Julie couldn’t sleep after talking with Jean. She spent the night on the deck. The sky was drenched in stars. She looked for a pattern and saw, in the stars, what she already knew: she couldn’t go home. In Ridge she was a fallen celebrity, attracting the gaze of her pastor, police at the diner, her elementary school superintendent — who in Safeway asked, with an eyebrow raised, what the school could’ve done better — of damaged baristas, lick-lipping butchers, and pharmacists, who would catch her eyes and then glance the condoms glowing next to the register.

“You did what you could,” some people said. Meaning: “You failed.” But had she kept Theo they would’ve thought her a whore. “He looks so healthy,” they’d say, smiling at Theo, “so handsome [for the son of a whore].” Without him she felt like a failure. And the subsequent failure to find Greg compounded the first, absorbing and exposing everything she’d ever done wrong —  cheating on Spanish exams, missing overtime free throws, dialing wrong numbers, alienating her parents — until she became, instead of Julie, a list of deficiencies shaped like a woman.

The next morning, however, as she watched the fishermen lug buckets of chum from their boats, the air briny and halibut-scented, she slipped into the heads of the dockworkers. Were they, like her, searching for something? Were they running away? Did they love anyone? Were there lovers to see after work? Families? They must be so lonely. She thought of Kyle. She thought of the deadline. Her body had been ruptured by scalpels, plucked of her son. What more could she lose?

She raided Jean’s jewelry looking for hoop earrings. She settled for dangly turquoise. She painted her lips and practiced her pout for the mirror. She squeezed her toes into under-sized heels she bought for a dime at a thrift store. She offered herself to men at the dock. She paced beside the flesh-colored shed, wearing jeans she’d cut into shorts and a gold, cropped-top T- shirt. She stained her lips pink with Jean’s chunky makeup. She batted her eyes at the men squelching past in their rubbers. A middle-aged fisherman asked what the hell she was doing.

“Whatever you want,” she whispered, but had to repeat it.

“Unbelievable.” He shook his head. “Had to hear it myself.”