Mostly I just felt tired.
The water was the same impossible turquoise as CocoCay. Everything in the Bahamas was the same turquoise. I was beginning to find it personally offensive.
I had almost reached the far end of the public beach when I heard my name.
“Camila? Camila Torres?”
I turned.
A woman was jogging toward me across the sand in a pink floral beach dress, waving with uninhibited enthusiasm. She looked genuinely delighted to see me and had absolutely no awareness of being undignified about it. Beside her, straining at a coral-colored leash, was the most compact and self-important Great Pyrenees I had ever seen — black and white, with enormous round eyes.
It took me a full three seconds.
“Audrey?”
“Oh my god, it IS you!” She reached me and pulled me into a hug before I’d fully processed that this was happening. She smelled like coconut oil and something floral, and she hugged with a wholeness I had forgotten existed.
Audrey Coleman. We had been inseparable for two years of high school and then thoroughly separated by colleges on opposite coasts and the general entropy of adult life. The last time I had seen her was at a mutual friend’s engagement party, six or seven years ago. She had been funny and loud and completely herself, which I remembered now, seeing her.
“What are you doing here?” I managed.
“Living here, actually.” She pulled back and looked at me, her expression shifting into something more careful as she registered my face. “Post-divorce. Long story. What about you — are you on holiday?”
I opened my mouth.
The Great Pyrenees chose this moment to sit directly on my feet, look up at me with those enormous eyes, and lick my ankle with great conviction.
Something about it — the sheer absurdity of it, the dog’s complete confidence that this was exactly the right thing to do — cracked something open in my chest.
“I was,” I said. “I was on my third anniversary cruise.” My voice held for exactly those two sentences and then stopped holding. “And then I saw Jason — my husband — fucking another woman. On our anniversary.” I pressed my lips together. “So now I’m here. On my own.”
The tears came again, which I had thought I was finished with, which apparently I was not finished with.
I bent down and petted the Great Pyrenees because it was there and it was warm and it was looking at me with an expression of profound sympathy, and I sobbed into its ridiculous black and white head while Audrey put her arm around my shoulders and said nothing, because she had always known when not to say anything.
After a while, when the worst of it had passed, Audrey looked down at the dog.
“Luna has something she’d like to say.”
I looked up.
Luna the Great Pyrenees was looking at me with her head tilted at a slight angle, ears perked, eyes enormous and solemn and completely certain of her own position on the matter.
“Luna says, fuck Jason.”
I looked at Luna. Luna looked back at me with absolute conviction.
And then I laughed. Just out of nowhere, I laughed at the cute ridiculousness of Luna’s face and imagined her cursing Jason.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“Fuck Jason,” I said.
It was the first thing I’d said in three days that felt true.
Audrey held out her hand and pulled me up.
“I’m here, Cam. Tell me what you want to do, and I’ll do my best to make it possible for you.”
