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Is that when he asked how I'd ended up here? I told him I'd seen a map and liked that Wisconsin was shaped like a mitten.

"Seriously? You liked the shape of the state?" Lights from passing cars moved in a straight line along the rise of Interstate 94 to the south. A breeze riffled the leaves.

"Well, there might be a little more to it." I felt my pulse in my throat. "But we do have that moratorium."

"Ah, yes. We do, don't we?"

He asked about my job then, and I told him what I did as a graphic designer, how my real love was making collages that I sold in a local gallery.

"Collages? Like scraps of paper?"

"Photos, wallpaper, snippets of cloth, anything really."

"So, what do you love about it?" I could no longer see his face in the darkness.

"It's hard to explain. It's..." Healing, I wanted to say, or redemptive, but I wasn't sure if this was true or if I just wanted it to be. "The collages are like puzzles," I said. "There's all these random fragments, and if I can just figure out how to arrange them, I can make a completely different story." Of course, I was talking about my life. Trying to arrange the broken pieces into something whole. I wasn't sure it was possible, but sitting there with Erik, I felt such longing to believe it was.

We were silent then, but it was a good silence. Across the parking lot, an impossible number of teenagers—nine? Ten?—tumbled, laughing and shrieking, from their tiny car.

"What were you like as a kid?" Erik asked. "Goody Two-shoes? Nerd? Bad girl?"

"Pure Goody Two-shoes," I said. "And you were a bad boy, I can tell."

"Oh, bless you." He put his hand on his heart, grinning. "No one has accused me of that, ever." He shrugged. "I'm a rule follower. Always have been."

"Me too."

 

"You? The woman who chose where to live based on the shape of the state?" He shook his head, but there was this look in his eyes—I felt how much he liked me, and I liked him too, and for a second, I wished so much that I could tell him the truth. I never had a reason to move to Wisconsin so much as I had a thousand reasons to leave Delaware.

Or maybe not a thousand.

Maybe only three: My best friend, Kelly. My ex-husband, Nick. And Lucy, our daughter.

* * *

Erik asked me out for the following weekend, and I said yes, though it terrified me, the spike of joy when I saw him at the gym, the rush of adrenaline when I heard his voice on the phone. I'd been on a few dates since moving to the Midwest; I'd even been in a brief relationship, but I hadn't, not since Nick, felt that whoosh! of hope plunging through me.

Shortly before I moved here, I'd joined a monthly outpatient group at the hospital for women like me, and one of the things we discussed was how we would talk about our children when we met someone new. Dr. Fasnacht had us role-play situations where we tried to explain. But no matter who acted as the friend or potential spouse or lover, the responses were the same: "How do you live with yourself?" or "How do you ever get over something like that?" It didn't matter that we were pretending to be someone else, some imaginary character from our unimaginable futures. We couldn't fathom that anyone would understand what we had done because we didn't understand it ourselves. "This isn't helping," I remember weeping in the middle of role-play. "Why would anyone decent want us?"

"Because what you did is not who you are," Dr. Fasnacht said.

I thought of that a lot that summer of 2000, the summer I met Erik. It seems so long ago, but in that time before iPhones and Facebook and YouTube, second chances still felt possible.

CHAPTER 2

"You've lived here five years and never been to the state fair?" he asked me over the phone two days later. "That's unacceptable! Where else can you see a thousand-pound pig?"

"Exaggerating, are we?" I'd just come in from a run and was lying on my living room carpet in front of the window AC. I felt like a giddy teenager.

"Scout's honor," Erik said.

"You were a Boy Scout?"

"Hell no."

I closed my eyes. His laughter swirled through me.