We met for lunch, the way we always had when we were seeing each other. I took my state-mandated hour break during the first hour of nap time. Rosie took hers in the second hour and I sat with the kids, the two year old room filling with the sounds of deep toddler sleep. At three Rosie returned from lunch and we woke them together, with gentle pats on the back, to go outside and play.

There were few restaurants in town where he and I wouldn’t be recognized, the two of us with our separate lives and spouses easy targets for town gossip, so instead Jamie drove us to a secluded spot where we could look out over the creek. I ate my teacher’s packed lunch of jarred yogurt and salad, watched Jamie’s hands dark with grease from the autobody shop as he picked over his gas station hoagie and chips. I sat as far from him as I could on the bench front seat, denying myself the pleasure of reaching out to adjust a lock of his hair. It was cold with the car off, and except for the splash of ducks taking off and landing in the water below us, nearly silent.

If Jamie wanted to see me, it meant he wanted to begin our affair again, one that had been easy to begin, painful to stop. I both relished and dreaded the idea of touching him. On one hand there was Jamie’s physical beauty, his easy laughter and our chemistry. Being with Jamie made me feel like my life made sense. But returning to Jamie also meant submitting to the tides of the affair, the way he came and went from me, his devotion to his wife and daughters and the jealousy that gripped me when I thought of how he loved them.

I watched geese swim in the muddy creek below. “This is a good spot to take Olivia,” I said. “My parents took me here just about every weekend when I was a kid. We used to buy a whole loaf of white bread on the way back here, and we wouldn’t leave until the geese had finished it all.”

“I miss her so much during the day,” said Jamie. “I was excited for her to start school and now I can’t believe how much I miss her. It’s like—anything could happen to her, out there. At least she’s with you.”

I’d felt a jolt when I saw her name on my roster that August, the same jolt I had felt when Jamie had asked to see me the previous afternoon. Fear? Prescience? There was a somber mood in the car, and I reached for the radio dial. Jamie put his hand over mine.

“What,” I said, and I looked at him, and starting again felt impossibly sad.

♧

I’d chosen Elaine as a sponsor at one of my first meetings. I was a bundle of nerves and adrenaline in my early days of sobriety, and I’d noticed Elaine right away. She seemed relaxed, unlike a lot of ex-addicts, who do everything like they’re running out of time. I liked the way she sat, in the center row of seats, near to the chairperson, arms crossed as if she could recite his script in her head. She had short, salt-and-pepper hair and wore loose, natural-looking clothing in earth tones. She’d been going to AA so long that there was no trace left of the party girl she’d once been. She looked like someone’s athletic grandma. Like she’d been to so many meetings, there was nothing left at AA that could surprise her.

I wondered what it might feel like to fit AA so neatly into my routine that it became just another thing to check off my schedule, rote as afternoon traffic. So I didn’t ask any of the women who spoke excitedly about sobriety to sponsor me. I was too shy to ask any of the women who sat in a close, cliquey huddle, as if by nature of having chosen the meeting as their home group they had arrived home. I didn’t ask any of the angry women, either, though I felt drawn to them-- women who felt passionately wronged by God, women who used that rage to fuel their sobriety. I chose Elaine because she seemed so comfortable, almost bored. I didn’t necessarily want to be bored, but it felt like something I needed, the opposite of the chaos that ran my life when I was drinking.

I’d moved back to my mother’s house, to my childhood bedroom, after years of blackouts and lost jobs and bad boyfriends. My mother had driven up to get me from the hospital after I’d crashed my car into a drainage ditch on the side of a county road. I’d been living upstate in a dying post-industrial city, a place so miserable it made me feel better about my life. I hadn’t spoken to her in several years at that point, and I knew that if I called her to come and get me, I’d have to make a change. But I had to make a change. When I crashed the car, I’d been blacked out for a day and a half already. I had no idea what I’d been doing for over twenty-four hours before I ended up on the side of the road.

