“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.

Swimming is exhausting.

I carry with me a toiletry kit. The star of the packing universe.

Memory, as a substance, is definitely water. It either evaporates completely, or it gets soaked into the brain sponge until the sponge gets squeezed by some unexpected something, and then the water spills everywhere. A lot of times, the something is photographs. People insist they remember intricate details of a moment because they’ve seen a picture of the family dog they never met—I swear to God I remember we were at the lake because the dog was with us and I remember him, his name was Biscuit! He smelled like dirty pennies!—when in reality Biscuit died before the person was even born. Or there’s the thing where people hear stories from other people’s lives, and the stories get repeated over and over and the water is absorbed into another sponge and then you’ve got people fighting over whose memory it truly is.