While less close acquaintances might be quick to say, “Fuck him!” and launch into a monologue about how they never really liked him in the first place, Darlene understands that it’s more complicated than that. Because she knows there was good, too. Because of Noah and Lily—all the manifestation of that good. She can still see some version of love b

Father and son, palms leaving prints against the train window as we crossed over the bridge. My husband believed you could tell how good a day it was going to be based on how sparkly the water was.

In college, I took a Psych 101 class in which the professor said that very few people have genuine memories of their childhoods. This idea froze me in my tracks; a robber in the night. Here’s how you know if a childhood memory is real or merely fabricated from so many retellings: Look around your memory. If everything feels big, then it is real.

You never realize how many people you hate until you try to name a child.

I said it when they left for school and when they went to sleep, and in this way, “I love you” mostly became a sign-off, a shorthand for goodbye.

This is a thing our fights circled around, as if every fight had a mother fight hiding at its core.

To have to tell your own life story again; to reconstruct the narrative for someone who wasn’t there; to excavate your past and mine it for gold that you can hand to some stranger; to hang your hopes on someone new; to reference something specific and to realize that the person you’re talking to is not the person who was laughing beside you when it

closed,” she