I was in a bad way when I arrived home. My torso and face were bruised from where the airbags had opened up into me and the seventy-two hours I’d spent in the hospital were the longest I’d gone without taking a drink since junior high school. I understood, in a metaphysical way, that I wouldn’t survive another accident. I wasn’t a religious person, hadn’t attended church since I was a kid, but I knew that I had been given a hell of a second chance. My mother seemed to sense a change in me as well. She set me up with a job at the preschool she’d operated since I was a child, assistant teacher in the two year old room. It seemed excessively risky to trust me with such a position, and I felt the weight of how much she loved me in that moment, that any small hope for me outweighed the considerable risks.

Elaine believed that a strong spiritual foundation was necessary for lasting sobriety, and required that I attend mass three times a week, along with my ninety meetings in ninety days. It was easier to attend Elaine’s church than to find my own, though my family had left the Catholic faith when it came out how much child abuse they’d been covering up. My mom had always heard rumors, she said, about the altar boys, but it made it worse somehow, seeing it on the news. I watched a look of mild betrayal cross my mother’s eyes when I told her I was going to mass, and comforted myself with the knowledge that she preferred to have me home, safe with her and attending a church she resented, than living in some shitty tenement apartment, drinking my way through my latest customer service job.

I went to work, I went to mass, I went to meetings, I went to the diner afterwards for fellowship, I slept. My life had developed a routine that was as distant from my previous life as it could possibly be. I was unhappy, sure—I cried often, snapped at the kids, snapped at my mother, gained twenty pounds that I did not want—but I had been unhappy, unhappier, as a drunk.

Newcomers to AA aren’t supposed to date for their first year in the fellowship, but the truth was that I was incredibly lonely. As the months wore on, my cravings for liquor slowly subsided, especially the physical draw to it, which had been bad at first. In my early days of sobriety, the smell of antifreeze on a car’s window had been enough to get my cravings going. But I also found myself less and less interested in AA. I was tired of eating shitty food with the same boring people, tired of hearing Rick’s stories about how he’d boosted cars on meth, exhausted of Danielle’s stutter, resentful of the cool sober kids, handsome in their tattoos and angst, that had never fully accepted me. Worse still was the constant threat of relapse—I’d go out for a cigarette before a meeting and come back in with my stomach churning, having gotten word that someone I’d sat next to the previous week, or shared fries with at the diner, had gone out and overdosed, wound up dead.

There was a whole faction of skeezy men who treated AA like a speed dating service, who were nominally sober and preyed on vulnerable newcomer girls, some of them terribly young—sixteen, seventeen, nineteen. They’d get the girls high just to get into their pants. I’d seen whole friend groups relapse this way. If a particularly pretty girl came in, all of her friends could be gone from meetings by the next weekend, sleeping it off in an abandoned house or someone’s mom’s basement. I was relieved on my ninetieth day of sobriety, when I was no longer required by Elaine to attend daily meetings. There were people in AA who reminded me of what I’d been like when I was drinking, and I feared that too much exposure to them would send me back to the bottle, despite the promises of the program, that AA fellowship would heal me. I wanted to live. The question was how.

It was around this time that I started to notice Gabriel. He never missed a five-thirty church service, and he dressed in fitted suits that marked him as different from the construction and oil refinery guys who worked locally, the guys I’d grown up with. He must have worked in Pittsburgh, and I imagined him leaving his office job early, before five, to get the train back to mass on time. There was something about this loyalty that appealed to me, a monklike, old-fashioned quality.

While I was drinking, I’d been drawn to slippery, unreliable men, musicians and drunks, beautiful and vibrant and charming sometimes, or else moody and morose. In much the same way that I had chosen Elaine, I chose Gabriel, decided that he was sufficiently different from the men I’d been with before. If Gabriel was so devoted to the church, surely he could devote himself to a woman. I imagined him solidly returning home at the same hour each day, making love to me in the exact same way each night. If unpredictability had been a hallmark of my time as a drunk, then Gabriel was what I needed. I began arriving at the church early, departing the preschool as soon as my day ended at five and waiting for him in the pew behind where he usually sat. When I offered Gabriel the sign of peace, reaching out my hand to shake his, I sent him a signal with my eyes. I need you, the signal said.

