I imagined that, in some ways, having seen Chase with Thad would make my divorce easier. When I thought about the good times with Thad, I realized they had all been a lie. Our life and our love had been a total sham.

Why couldn’t life be like journalism? The story could take you anywhere, but the formula was tried and true. If you did the research, if you conducted the interviews, if you put in the work, the story would come. Why hadn’t my marriage followed that same pattern?

I wiped my eyes, and when I looked over to my left, I could see someone else sitting on the end of the Thaysdens’ dock next door, not twenty feet away.

“Is it done?” Parker asked.

The way the moon reflected on the water was so beautiful here. “Oh yeah. It’s done. I’m done. Everything’s done.”

“You are not done,” Parker said. “You’re just getting started.”

I nodded, even though, in that moment, I didn’t believe it. Not even a little.

“Hey, Park?”

“Yeah.”

“So are you.”

He nodded.

He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I. We just sat there, the silence washing over us. How had we gotten so far off course? I wished that, just for a minute, we could go back to being those same kids on these same docks, fishing with cane poles and swimming every chance we got. I knew I had to move forward. And Parker did, too. But sometimes in order to do that, you have to go back first. And I think that’s what scared us most of all.

The first time I saw Parker, he was eighteen years old. Well, the first time I actually laid eyes on him, I was three and he was three days old, and my mom and I had taken a chicken potpie to his mom, as if crust and a little gravy could cure her split-open insides. Even then, I was leery of childbirth. Maybe my body knew already it was something that would never happen for me.

His mom had this frilly bassinet set up in their living room, and I peeked in to look at him. I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about. My baby dolls were so pretty. He just looked kind of red to me.

Our parents were best friends, which meant Parker and I necessarily saw each other. Labor Day picnics, Christmas Eve get-togethers, lemonade on the lawn at church, that type of forced family fun, so I saw him all the time. But the first time I really saw him was the summer before my junior year of college.

As the friend who lived at the beach, I was pretty popular in the summer. And I always had my friends down for at least a week or two. The summer we all turned twenty-one, Dogwood resembled a sorority house. The girls were always impressed that I could drive the boat over to the beach myself, so I took every opportunity to wow them.