And then I remember, that weekend I was here in February. It had been a bad day, too cold to go outside, and Heather was on my case about money and moving forward with the Big Plan. I knew I’d fallen in love with Skye—there was no turning that ship around—but it was a feeling that crushed me as much as it buoyed me. I’d quarantined myself in the office to let my thoughts spill out into the Moleskine while Heather made chili downstairs. When Heather and Maggie barged in, telling me the meal was ready, I shoved the Moleskine behind the desk before Heather could catch a glimpse of it.

After weeks of searching—mostly through Skye’s apartment—I’d concluded that I must’ve left it on the subway or that it had fallen out of my briefcase on the street. But how had I not realized? This is where my Moleskine has been all this time, shoved between the back of the desk and the wall in New Haven.

I can’t remember exactly what I wrote at the time, only that my entries were often lengthy and sprawling and emotional.

I open the Moleskine, its leather spine creaking softly. The first entry I’ve written is from nearly seventeen months earlier, before I met Skye.

May 24, 2018

I know Heather and I aren’t in a good place, but I don’t know if I can go through with the Big Plan. I blame myself for where we’ve ended up—well, I also blame fucking Herb Wooley, but that’s beside the point. If I go through with this, I could get in big trouble. Again.

It’s my fault that Heather’s dreams got crushed. I accepted that a while back. I failed her, and I’ve done my best to make peace with it. Sometimes I do the whole what-if thing and wonder what would’ve happened if I’d let Heather go years ago, before we were married, back when I had the chance to let her truly be free of me. I was an addict then, and even though I vowed to get sober, I was always only one slipup away from destroying the future she banked on. I knew that then, and I know it now. She may have done so willingly, but I let her board a train that was heading straight for a brick wall.

But the thing about life is, you can’t know how you’ll feel about something in retrospect when it’s happening in the moment. I remember exactly how I felt about Heather Price back then, and I know I wouldn’t have done anything differently. She was my Bones. I couldn’t have fathomed loving anyone more. When a girl you love that much chooses you, you choose her back. You just do.

It was so much more than her looks. Heather has always been a knockout, but the real kicker was, she had this drive in her that mesmerized me. Everyone else our age in Langs Valley was complacent; indifferent to the future that awaited them. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t have wanted what Heather did; they simply weren’t aware of the possibilities that stretched beyond our shitty little town. But somehow Heather knew what else existed, and she’d had that dreamy sheen in her emerald eyes since we were kids. And when a girl like Heather Price plants a seed in your mind and in your heart that life could be so, so much bigger, when she grabs your arm and wants to take you with her, you go. God, you go.

Here’s another what-if that always gets me—what would’ve happened if Heather hadn’t started babysitting for Libby Fontaine and Peter Starling the fall of our junior year. Heather already had it in her, of course, but Libby was the one who gave her that extra push, that inexplicable drive to become someone else. Libby made Heather greedy, I think. I wonder if it weren’t for Libby, would Heather have settled for less? Would what I offered have been enough?

But it’s complicated, see, because if Libby hadn’t entered the picture, Gus wouldn’t have died. And if Gus hadn’t died, Heather and I wouldn’t have been sealed together by her pain. I truly can’t make sense of any of it. Sometimes I push my mind to a place where I admit that maybe, from a purely objective standpoint, Heather and I shouldn’t have gotten married. We were young, too young. But my mind won’t push any further than that because then I think of the kids, and considering a life without Garrett and Hope and Maggie in it makes the least sense of all.

It’s crazy the loops and circles that time takes. Here we are thirty years later, and even though Libby is dead, she’s somehow back in the picture.

Anyway, the Big Plan. The world has played dirty with me—with us—so perhaps it’s my turn to play a little dirty with the world. Apparently, the Starlings have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. And then there’s Gus—we’d finally be getting justice for his life. I don’t know. It still feels cruel, the Big Plan, if it’s even possible.

To be clear, if our finances weren’t in the toilet, I wouldn’t be considering any of this. When I got laid off from PK Adamson earlier this spring (I STILL don’t understand why Herb fired me, to be honest), we’d just finished renovating the master bathroom. I’d been promising Heather we could renovate it since we moved in—she was desperate for one of those big Jacuzzi tubs and she loathed the preexisting tile—and after my Christmas bonus, a renovation was finally feasible. It would be costly, but it had been a good year at work, and I wanted to make Heather happy. Little did I know I’d lose my job four months later, a $7,000 balance still owed for the new master bath.

Where does all the money go? I ask myself daily. All I’ve ever wanted is to get to a point in life where money isn’t a topic that grips my mind like a pair of forceps around my skull. But it feels impossible, like I’m constantly logging in to Chase to find the outstanding balance on the credit card is twice what I’d expected, the number in my checking account ticking lower and lower until the ACH hits on payday and I can breathe again.

Except now there is no payday—thanks, Herb, thanks, PKA. You’re welcome for twenty goddamn years. What there IS now is our mortgage, both our car payments, Hope’s Eastern tuition, taxes, the renovation balance, the foreseeable and exorbitant cost of poor Hopie’s dental implants, and outstanding bills from couples therapy. Then there’s the family vacation to Yellowstone National Park in August that Heather already put on the Visa because she found “cheap” flights to Salt Lake City and Maggie is mortified to be the only one of her friends who’s never been on an airplane. The list of expenses goes on. Even when I did have a biweekly salary, there was never enough money in our house. Not even close.

Some time ago, I suggested to Heather that we move someplace where the cost of living is lower, where life is a little simpler. I made the mistake of mentioning Langs Valley, the idea of moving back there or somewhere like it. That didn’t go over well. The second I said “Langs Valley,” Heather’s face reddened, the way it does when a storm is brewing inside her. She looked at me, her expression full of venom, and asked why I would ever think to say a thing like that.

And I get it, I do. Heather and I promised each other a long time ago that we would never go back the way we came from, that we’d always do everything in our power to give our children a real shot in life—the kind of shot we never had. And I vowed to keep that promise, even after we came to terms with the fact that our life wasn’t going to play out the way we’d so diligently planned. After what I’d done to unravel us, it was all I could do to attempt to save us.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Heather

Dear Dr. K,

The fall after Garrett was born, I was supposed to go back to Fordham. Technically I still hadn’t finished my junior-year credits, but I could catch up and graduate a semester later than planned. Burke and I had saved what little money we had—including his summer-internship compensation from Credit Suisse, which wasn’t nothing—for day care.

But I was so attached to Garrett that the idea of going back to school was unthinkable. I couldn’t fathom pulling myself together and enduring the stuffy, crowded subway ride to Fordham, all the while imagining my perfect baby boy in someone else’s hands. The notion of pulling my attention away from Garrett to finish the term paper I still owed for Economics of Gender made my head spin.

So I didn’t go back. Burke had found out at the end of the summer that he’d secured a place in the two-year analyst program at Credit Suisse, contingent on his keeping his GPA close to perfect. The analyst job meant Burke would be receiving an annual salary of a hundred grand, which was more money than either of us could fathom. It would certainly be enough to get us out of our stuffy little studio, and I didn’t complain when Burke essentially moved into the NYU library that fall.

As the days grew shorter and the weather turned frigid, any lingering thoughts of returning to college were snapped by the cold. Garrett and I nested together in the apartment, sheltered in our warm bubble. I relished the feel of his chubby cheek against my collarbone, the way his tiny fist wrapped my whole pointer finger. Every moment with him was a miracle.