There are two types of men in this world. Show the first type that you need him and he will take it as his cue to cut and run. I wagered that Gabriel would be the second type, the kind who found being needed irresistibly arousing. I was right. We were married two years later.

♧

It wasn’t clear who was most thrilled when I found out I was pregnant. Which of my students, I wondered, would our kid grow up to be like? Shy Marco, glamorous Lana, maniac Max? I watched my mom watching the kids, too. She held on to them extra tight now when they filed in from morning drop-off, delightedly squealing, “I’m squeezing the life out of you!” as she hugged each one hello.

Though I’d warned him not to, that the pregnancy was still too new to be a certainty, Gabriel came home on the train each day with tiny offerings for the baby, onesies in gender neutral yellows and grays, teething rings that could be frozen to enhance the baby’s comfort throughout the painful teething process. At night he touched the places on my stomach where he thought the baby might be hiding. “Is he up here tonight?” he’d ask, tickling my rib, and I’d giggle, and he’d press again, laughing along.

By the time I entered my second trimester, Gabriel and I had developed a routine for our doctor’s appointments. We went to an OB/GYN in Pittsburgh, Dr. Richards, because the OB/GYN in town didn’t offer Saturday appointments and it was difficult for Rosie to manage our class alone at the preschool. Gabriel and I took the train into the city on those Saturdays when we had an appointment, gorged ourselves on buffalo chicken subs from Thunderblood’s, and walked hand in hand to the doctor’s office. I felt so lucky. Gabriel was not the type of husband to miss an appointment. As we walked, I pretended that other women on the street watched us jealously. Just the sight of us, I decided, made them wonder what it was like to be so loved.

The nurse from Dr. Richards’ office called me one afternoon during work with the results of the genetic tests the office had done on me the previous week. I was thirty-two, and therefore considered a normal-risk pregnancy. Neither my family nor Jamie’s had a family history of Down syndrome or other genetic conditions. But I was certain that my years of hard drinking had done something to the baby, something harsh and irreversible. When the doctor mentioned genetic testing I’d asked for it right away, paid for it out of pocket, wanted to be absolutely sure our child would be okay.

I watched the children kick a ball around on the playground as she spoke, their aim inexact, their little legs still uncoordinated. The results had shown some abnormalities, the nurse explained, could I come in and speak with the doctor sometime this week? I was afraid to ask what abnormalities she was talking about, and relieved when she didn’t specify. We scheduled the appointment for the next day, a Thursday. Gabriel would be at work. Whatever the abnormalities were, they were probably minor, I told myself. No use in worrying him.

♧

Instead of taking the train, I drove to Dr. Richards’ office, and I stopped at the liquor store on the way. I selected a fifth of Heaven Hill, hesitated, swapped it out for a liter. I stared at the checkout guy, daring him to say something about my stomach. The only thing worse than being a drunk was being the sort of drunk who would risk fetal alcohol syndrome for a few glugs of bottom shelf whiskey. Or maybe it was worse to be the type of liquor store clerk who didn’t intervene when a pregnant woman bought booze.

The clerk said nothing, barely glanced at me, and outside I put the bag in my trunk where I couldn’t reach it as I drove. Three years, five months, I recited as I drove. Go to a meeting. Call Elaine. You don’t need it. The problem with AA, I thought, was that there was too much focus on being sober and staying sober. Every day I kept existing, and there was always bad stuff happening, and work on the weekdays, and bills to pay. On and on this went. I needed a twelve step program that would teach me how to keep going when just being alive felt like too much. I know it’s hard, Elaine would say. Go help someone. You’ll feel better. Elaine was a big believer in helping people as a means of maintaining sobriety. You gotta give it away to keep it, she’d say, waving away my thanks at her sponsorship, lifting chairs into a stack after a meeting. I didn’t want to help anyone, though, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay sober. I didn’t call Elaine. I drove to Dr. Richards’ office, parked, and rushed inside without opening the trunk.

