’s gaze snapped back to his ex. “Wait. Seriously?”

He had met Zadie only a year after Nora had disappeared, when she was broke and still sleeping on friends’ couches. They’d met on one such couch the morning after a mutual acquaintance’s party. Each of them thought they were the only person crashing there until they woke up with the soles of their feet pressed together. Zadie instinctually screamed and kicked him in the shin. Joel also screamed, but from pain, not surprise. After a solid minute of confused yelling from opposite ends of the couch—

What are you doing here?

What are you doing here?

—they were laughing at the burgeoning bruise on Joel’s shin. An hour later, Zadie found herself spilling the story of her mom’s disappearance to this guy she barely knew. If she had met him at any other point in her life, they would have been good friends and nothing more, but Zadie was lonely, and he made her happy. At least for a while, anyway.