I always come back to the fries.
Not the sirens. Not the coast guard flashlight moving across the water in long, slow arcs. Not the specific sound of Noah’s voice when I finally got close enough to ask him where his mother was and he didn’t answer, just stared at the water.
I come back to the fries going soft in my hand while I stood at the edge of the sand and understood, for the first time, that something was deeply and irreversibly wrong.
Claire and I had driven her six kids down to Pelican Cove for a last weekend before school started. We weren’t married yet. I was twenty-nine, with no ring on my finger and no legal claim to anything in that minivan. None of that had ever mattered much to me. I already loved those kids the way you love things that have become fundamental to you before you consciously decided they would be.