♧

Dr. Richards was so sorry. “This is an incredibly painful thing for a mother to experience.” He looked to be on the verge of tears himself. “But the good thing is, we caught this early. You had very good instincts, asking for the genetic testing. You’re still relatively early in your pregnancy, and it’s a safe time to end the pregnancy if you wish to.”

“I mean, it’s not like I have much of a choice.”

Dr. Richards looked at me for a long time. “Some women in your situation might choose to carry the pregnancy to term. But it is an extremely difficult experience for the parents.”

I wondered if he had to say that, if there was some law that forced him to say that I had a choice, that I could carry my baby to term if I wished to, despite how clear he had been just a few minutes ago—ninety percent of babies with this condition are born dead, one hundred percent won’t make it past their fourth year of life. And it’s a very physically painful life for the child.

“I’m sorry that Gabriel couldn’t be here with us today,” Dr. Richards was saying. “If he wishes to speak with me, I’ve let the front desk know to put his calls through to my personal line.”

Genetic testing could tell the sex of the baby, earlier than an ultrasound. I didn’t ask. I thought about how Dr. Richards knew, how somewhere back there in one of his files, M or F was checked, my child. Dr. Richards hadn’t referred to my son or daughter by any pronoun. He was a fundamentally kind person.

I coughed. There was something like chalk in my throat. “Thank you,” I said.

♧

Gabriel looked away from me when I told him, focused on something beyond my line of sight, out of our kitchen window. He was still in his work clothes, fresh from evening mass, and I resisted the urge to pull open the knot at the base of his tie, allowing him that tiny bit more comfort.

I watched the light move across Gabriel’s face as I sought to read his expression. He looked exhausted. Angry, even. I understood. I’d rode down to the old steel mill after my appointment. It was abandoned now, a roost for pigeons, and I’d sat on a crumbling cement block and watched the creek run. I’d looked at my liter of whiskey at least a hundred times before hurling the bottle as hard as I could against the cement. There was an old acronym in AA—HALT. If an alcoholic was hungry, angry, lonely or tired, they were in danger of relapse. But I wondered if this acronym worked the opposite way, too. I was so exhausted and enraged that the idea of taking a drink had been repulsive to me. I wanted to be mad, not drunk. I wanted to scream so loud that God would hear me and feel sorry for what he’d done.

“Dr. Richards was able to schedule the procedure for me this week,” I continued. “In cases like these, it’s best to act as quickly as possible. I’m still in the realm of safety for an abortion for a few more weeks, but the longer you wait, the more likely complications become.”

I expected that at some point, Gabriel would move toward me, comfort me in some way. Gabriel had been excited, but I was the one who had been living with a child inside me, around the clock, I had only just stopped puking for this baby. I worked with kids for God’s sake, kids were my life.

“Oh baby,” said Gabriel, and he did move toward me now, pulling my nose into his chest, but I felt a chill as he did so, as if this were not my husband at all but some other man. “We’ll enjoy the time with him or her that we can. But we won’t—I mean, when he or she lives or dies isn’t up to us. We’ll have her around as long as we have her. And who knows? Doctors have been wrong before. God could surprise us.”

For a moment, I allowed myself to believe what he was saying. Certainly, Dr. Richards could be mistaken. What if the baby—our baby—was fine in there, fingers and toes forming perfectly, not the too many that Dr. Richards had described? What if at my appointment the following week, the doctor pulled a perfectly healthy fetus out of my cervix and discarded it? How would I ever know? I breathed in the slightly sweaty odor of Gabriel’s work shirt. I had never been Catholic the way Gabriel was. I believed in a twelve-step God, a God of stale coffee and late night diners and the way that Elaine had of calling me exactly when I needed her. I thought of a parable that was often passed around twelve step circles.

A woman’s house floods and she climbs up to her roof to stay dry. She prays to God to save her. A man in a boat comes by.

“Do you need help?” he asks.

“No thanks,” she says. “I’m waiting for God.”

The water level keeps rising. A helicopter flies above her. The rescue crew in the helicopter extends a rope ladder. “Grab on!” they yell.

