I drove to Fletcher’s, planning to lick my wounds while I watched World War II documentaries and drank Miller out of a can like a real man, but that’s not what happened. What happened, unfuckingfortunately, was this:

I got to Fletcher’s and didn’t explain anything when he opened the door, except grumbling, “Man cave.” I shouldered past him and dropped my bag in the front hallway without letting myself look at a photo that I knew was on the wall of Rosie and me, with Captain, on the beach from last summer. Christ. I’d headed straight down into the dark, posh basement with Cupcake and Captain, who were obviously so much in love that it made me want to man-cry and pretend it was an eyelash. Still, though, I kept my shit together and turned on the cable box. As if the cable gods set it up, the first thing I saw on the screen was Legends of the Fall. It sucked me in like a dinghy into a whirlpool, and before I knew it, it was an hour and a half later, and I was watching Brad Pitt confront that goddamned bear, with tears streaming down my face.

“Dude, you okay?” asked Fletcher from the top of the steps.

Christ. I pressed my T-shirt to my eyes. Awww, fuck it—there was such a thing as a bro code, and Fletcher was pretty good with that shit when it came down to it. “Legends of the Fall,” I said, my voice all dark and baritone, like I’d just woken up or been punched in the balls. “Bear scene.”

Fletcher groaned, and I heard what sounded like him thumping the drywall softly with his fist. “So, how are we gonna play this? I’ll pretend you got allergies, yeah?”

The bro code was totally intact. “Yeah, definitely.” I tried to hide my sniffle. Didn’t fucking work. Of course, even I knew the tears streaming down my cheeks had fuck-all to do with the bear or Brad Pitt. It was like my heart had been shredded, like I was in the middle of some ancient Greek goddamned catharsis. I felt like I was grieving for something I’d never known I had, but definitely didn’t have anymore.

Rose. Marie. Madden.

“Got it,” Fletcher said, and his steps creaked down the staircase.

He was a guy who took a few seconds to get the pulse of a situation before he made a move—and that’s exactly what he did. He looked at me and at the tearstains on my T-shirt. So I didn’t have to look at him through blurry, stinging eyes, I looked at Captain and Cupcake, snoring softly in a big, furry pile, her curled up in a ball inside him. Big spoon, little spoon…

Oh Christ. It was like Anthony had unleashed the beast inside me—the ugly-cry beast. I gritted my teeth and watched the credits roll. I tried to hide my sob with a cough.

“Whoa,” Fletcher said. “This about Rosie?”

I rubbed my face, spreading my tears over my stubble. “Maybe you should come back, dude. I gotta do some deep breathing or something.”

Fletcher eyed me for another long second and then shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere, man.” He sat down in the recliner next to mine. He paused the movie, mercifully sparing me from an orchestral reprise of the theme song, which I was pretty sure would have put me in the fetal position on the floor. As the room went silent, I felt like I could breathe again. Sort of. If not for all the snot.

“Take a minute.” He sounded like he was telling me to walk off an injury in flag football. He flipped over to the Sox game and pretended like everything was totally normal, totally cool. He grabbed a Kleenex from a box and handed it over without looking at me. I pressed my palms to my eyes so hard I saw flashes. While the Sox brought out their pinch hitter, Fletcher said, “If you need somewhere to stay…my house, your house, all that shit.”

“Thanks, man. I just…” I wiped my tears away with my thumb and forefinger. “I had to let her go. I don’t know what made me think it would ever work. If we’re talking leagues, she’s in the pros. I’m fucking around in intramurals.”

“You’ve always felt that way about her,” said Fletcher. “Since we were kids, you’ve been talking about her like she’s royalty.”

I dug my fingers into the muscles at the back of my neck and took some deep breaths. It was totally fucking true. There were women, and then there was her. No fucking wonder I was down here in the dark, weeping like a baby.

Suddenly, there was a very familiar rumble and an equally familiar squeak. My heart shot into my throat. I’d know that sound anywhere: it was her, in her Bug, lurching into a parking place, getaway style. I’d seen it a million times and gotten my coffee all over my crotch because of it more than once. Fletcher glanced at the window well on the far side of the man cave and then back at me. And then the doorbell started ringing, over and over again, like some midnight prank. I could imagine her doing it, holding her finger down on that button so that the first chime went on and on and on.

“I can try to cover for you, dude, but she’s seen your truck, and we both know she’s not leaving.”

Dinnnnnnnnnng-ding-ding-ding. “I see your truck, Max!” Rosie yelled. “You know I’m not leaving!”

“Called it,” Fletcher said as the catcher ran out from home to catch a pop fly by third.

“I need to talk to her. It’s good,” I said. I hurled myself off the recliner, grabbed one more Kleenex, and headed up to face her.

* * *

She was always beautiful, but when she walked on the shore, she was one of those sirens that would make a man beach his boat on rocks he’d always known were there. She pitched me a hundred different ideas—I could come with her, we could swap weekends, or even do every other weekend if I didn’t want to come to the city at all. People did long-distance all the time. But in spite of how fucking beautiful she was, and how logical all those plans were, I stood my ground. The reason wasn’t because I hated the goddamned city, but I wanted her to be able to fly free. She was wild like that, and I didn’t want to hold her back.

I took her in my arms as the waves hissed along the sand, over our toes. “This is your big moment. You need to be free to grab it.”

“I don’t want to be free from you,” she whispered. “I never want to be free from you, Max. These last two weeks…”

I untangled a tendril of hair from between her lips, caught on the sea breeze. “Best of my life. But listen now, beautiful. I mean it. You’ve been dreaming about this for forever. I’m not gonna stand here and complicate it. You go. I’ll be waiting.”

Now it was her turn for tears. They shimmered in the sunlight, and her blinks got quicker and more urgent. She glanced away from me, into the sand, and then she slipped her fingers into the pockets of my jeans.

For an instant, I felt like I was looking at the two of us with X-ray vision, because in that pocket, it was waiting for her. The ring. Only a few more inches and she’d find it. I’d never been a guy who believed in signs or coincidence or that anything was meant to be. But she’d made a romantic out of me, and I started thinking like I never had before. All this magic had started with a chance peek into a skylight, and at least once every day since, I’d looked up at the sky and thanked God that it had. She was the one who made me happy, fucking happy in my bones, for the first time ever. She was my epiphany. She was my hope.

So I left it to hope. If she found it, I’d ask her. If she didn’t? I’d wait.

Her hands were small, tiny compared to mine. The ring was in my left pocket. The fingers of her right hand moved down, down, down.

“I don’t want to lose you, Max.”

“You won’t.” One more inch, beautiful. Just a little more.

But her hands were too small, my pockets were too big. It wasn’t meant to be. So I pulled her to me, and I kissed her as hard as I’d ever kissed her. We stood there long enough to sink into the sand and until the tide started to come in over our feet. “You gotta go to New York, Rosie.”

“I’m terrified,” she said, so softly that I almost missed it. “I’m terrified I’ll fail. I’m terrified I’ll be fired. I’m terrified I won’t be good enough.”

How wrong she was, she’d never fucking know. “I get that. I do. But you have to try.” I tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Bite those stars, like your fireflies do. Do it for me. Just try, okay?”

Her lips trembled, and she slipped her arms around me, pushing her cheek to my chest. “Okay.”