Page 74 of Cruel Summer

She walked along the harbor there, and stopped when she heard Frank Sinatra. She smiled, listening to the music filtering from one of the boats tethered there.

It was one of those strange, surreal experiences that she knew she would always remember. It was funny. Those moments in life.

That were just a little too perfect. Almost as if they were scripted. Maybe it was strange to ponder the appearance of background music at an opportune moment on quite that level, but nothing in her life had felt scripted for the last few weeks. So it was just sort of nice to rest in the softness of the moment. The romanticism of it. That made her smile too. That she could feel a sense of romanticism, walking by herself.

She took selfies in front of the big bean at the park, and wandered through the Art Institute. She particularly loved the display of Western art, and for the first time in a while found herself reflexively thinking that she should text Will.

Because he probably would’ve liked the bronze statue of the cowboy on a horse, and she would’ve texted him and said it was an art museum he would probably enjoy.

Except she didn’t. Because they weren’t speaking.

Being away from home made it a little bit easier. Being outside of her experience. Her normal life. But it didn’t erase those well-worn pathways, those habits that were more a part of herself, her subconscious, than she’d realized.

She met with Logan again at dinnertime, and they had deep-dish pizza, and she felt wistful at having the new experience without anyone in her family here, and she didn’t know why she was feeling quite so melancholy.

She missed her kids. She missed a life she didn’t think she could ever go back to. She wasn’t sure why it was so harsh right now. Maybe because she should have been on a family vacation this time of year.

But she wouldn’t have been anyway since her kids were off having lives.

“You seem like you’re already across the country,” Logan said.

“No,” she responded. “I’m just marinating in parental guilt.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a parent and it’s what we do?”

“Fair. But you shouldn’t feel guilty.”

“I think you and I both know I actually have a lot of things to feel guilty about.”

“I thought temptation wasn’t sin?”

“Yeah. Well. Sorry. It’s not that simple for me. I feel guilty about it. That’s why I didn’t want to acknowledge it.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I think you didn’t want to acknowledge it because then it would be an action item. You really didn’t want to do anything about the issues in your marriage.”

“Stop it. You don’t have an insider’s perspective on my marriage. Quit acting like you do.”

“Would you say that to Elysia? Or Whitney?”

“No,” she said. She took another bite of pizza. “I also have never evennearlykissed one of them.”

“I see. So I don’t get to say anything because I’m a man.”

“A man that I almost kissed. Yes.”

“Just casually using that in conversation now?”

“You wanted honesty, Logan. Here it is.”

“Yet somehow not.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s all aboutright now.”

“Fair enough.”

She had trouble sleeping that night. She sat in a chair by her sixteenth-floor window, looking out at the river below. At the boats gliding across the water, and all the lights shimmering across the surface. It was a beautiful city, and she wished that she had built more time into this portion of the trip. She didn’t have to leave for the West Coast at the same time Logan did. But they had booked flights on the same plane.

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