“No thanks,” says the woman. “I’m waiting for God.”

The woman drowns and goes to heaven. She asks God why he didn’t save her, when she prayed and prayed for him. “I sent you a boat and a helicopter,” says God. “What more did you want?”

“I’m going to go out for a bit,” I said. “Clear my head.”

I drove to my mother’s and stayed there for four nights, and when Gabriel called she told him, in her sweet way, that I wasn’t available to come to the phone, and on the fifth day we went to the clinic.

My mom took me to the appointment, and held my hand during the worst parts. I’d read online that one in four women abort a baby sometime before they turn forty-five. I repeated that statistic to myself throughout the procedure like an incantation. Even with the meds they’d given me I could feel the plastic wand the doctor was using, and the tube that the doctor had explained went up through my cervix, and I wondered when doctors would finally come up with a good anesthetic, something to make me stop feeling altogether.

♧

I stayed at my mom’s house for a week after the procedure. I wasn’t sleeping well. It felt alien to be back in my childhood bed, like I was back in my early days of sobriety, and most nights I didn’t attempt sleep until well after midnight. I felt nebulously guilty. I’d begun to suspect that the baby had been doomed as a result of my own poor loyalty to my parents, the stress I’d put them through in my teenage years. I had been an unfit child, and God had judged me an unfit mother, taken my baby back.

I returned to the house I shared with Gabriel on a Saturday. My mother must have let him know I would be returning, because he greeted me with dinner, steaks and seltzer, a clean tablecloth. The whole house smelled like Pledge. He was relieved to see me, and yet when he turned away from placing the steaks on the counter I could see the hurt in his eyes, just there below the surface. I wondered if my own hurt was so obvious.

The next morning I woke up early, just after four. I made coffee, then crawled back into bed, watched the light slowly fill our room as the sun rose. Things would be okay, I thought. Husbands and wives had forgiven one another throughout history. This was just one more thing that Gabriel would eventually forgive me for. Maybe someday I would forgive him too.

I ran my fingers through his hair. I loved his hair, dark and curly, with silver coming in at the temples. I’d missed him when I was at my mom’s. Early in our marriage we’d fallen asleep most nights curled up together, his arms around my waist, and on the nights I’d stayed at my mom’s I pretended he was there, holding me, even though I was angry with him. He blinked, slowly up at me, then sat up. He drew away from me, sat up against the bedrest. He looked like he was still waking up, like he still couldn’t make sense of the scene in front of him. “I don’t think you should come to church with me today,” he said finally.

“What?” I said.

“Well, what you did is a mortal sin,” Gabriel said slowly, like he was talking to a child. “And it’s a really bad one. I mean, typically getting an abortion means automatic excommunication from the church.” He pulled up something on his phone. It was a nervous habit; Gabriel knew Catholic doctrine back to front but he wanted the words there, the support of some random stranger online. He read aloud, “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication. The term latae sententiae means automatic, meaning as of now you’re excommunicated.”

“Come on,” I said, “It’s not the fourteenth century anymore, I’m not excommunicated if no one knows I’ve sinned.”

His eyes were steely, sad. “I know, and everyone else will too, when they realize you’re not pregnant anymore.” I pulled the phone out of his hand, looked down at the website: catholicanswers.com.

“It says here the bishop has the power to forgive me. It says that most bishops will absolve anyone who’s had an abortion, especially if it’s the first time.” I kept reading. “Excommunicated parishioners are still expected to go to church. Joan of Arc was excommunicated, and she became a saint. So it’s fine.”

I looked at him. Gabriel didn’t say anything. I felt the hair on the back of my neck raise as something crystalized in my mind, a thought that I’d had on and off throughout our marriage, as I’d watched him kneeling in the pews, eyes closed, the picture of a model Catholic. “You’re ashamed,” I said. “You don’t care that God will forgive me, that that’s the literal foundation of Catholicism, that God forgives all of us. You don’t care that the bishop will forgive me. You want to make sure everyone knows that you don’t forgive me.”

