Rebecca sighed. “Okay, maybe very occasionally, if he got overwhelmed at work, or if he didn’t get enough sleep. If he was jet-lagged.” She smiled. “He really liked his sleep. Once he had the flu, and he was in a bad mood for about two weeks. But that was unusual, and in his defense it was a really bad year for the flu. But honestly, that was rare. The minor irritations in life, the crap that gets me cranky? It didn’t even faze him.”

“I’m jealous,” said Sherri. “There are days when I feel like everything gets me cranky.”

“Me too,” said Rebecca. “Me too.” She swiped savagely at her eyes. “I didn’t deserve Peter. He was too good for me.” Her emotions were taking a sharp left turn, and she tried to rein them in. Deep breath, then another: in, out, in, out.

She didn’t deserve Daniel either. Eventually he would figure that out. Her long-term relationship odds were already crummy: fifty-fifty if you were looking at good choices versus bad, zero for two if you were scoring on longevity. If she and Daniel didn’t work out she’d be down to zero for three.

“Of course you deserved him,” said Sherri. “Of course you did.” She reached across the table and squeezed Rebecca’s hand, and the gesture was so unexpected and so kind that Rebecca had to wipe once more at her eyes with her free hand.

“Alexa’s dad was an alcoholic,” she said. She hadn’t talked about Alexa’s father in a very long time—even thinking about him dredged up old feelings, feelings that were as messy and muddled as decomposing leaves in the middle of a forest.

Sherri made a noise that was halfway between a tsk and a sigh. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Rebecca’s second drink was three-quarters gone. “It was one of those leave-in-the-middle-of-the-night situations. Like, I had to get Alexa and myself out of there or I thought something really bad might happen. He wasn’t a jolly drunk who just fell asleep and was sweet and regretfully hung over the next morning. He got really angry when he drank. He turned into another person—an awful person. And he wouldn’t get the help he needed to get better. He tried, a couple of times. But it never stuck.”

Sherri was sitting very still, listening. For a moment, when Rebecca stopped talking, the only sound was the fountain and a very distant siren, probably coming from near the hospital. “So what happened?” Sherri asked. “To make you leave?”

“He drove drunk with Alexa in the car, and that’s when I said, That’s it. I had threatened to leave before, and I knew if I didn’t do it right then, I’d lose my nerve. So that very night, we packed up, and we left. Alexa wasn’t even three.”