I pushed away my disquiet and thought about what else I would have to rearrange to leave my life for the week. I’d notify the clinic, let them know I couldn’t work. They’d been bugging me to use up my vacation time, and I was up to date on my charting.

Nobody cared at book club if anyone missed a meeting. We were discussing Feng Shui Your Fridge for Better Digestion, and there was no way I was reading that book. With Maddie gone, there were fewer things on my schedule. I’d been sprinting toward her graduation from high school for so long. Volleyball season had merged into spring track meets, planning a graduation party, attending awards ceremonies, completing scholarship applications. Now that it was all over, I could see how I’d lived Maddie’s life and not mine. I knew that was what parents did, especially single parents. I also knew it wasn’t advisable if you wanted your empty nest not to be your desolate nest.

“So, that doctor. How do you know him?” Katie said while Holly seemed preoccupied with her phone.

“I don’t. I just ran into him in the hall.”

“He seemed kind of into you.”

I simultaneously rejected and enjoyed this. “It’s a constant problem. So many married Prince Charmings finding me asleep and falling in love with me.”

“They would fall in love with you if you let them.”

I threw my head back and laughed. “Look at me. I’m not exactly the kind of woman people think of when they think of a dream girl. A bit long in the tooth for that.”

“Is that what you think of me? Too old for love?”

I sat up straight as if I’d been zapped by an electrical spark. “Katie, no. No, I didn’t mean that. You are so adorable. Everything about you is dateable. I just let myself go.”

Katie had always been the girl everyone wanted. She had a sweetness about her but also a don’t-screw-with-me temper. It was a great combination for attracting men. It served her well until Tom showed up. His dysfunction slipped under all our radars. I’m certain Holly would say she’d never liked Tom, but I had to admit I’d loved him.

When we first met, Maddie was three. I’d been the kind of mom who was invisible except for in her daughter’s life, present at all parent-child activities, with no time for anything of her own. Tom had focused when he shook my hand. His smile—with its single dimple, his full lips—you had the feeling that they were all yours.

“The famous Samantha,” he’d said, with nothing but delight in his tone. He took my hand and covered it with his and pulled me into a chaste peck on the cheek. He smelled like sandalwood, a scent I associated with creativity and hard work. He locked his eyes on mine and said, “Katie means the world to me,” and I believed him.

There were flowers, love notes, invitations to moonlit picnics. His warmth was contagious. The gentle but unromantic Jeff, who had been utterly irresponsible, hadn’t been anything like Tom, so I admit I encouraged Katie. No one was like Tom. It was as if he had studied every romantic comedy and lobbed every tool from them in Katie’s direction. When we were in college, no one had used psychological terms to describe people, but during the divorce, we both became fluent in narcissist. Katie never had a chance.

In the stark light of the hospital room, where we should have been problem-solving cancer, we were talking about boys. It was college all over again, but without Holly’s stinging take on the absurdity of relationships.

“I’ve had the great love of my life. If I got another great love, it would water down the whole soul-mate idea. Jeff was my soul mate,” I said, flicking my gaze at Holly and wondering if she caught on to my lie. Wondering if she cared enough to tune in, knew enough from Katie to challenge me, cared if I told the truth.

Katie softened the moment. “You could have dinner with someone who was nice even if he didn’t speak to your”—Katie paused, allowing my false characterization of my relationship with Jeff—“soul.”

I shrugged. “You know me. I definitely want to leave my soul out of future relationships.”

Holly looked up from concentrating on her phone and said, “Okay, done.”

“What did you do?”

“We’re booked on a flight out to LA on Thursday. Let’s get this show on the road.”

“We? You booked mine too? That’s in two days,” I said.

“I used miles. I have thousands. And you said we should go. What are we waiting for?”

I looked at Katie, and she had the same expression on her face that I imagined I did: as if we were at a bus stop and we had to hop on or we’d get left behind. So many years of this, running behind Holly to catch up, trying to understand what was in her head, how she kept up the pace and why.

I shook my head and squeezed Katie’s hand. “Okay, then. I’d better pack a bag.” My phone buzzed, and I pulled it from my back pocket and was astonished to see Beautiful Drew had written:

BDREW: Hey Mom. Sup?

ME: I wrote: 1-800-AARP Insurance

BDREW: Hahaha. Have a good trip.

ME: Not likely.

CHAPTER FIVE

I’LL BE FINE. WE’LL BE FINE.

Before I could untangle my shoulder bag from the electric cords at my feet, Holly was up and out the door.

Katie called after her, “Love you!”

“You too,” she shouted, but you could hear she was already a room away.

It was startling how fast Holly moved; if she were a cartoon sketch, there would be swirling leaves and zoom written in Comic Sans font where her form should be. In adulthood she’d perfected the uncomplicated exit, which I assumed had started the day after graduation all those years ago.

After Holly had left our shared apartment without saying goodbye, Katie and I could talk of nothing else. We’d finished packing cardboard boxes, hauling milk crate bookshelves to the dumpster, and examined the night before from every angle imaginable.

“How mad was she? After Mike said that?” Katie asked.

“You know Holly, she gets outraged in one second, and then it’s over. We were both drunk. She was sick. I told her to stop puking in the sink,” I said.

“You always tell her that.”

“I knew she had to leave early, but not before we woke up.”

There was no Post-it on the bathroom mirror. No note on the microwave. Just half a container of mayonnaise in the fridge and a mascara tube in the trash in her room.

“She’ll call us, right?” we both said again and again as we loaded our cars, cleaned the tub, vacuumed the carpet. My frantic anxiety fueled a kind of cleaning and packing never before seen in our apartment. Katie found me scrubbing the baseboards in the living room with a Q-tip, crying. She slid down the wall. “That Q-tip is worn out. Can I get you another?”

My eyes felt hot, and the dull ache in my forehead from crying, dehydration, and sleeplessness compounded my misery. Our college years were over, and that was enough to mourn. How would I . . . surely I wouldn’t have to manage this without Holly? That was inconceivable.

In 1994, when we graduated, you couldn’t text or call someone’s cell phone. There was no Twitter or Instagram to browse to find someone, no Find My Friends app to track your lost relationship. In the nineties when people wanted to disappear, they could accomplish that pretty well.

“Should we call her aunt?” I wiped my nose.

“How would we do that? Doesn’t she live in Italy?”

After Holly’s mom and dad had died, her aunt had become her emergency contact person. We’d met her once during Parents’ Weekend, but we didn’t know her. Not well enough to take out our calling cards, figure out how to make an international call, and complain that Holly left without saying goodbye.

“She’ll call you,” said Katie. “Of course she will. She’ll call you at your mom’s house.”

“She will,” I said, but saying that was like sitting on a wobbly rock and hoping not to slide into the sea. Holly was unpredictable.

“She loves you.” And that, I thought, was true.

Over the decades that passed between college and present day, many things had changed culturally. In the nineties we called our friends’ parents Mister and Missus, never by their first names; they were not our friends. I couldn’t imagine calling one of my friend’s parents. That seemed like insanity. For parents, once a child left for college, it wasn’t easy to talk on the phone. It was expensive, and you had to be home on a landline. Letters were a thing. Hard to believe now—Maddie and I talked and texted all day.