Gabriel rubbed his hand over his forehead like I was giving him a headache. I imagined Elaine, telling me to take a searching and fearless moral inventory, to make amends to anyone I had harmed. I would not be making any amends to any bishop, even if it meant I would never take communion again.

On the last night before the procedure, my last night as a pregnant woman, I had laid in my childhood bed in the dark. My heart beat so rapidly I was sure I would never fall asleep. I put my hand on my belly. I’m sorry, I had said to my baby in the dark. I’m sorry, I had said to myself. God, if he wanted to, could make an amends to me.

♧

Instead of going to mass, I walked down to the AA clubhouse by the canal. I was headed to the big AA meeting, called that because it was, well, big. Two hundred people some mornings, and some real recovery there, Elaine used to say. If you added up all the recovery in that room you’d have something like a thousand years of sobriety. I’d never been. It conflicted with 10:30 AM mass.

A group of alcoholics stood outside the clubhouse, smoking and goofing around. I stood by the retaining wall over the canal, looked out at the brown water. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I watched a man in a hoodie put out his cigarette against the retaining wall, then toss the butt in the water. I thought of those chemicals leeching into our drinking water. Luckily, our water didn’t come out of the canal. I didn’t think it did, at least.

Hoodie guy looked up at me. “Ana Sullivan. What’s it been, ten years?”

I didn’t correct him, though I’d changed my last name when I married Gabriel. “At least that,” I said. I felt suddenly shy with his blue eyes fixed upon me. I knew hoodie guy. We’d run in the same circles once, different high schools, same friends. Jamie something or other.

“Have you been here in town this whole time? Why haven’t I seen you?” he asked.

“I don’t go to bars anymore,” I said, nodding at the clubhouse. “And I don’t see much of anyone, really.”

“I don’t get out as much either,” he said. “But I’m surprised I haven’t seen you around meetings. I have a daughter now, if you can believe it.” He pulled up a photo of a toddler on his phone, a girl judging from the giant polka dot bow clip holding her hair down. She had long, expressive eyelashes and giant eyes.

“She’s beautiful,” I said. I felt suddenly angry. Who was this guy, flashing photos of his children to strangers? Was he so great that he should he have children, when I didn’t? “Gosh, I—I actually just lost a pregnancy, so I don’t think I’m the best baby person right now.” Going into work since my procedure had been excruciating. Glimpses of the kids running or playing with blocks or washing their hands would start my ears buzzing, put a sort of woozy distance between me and the classroom. I wondered at these moments, ruefully, why God hadn’t killed me in the accident, spared everyone the trouble.

Jamie put a palm on my back, as if we were already close, as if we had always been close.

“Do you have time for a cup of tea, and you can tell me about it?” he asked. I hadn’t spoken to anyone about how I was feeling after the abortion, not even my mother, though she had tried to bring it up more than once. When Elaine called, I let it go to voicemail. I nodded, though I still felt angry.

As we walked to a coffee shop a few blocks from the clubhouse, I could feel Jamie looking at me. I had to look up at him, which was rare for me; I was tall enough that I looked most men right in the eyes. The sun was behind him, and for a moment he looked radiant. “What?” I said, smiling.

“There’s just sometimes I wish I could go back and talk to my high school self,” he said. “I’d love to tell him I was finally going on a date with you. I would have killed for a whole cup of tea’s worth of your time, back then.”

“A date?” I said. “How about just fellowship?” I had a brief vision of Elaine, warning me to turn around and go to the meeting, that with each step I took towards the coffee shop, I was walking further away from the rigorously moral life I’d worked so hard to build.

“Just fellowship,” he agreed, and I looked over into his startling eyes, thinking about how I wouldn’t mind being happy again. I thought about how maybe I didn’t need someone who was predictable, how maybe I wanted someone who made me feel something. And all that summer, as we saw one another on and off, as we made love in his truck, I could still feel the sun warming our backs as we walked, and that the lingering question of why God had spared my life in that accident had been answered.

