“Do you have kids? Your own?” I said, breaking my Do not ask the foster parents personal questions, especially if you like them rule.

“I do not,” she said.

“What did you do before you retired? Before you fostered?”

“Well,” she said, “I was a pediatric nurse.”

“No way.”

“Oh yes. I loved it. I worked at Children’s in the city. And then I was about to turn twenty-five years old, and there was this cardiologist from San Francisco. We moved to Seattle, got an apartment together.”

“But did you— You didn’t want kids?”

“I wanted kids desperately. He said he did, too, though it never was the ‘right time’ for him. But I loved him. So I waited, and when I was thirty, we got married; we moved back here to the island, and I thought, Well, now’s the time, but still he wasn’t ready. I loved him some more, and I waited and waited some more, and I woke up one day and I was forty years old. And he woke up that same day and told me he had changed his mind. He didn’t want kids. Or me. And he moved back to San Francisco.”

“Francine.”

“I’m not proud; I can tell you that. Here’s the thing: don’t ever put the needs or wants of a grown adult over yours if it’s something as elemental as wanting children. It’s a real gave him the best years of my life mess. Could have become a Miss Havisham up in here, but I get too bored.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Led me to fostering, though, which I loved. Still love.”

“Did you ever see him again? After he left?”

She shook her head.

“That’s— You would have been a really good mom. You are one.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Do you want to Facebook-stalk him? Tell me his name; I could help you.”

She laughed.

“I get that,” I said. “ ‘The best years of your life’ thing. Happened to me.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” She smiled. “Don’t think like that. Your best haven’t even started yet.”

“No,” I said, disbelieving that the words were coming out of my mouth but feeling, even as I said them to this woman who kept showing up and standing up for me, a weight leaving my heart. “Mine was over before it started. I waited for someone, too, and I didn’t know I was doing it. I liked them so much I stayed with them too long, until it was too late. They took the best—the only—chance I had.”

“Chance for what?”

I could not say the word. Not after a lifetime of insisting I did not want it, believing the story of how brave and smart I was to avoid the snare of its trap, swimming all my life against the current determined to drown me.

But then Terry Johnson stretched and blinked in the sunshine. Francine moved my hair out of my eyes, tucked it behind my ear, and said, “You don’t have to talk about it.” And I was suddenly so tired.