I cleaned my house until it was sparkling.

Jojo and Isabel had no idea where the energy had come from, but they watched me in fascination as I dusted every shelf, took everything down to wipe off the patina of dust and stickiness that seemed to build up whenever there was a baby in the room. Isabel wasn’t a big fan of the vacuum cleaner, and spent some time fearfully barking at me as I went over the carpet.

I don’t think they liked the music either. I had it up loud, pounding, singing and shouting along with the lyrics. No pop. No top 40, nothing about love or warmth or togetherness or any of that other nonsense. Just loud and angry and pure.

“I’m free,” I told Jojo, as I took the cushions off the couch to vacuum all the little crevices. “For the first time in my adult life, I’m free.”

“Fah!” he said, but he gave me an uncertain look. I’m not sure he had ever seen me angry before. Certainly never suffused with this kind of angry hyper energy, like I’d downed a bottle of Adderall or something.

“Never let your life be dominated by an obsession,” I told him. “If there’s one thing I intend to protect you from, it’s that. You’re not allowed to get addicted to anything.”

“Da-dah?”

“Because that’s really the point, isn’t it? I’m Mr. Good Guy. Don’t smoke, don’t really drink, no bad habits to speak of...except one. One big weight tied around my neck. Well, no longer. No carrying around a memory year after year, wondering what could have been. No more kicking myself thinking that I should’ve gone after him. Because now we know. I was right not to go after him. Immature, self-centered--”

“Rah!”

“Yes, exactly! Ransom. I have wasted so much of my life, thinking I’d failed by not going with him. Thinking I’d resigned myself to a life of boredom and futility without him. But you know what? I’ve got a darned good life!”

I shoved the couch cushions back in place and looked for something else to clean. Maybe Jojo’s toys. They could use a good sanitizing. I could bundle them all up and put them in the sink with some hot water...

Instead, I collapsed onto the couch and silenced the stereo. He crawled up to me, and I pulled him onto my lap and hugged him close. “I feel so bad,” I whispered to him. “Shouldn’t I feel better than this?”

Seeing me feel bad made him feel bad too, but he was too little for sympathy, too little to try to comfort me; instead, the best he could do was be sad, like a little sponge absorbing my emotions. His eyes welled with tears, and he began to sniffle.

“No, no,” I said quietly. “It’s okay. It really is. We have each other, and we have Isabel and all our friends.”

When the doorbell rang, at first I felt angry, thinking it might be Ransom, or worse, one of his people. That would be just like him, wouldn’t it, to send someone to come get me, like I was dinner from some take-out place. I carried Jojo to the door and looked out the peephole.

There was Nat, staring at me all distorted. I let him in.

“Oh god, what happened? It smells so clean in here.” He ran his finger over the top of the doorjamb, then looked at me with concern. “Not a speck of dust. I guess it went badly?”

“Am I that predictable?”

“Let’s just say that if we could keep you miserable all the time, we could hire you out as a housekeeper.”

In the kitchen, I gave him Jojo and started a pot of coffee. It felt like a coffee kind of conversation. Coffee with a pint of whiskey added.

“Was it just a fight, or something more final?” Nat asked me.

“Oh, it was final all right,” I said. I gave him the short version, watching his face fall, and his jaw slowly steel itself as he heard about what Ransom had said.

“Jesus. Good riddance.”

“I can’t believe I was so blind,” I said. “You know, I wish I’d called him names. I wish I’d said he was selfish and shallow. God, no, I don’t really mean that, you know I don’t. I kind of do, but I don’t.”

“Sometimes you really don’t know what’s in a person’s heart, until they’re in an extreme event,” he said. “I’m not happy for you, by any means--in fact, I’m really sad! But at least you know the truth.”

I thought of the pain I’d seen on Ransom’s face and tried to put it out of my mind. I couldn’t give in to the temptation to have sympathy for him.

“I’m pretty sad too,” I said, putting grounds into the coffee maker and switching it on. “I know it’s for the best. How embarrassing, though.”

“No, it really isn’t.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. Think about it this way: Every relationship I’ve ever had, I’ve measured based on that first crazy passion for Ransom. How could anyone ever stack up compared to that? Normal people let the past recede into the background...but I feel like I’ve lived my whole life in reaction to that one relationship. Now it’s going to be even worse. How can I ever go out with anybody ever again?”