Being with Jamie made me feel invincible. Until it didn’t. Until his wife called, and he answered, and he’d throw the truck into gear real fast and we’d stop whatever we were doing to get back to her. Until I’d text him to meet up and he wouldn’t answer for a week or more, and I’d worry he’d forgotten about me, or worse, that he had realized the kind of person I was deep down, that I had disgusted him.

Gabriel and I had no children, but I had Jamie, and I swore to myself that he was enough, even though having Jamie felt like less than nothing sometimes. Sometimes I wondered if God had truly sent him, or if I had found him myself, the way I’d found booze. We’d seen one another all summer, until the fall when Jamie’s second daughter was born. I’d texted him when I saw photos of the baby on Facebook. Congratulations.

No response. No response for three more weeks, until I was cutting up hot dogs and wet pineapple at snack time one morning and I felt my phone buzz. A ten thirty in the morning text, like nothing.

I’m sorry but my family is my priority. As if we were in the middle of a conversation. Which in a way, maybe we were. I often spoke to Jamie in my head, sought contact with him there, the way program oldtimers talked about seeking constant contact with God. You and Gabriel are so wonderful together anyway, and I need to be here with my daughters.

I didn’t respond. Couldn’t respond. How could Jamie pretend to know me, and say Gabriel was wonderful in the same breath? How could I stand Gabriel without Jamie? My relationship with Jamie had created a wedge that had made my marriage to Gabriel tolerable. I thought that Jamie felt the same way about his wife. Didn’t his willingness to cheat on her prove the weakness of their union? I remembered the way Jamie’s eyes would go soft when he mentioned his wife, what a wonderful mother she was, how she kept him steady through years of rehab. I felt no such loyalty to Gabriel. I would not have cared if Gabriel left me, if he found out about Jamie, if took up with a new woman from church. We were like roommates, and not the kind of roommates who were friends.

♧

Now, in his truck by the creek, I left Jamie’s hand on my knee. I looked away from him, out the window, at the woods beyond, the trees’ verdant green. Jamie was waiting for me to do something, I could tell. He wanted me to reach up and cover his mouth with mine. And I wanted to. Sometimes at a meeting, someone would bring up their first drink, the way at eleven or fourteen or fifteen or twenty-one or twenty-five, all of that self doubt and fear and exhaustion that came with being a person in the world had been washed away with a sip, replaced with pure simple peace, a nothingness inside the mind, and then even better, an excitement about life, this feeling that they could do anything, be anyone. I thought that us alcoholics were just trying to get back to that first moment when we’d felt invincible.

It had been three months since that last text. I leaned my head against his shoulder. I was so, so tired. Wherever God was at that moment, he felt far away from Jamie’s shitty truck, from the murky creek, from my lunch hour and an imminent three more hours of unstimulating conversation with preschoolers.

I didn’t ask Jamie why he had wanted to see me. To ask would give him an opening, and I should not invite him to whisper his beautiful falsehoods. Jamie wouldn’t leave his wife, he had never intended to. He had his daughters, and I had accumulated what amounted to rental children at the preschool, zero of my own. To start our relationship up again would amount only to self-punishment. I had succeeded in forming relationships with two men who I hated, and one baby who I loved, who had died, who would have died no matter what I had done. My life was so meaningless I could barely stand it.

I slipped out from where I rested against him, eased the car door open. Jamie was supposed to have been my good thing. It seemed silly now, how hopeful I had been that morning to meet him for lunch. What had I thought was going to happen? Perhaps I had run out my miracles surviving that car accident. Maybe it was selfish to ask for more.

“Ana? Where are you going?” Jamie asked. “I can give you a ride back to work.”

I looked at the logging road we’d traveled to get down to the creek, hung low by dogwood branches. It was a mile or more back to town. I’d called the place where the truck now idled our spot that summer, when it had been a place of joy. I understood that it was a place of desolation now, but that there was a comfort in that. Desolation was familiar, and desolation had led me to sobriety. “It’s okay,” I said, and I knew it wouldn’t be, when I got back home, but the woods had a way of playing tricks on me, and Jamie looked impossibly beautiful in that light.

“I can walk.”

♧

June 21, 2026