“Christy, honey, look at this. It’s a mother-daughter necklace!”

The necklace dangles from her mother’s fingers, glinting sharply in the late-afternoon sun. It’s a heart pendant, cut jaggedly down the middle, only there are two chains instead of one. She can’t quite make sense of it.

“It’s supposed to come apart,” her mother explains. “See? Right down the middle.” She flips it over, then holds it out to Christy-Lynn. “Look! It says ‘forever friends’ on the back. That’s us . . . forever friends.” She glances at the price tag threaded through the clasp, then turns to the man behind the table. “We’ll take it.”

“But, Mama, you said . . .”

“Hush now, so I can pay the man.” She’s already reaching into her back pocket for the stack of bills folded there. The man counts back her change, then snips off the price tag. When he pulls out a small gift box, Charlene stops him. “I don’t need a box. We’ll just put them on. Come here, honey, and hold up your hair.”

Christy-Lynn does as she’s told, still wondering how her mother managed to scrape up enough money to get them through the gate let alone buy a piece of jewelry. The chain feels cool against her skin, foreign. She watches as her mother fumbles with her half of the pendant and then pulls the tabletop mirror closer.

“We’ll never take them off,” her mother tells her with startling fierceness as she stares at their shared reflections. “Whatever happens—no matter how bad things get—we’ll always be two pieces of the same heart. Forever friends.”

Christy-Lynn nods, confused by the edge of determination that has slipped into her mother’s tone. Or perhaps it’s desperation. She isn’t sure, and she’s afraid to ask for fear that the spell of this perfect day will be broken. Forever friends. The words flutter through her head like a pair of butterfly wings. Shyly, she touches the glinting half heart at the base of her throat—the first piece of jewelry she has ever owned. Her mother smiles and does the same, and at that moment, Christy-Lynn feels something tug at the center of her chest, as if an invisible cord now runs between them—two pieces of the same heart.

As long as she lives, she will never forget this day.

ELEVEN

Sweetwater, Virginia

December 12, 2016

Wade tipped his head back to study the sky, a chilly, cloudless blue, then stretched his legs out across the ribbed bottom of the old cedar canoe. He grimaced as he drew yet another line of red ink across the page, then scribbled a note in the margin. Tighten flashback or lose? Or maybe he should just toss the whole thing in the lake and be done with it. Frustrated, he reached for the dented green thermos that had been his grandfather’s and poured himself a cup of strong black coffee.

It had taken the old man three summers to build the boat, and Wade had been beside him for all of it, overseeing every plank and rib and painstaking coat of epoxy. Three summers had seemed like an eternity to wait for something they were just going to fish in. Then one day when he was feeling particularly antsy, his grandfather explained that someday the canoe would be his, to fish in with his own children, which was why it had to be built strong, so it would last.

And it had lasted, tucked up under the deck, protected from the elements by several layers of blue nylon tarp. He’d only had to brush out the cobwebs and recane the seats before putting it in the water. He wondered what his grandfather would think if he could see him now, adrift on a chilly December morning, equipped not with rod and reel and a box of freshly tied flies, but with a handful of rumpled pages and a glaring red pen.

He didn’t usually edit on paper, or in a boat for that matter, but desperate times called for desperate measures. He’d been hacking and slashing the same four chapters for a week now, and something still wasn’t working. He’d hoped a change of venue might help, but so far it hadn’t. What he needed was a fresh set of eyes.

That’s where Simone had come in handy. Whenever he found himself stalled on a story, bashing at the same handful of lines, he would hand the laptop to Simone. She never suggested any kind of fix—her writing style was too different from his—but she was always able to pinpoint precisely where he’d gone off the rails.

He missed that.

Hell, he missed a lot of things. Like having someone next to him in the morning when he opened his eyes or across from him when he sat down for a meal, someone to fill the quiet that sometimes grew too fraught with memories. The thought brought him up short. Not the gloomy nature of it, but the way he had framed it in his head. Not Simone. Someone. Anyone. Was that really how he felt? Had he finally started to let go?

The question came with an uncomfortable jolt of clarity. In letting go of his ex-wife, of what he’d had and then lost, his life would somehow be even emptier than before. The bitterness he’d been nursing, clinging to with such tenacity, would be replaced with . . . nothing.

Would that be so bad? To forget the sting of the day he’d come home to an empty apartment? It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it coming. They’d been having trouble for a while, but things had gone south in a hurry when he started talking about leaving Week in Review to chase what she snarkily referred to as a pipe dream. But it wasn’t just the money. In fact, looking back, he realized it had never been about the money. He’d never been enough for Simone. But then neither had Kevin. Or Todd. Or Phillip. Perhaps a TV news anchor with good hair would fare better.