Jean was right. She had stayed on the coast for too long. She reminded herself that she’d only come here to leave. To then find Greg and Theo. Little Theo. He was six months old, now, and she longed to feel his fingers gripping her fingers, to spoon mushy peaches into his mouth, to lather his hair. Did he have hair? she wondered. When did babies get hair? She called Kelly to ask.

“That’s just like her,” Kelly said. “Hair? Of course he has hair! I swear, if she finds him—” “Theo,” I said.

She scoffed. “If she finds Theo — what next?”

“What’s next is she raises her son.”

“You know she wanted to kill it.” Was that true? It couldn’t be true.

“Mom and Dad made her keep him. What if she’d gotten her way, Wil, would you cheer her on if she were diving in dumpsters at clinics, looking for the Ziploc filled with chunks of what — ”

“Jesus, Kelly. What’s the matter with you?”

“Me? You’re the one who’s obsessed with a fuck-up.” “She’s the fuck-up?”

“One among many.” This fight, our tone, it was normal, and rather than press her I waited for Kelly to say: “I’m sick of you. Your smell. The TV shows that you like. Of your questions —  How’s Julie? Did Julie call? Are you sure she’s okay?” She paused to catch her breath. “Why are you here, Wil? What did you want?”

“Want?” I asked. “Nobody knows what they want, Kel. The heart is a corruptible organ. Infiltrated, manipulated, by swirling glaze of the world, of glistening ads, of baguettes browning in bakeries at dawn, the grunts of incoherent malaise, and the promise of love,” I shouted, “that regenerative, slimy, jewel-encrusted carrot that I trailed to Princeton-fucking-New Jersey.”

That night Kelly and me fucked like sedans in a head-on collision. We broke up in the morning, about the same time that Julie, over in Oregon, was dragging her stuff to the Buick. Jean followed her outside. Late dawn. Sunlight marbling clouds. They hugged — their first. “I can’t thank you enough,” Julie said. She was crying. They both were. And as Julie drove off she peered in