Chapter 1

July 4: Dave and I arrived at the annual fireworks event downtown by the water’s edge.

We came in separate cars.

I parked two blocks from the town hall monument on a narrow side street adjacent to the DMV building.

Breaking out in a feverish sweat, I navigated ninety-degree temperatures and congested streets with people who were heading to the same destination. This year had been the hottest summer to date in upstate New York. I didn’t know if I could bear seeing Dave—it’s been a year since we separated and went our own ways, our lines of communication severed. He moved from Oakville to Albany seeking work as a paralegal. He believed in the law, but not in us.

“We need a break from each other,” he had told me last year. “To think.” It was close to summer break when he asked for time to consider life without me.

A year passed like a century. Our split would never have happened it if had been up to me. I didn’t want Dave to leave, but I agreed that we needed to reevaluate our relationship.

I knuckled sweat off my brow with the back of my hand, thinking about Dave’s apple pie voice, sweet and homey, calling me at home last night to meet him tonight for fireworks. “I need to see you,” he had said. I smiled at his singsong voice, but it was short-lived. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into after being away from him for so long. The curiosity alone forced me out of my air-conditioned apartment to the sweltering streets to find out.

As I waited at the crosswalk with a large crowd of people gathering around me, parents with their small children and young and old couples holding hands, I felt alone, and not the first time in a long year.

The sticky heat of perspiration dripped down my neck, to my back, and pooled under my arms.

When the light changed, a swarm of warm, sweaty bodies rushed past me, stepping out into the hot, crammed street. Nervous energy swelled inside me as I jammed my palms into my shorts pockets and joined the tail end of the crowd, walking unhurriedly, as if I were an out-of-towner, a tourist, seeing the sights for the first time.

I didn’t know when it happened, but I heard a car horn blasting behind me, people yelling at me to get out of the middle of the street, and when I turned, there he was, flashing his textbook smile, his cavernous blue eyes hypnotizing me, putting me under his spell. Mid-thirties, almost forty, but he doesn’t look his age. His thatched head of blond hair, trimmed goatee, cut and coiffed effortlessly, glowed beneath the burning sun. His enthusiastic wave and the way he leaned against the driver’s side door of his parked BMW on the corner, waiting for me on the other side of the street, reminded me of the good old days, as if time had stood still.

Nothing had changed. Yet everything was different.

* * * *

We found a quiet, comfortable spot under a thick knobby oak, away from the flock of people assembling close to the embankment with their folding chairs and ice coolers.

“You look good,” Dave said, tossing me his fresh-faced grin and slugging down a Bud Light.

I smiled, smacked the small pouch of my protruding stomach, and shoved my hand through my thinning brown hair. Ben and Jerry kept me company when Dave left. I was a touch out of shape here in my late thirties, but I was content. You didn’t have to have one-percent body fat to be beautiful, I thought. Six-pack abs and muscle-bound bodies were overrated in a country obsessed with implants and youth and Botox faces. But I admired Dave anyway for his dogged persistence for staying active—and handsome.

He handed me his beer. He had aged well in the last year. Smooth, polished skin, healthy looking. He worked out religiously.

I chewed the hot dog he had bought me and swallowed it down with a short gulp of his drink, handing him back his bottle. “Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked, scrubbing a hand over my bushy beard.

“Gotta keep my girlish figure.” His mouth twisted into a tight grin.

From the look of it, he had not missed a day at the gym. Strong arms with prominent veins snaking through them; not exaggerated, or steroid-induced. He had always been strong-willed, his head to the ground, a get-it-done type of person.

I admired him when we were together, and still did. The determination to get the job done had always been Dave’s forte. My only willpower was to get home after work and sit in front of the TV and play video games with a pint of Rocky Road—my unwinding downtime.