Nat rocked Jojo in his arms. “It’s a little early to worry about the future right now. It’s natural that your mind would go in that direction, but I promise you, there’s someone out there for you.”

I didn’t want to argue with Nat. He had been a true friend through all of this, warning me again and again that I was getting in over my head. This time, though, he was wrong. No one would ever compare to Ransom. I had never, in all my life, met someone who excited me on such a primal level. No one as beautiful as him. No one who could make every nerve ending vibrate with a single playful glance. Forget the money and the fame and all that, I would never meet anyone with eyes like Ransom’s.

“Where did I put the sugar?” I said. “Did I move it when I was cleaning? I swear to god, I can’t find anything in this house. I’m sorry, I know you like sugar in your coffee--”

“Cave?”

“I’m a bad host, I know, I just--”

“Cave. The sugar is right there next to the coffee maker.” He got up and set Jojo in his highchair, buckling him in and sliding the tray into place, then he led me over to a chair and made me sit down. “I will make the coffee. You are overwhelmed.”

“Why couldn’t he be normal, Nat? Why couldn’t he see what his fake engagement was going to do to me?”

“It’s not your fault,” Nat said. He brought me a cup of black coffee.

It was hot and bitter, like my anger and exhaustion. It burned my lips and tongue.

“I know,” I said. “It’s his. But it still feels like my fault. Like there was something I could have done.”

“There’s nothing that anybody can say that will make you feel better right now,” said Nat, “but someday soon you’re going to see that you made the right decision, and it’ll feel like the right decision. What else could you do? You were caught in a relationship that was based on a lie.”

“Your relationship was based on a lie,” I said. “You and Owen were fake boyfriends to get on TV. How come your lie worked out, and mine didn’t?”

“It almost didn’t. We had so much bad stuff in our individual histories, we almost couldn’t get past it to be together. It was hard and painful, and I’m glad we came out the other side intact.”

“See?” I said. “You managed to work through it all. Maybe I should have stayed with Ransom. Maybe I should have worked harder, maybe--”

He put his hand on mine and squeezed. “Hey. Hey, Cave. Earth to Cave. This isn’t your fault. My relationship working out doesn’t have any bearing on yours. Different people, different situations. I mean, just as an example, Owen had someone in his life that was a really evil influence. Somebody who knew just which buttons to push, to make Owen feel bad and helpless, like he didn’t deserve anyone to love him.”

I blinked. “An evil influence? That sounds so dramatic.”

“Oh trust me, there was way more drama than I usually have tolerance for. I’m still surprised sometimes that we made it work. But your case is different than mine, okay? You don’t have some evil psychopath pulling the strings in the background, and neither does Ransom. Totally different problem than I had.”

“It’s a shame. Things are so much easier when there’s a big villain. Makes it easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”

“Real life isn’t like that. Most times there aren’t really any bad guys, just guys with good intentions but bad decisions.”

I laughed ruefully. “That sounds like the title of a self-help book. Good Intentions, Bad Decisions.”

When the coffee was gone a little while later, he left but made sure I didn’t need anything else, and then gave my shoulder a squeeze and reminded me I always had a friend to lean on, to call him anytime, day or night.

Night. The basic rhythms of the night were still in play. Jojo still needed to be fed, bathed, put into PJs and put to bed. There was something soothing about the sameness of these activities. This is what I really needed, just the repetition of life’s tasks, letting them pull me back to normalcy, like the tides returning to normal after a tumultuous storm. It seems on the surface like the water is chaotic and wild, but deep down, those old rhythms are always working, the secret pattern of the world.

“Little Bo Peep, she washed her sheep, and didn’t know where to dry them,” I sang to Jojo, toweling him off after his bath.

“Peep,” he said happily. Amazing how quickly babies got back to normal. Maybe there was something I could learn from Jojo about how to recover.

“They shook themselves off, until they were soft, wriggling their tails behind them.”

Back to normal. Baby in the crib, Isabel next to the crib, lights turned low. I half-watched a movie while Jojo slept, but couldn’t have said what it was about or who was in it, by the end of it. I dozed off, thinking about what Nat had said about evil psychopaths.

It gave me bad dreams.