I toss the match onto my divorce papers, wishing memories were this easy to burn.

While the flame builds in the fireplace, I carry a bottle out to the back deck where the wind slices off Lake Michigan like a knife in a slasher film. That’s why no one comes to this town until the warmer months. Unless you’re a masochist. Unless you’re me.

The wood groans under my sneakers, and above, the April moon glows pink. According to astrology, it marks a new year. That would be providential if I believed in any of that stuff. I toast it anyway. It takes both hands to raise the champagne bottle to my cold lips: new year, new me in the place I love best. 

Dry bubbles float like fireworks launched at my brain. Surely, this isn’t how Veuve Clicquot is meant to be enjoyed, but here we are. I didn’t take much when I left Dallas, and a shiver weakens my spine at the thought of him noticing the top-shelf bottles gone. 

Nearby, a door opens and slaps shut. This backyard is open to the alley, shared with a business on the other side. One very specific business that, if I knew what was good for me, I would stay far away from.

Standing outside the building, a figure in white bows their head over a cherry ember. After a moment, he tilts his face to the sky, smoke leaving his lungs like an extinguished fire. Seeing him after all this time, the figure in white is hyperreal, both hard to look at and impossible to look away from. 

I don’t move, mesmerized by his every gesture, and sluggish from the champagne my husband received from his law firm after a big case. Ex-husband, Selene. Divorced. Split up. Consciously uncou—

My arms go weak, and the bottle doesn’t make it up to my mouth when I go for a drink, instead knocking against the deck railing with a fat thud. He looks over, searching for the sound. I’m shrouded in shadow, and he probably can’t see me, but I’d know him in a blackout.

Something inside me soars, something that’s reminded its wings are broken.

“Merritt?” My voice shakes—from the cold, from the person who sends me time traveling.

He takes a step forward, and my heartbeat fills my ears like slow underwater drum beats.

“It’s-it’s me.”

The words are aimed at him, but they’re for me, too. Through my bleary eyes, this familiar place opens up a portal, and I’m calling out to a past version of myself, screaming at her, begging her to listen, to slow down, to look closer. How would I warn her if I could see her now—trusting him so completely she wound every last thread of herself around him.

Merritt doesn’t take another step forward. Of course he doesn’t.

He hasn’t seen me. With the toe of his shoe, he scrubs out his cigarette and turns. He’s leaving me alone where I belong, one more new moon in the dark. 

Smoke tickles my nose, but it’s coming from behind me. I whip around to see a gray cloud waft out the back door of the house. 

“Shit.”

The bottle slips from my fingers as I bolt inside, where smoke rolls out of the fireplace in steady waves.

“Oh my God.” My gasp is the kind heard in films when the alien baby bursts out of someone’s chest cavity.

The acrid air is unbreathable, and as the fire speeds up, so does the smoke. Put out the fire! 

In the kitchen, I scramble to fill a big stockpot with water while I lean over it, choking on a cough. My frantic heartbeat screams at me, Did you seriously cause an emergency after being in this house for an hour? What will the headline say? WOMAN RETURNED TO THE SITE OF HER HEARTACHE TO BURN DOWN PROPERTY IN A TWISTED, POETIC GESTURE. 

Footsteps pound on the deck as a male voice calls out, “Hey! What are you doing in there?”

No, no. Please, no. 

Why didn’t I close the back door? Oh, right—because I turned this borrowed house into a barbecue smoker. 

I keep my back turned to Merritt, so he’ll go away and leave me to my crisis. He’s good at that. “It’s—” Cough. “—fine!” Cough. “I’ve got this under—” Cough. “—control!”

“Selene?”

After all these years, my name from his lips shouldn’t crash into me like the full moon tides, sucking me out to sea. Hopefully, he can’t see me sway to steady myself.

He bursts into the kitchen doorway. “What happened? Let me help—”

At his approach, I spin away with the pot, holding my breath as I toss it in the fireplace. The flame sizzles out, sending a fresh wave of smoke forward. Merritt darts around, opening windows. A second dousing can’t hurt, and will keep my hands busy, so I head back to the sink.

“I’ve got it!” I announce, still not looking at him as I pour more water on the shriveled logs.

“Selene.”

It stops me in my tracks. When I finally turn to him, his face blasts me back a decade. His hair has come loose from its tie, waving like tendrils of burnt sugar. He looks the same, but better. Merritt isn’t so tall that I have to strain to look up at him, like his brother. He’s still trim, but no longer lanky with gangly arms and knobby legs. He looks like a connect-the-dots filled in with lean muscle and tan skin. 

He looks torn between a thousand questions. All he asks is, “What are you doing here?”

“This is my uncle’s house…”

“I know. He asked me to keep an eye on it since he’s been away. I didn’t know you were here; I thought maybe someone was trespassing.”

“I just got here tonight. Not trespassing.”

“Right.” Merritt’s wearing his chef’s whites, and I shouldn’t notice the vein twisting lazily up his forearm. Especially not his bicep, straining the upper part of his sleeve. No, I don’t notice any of it. “What happened with the fireplace? Did you open the—”

“The damper was open.” I think.

I walk out to the deck to breathe clean air, and where there’s no chance he can hear the pounding of my heartbeat. He follows. The pleasure of that makes my foolish heart beat faster.

“Thanks,” I say, although gratitude is the last thing I had on my Merritt bingo card. 

The toe of my shoe bumps into the fallen champagne bottle. What was I celebrating again? Oh, right, my fresh start here—the homeplace of the grief I’ve run from for years.

His shoulder brushes mine and is gone a second later. A dozen memories surge—sun-kissed skin, salty kisses, fevered caresses—and slip away.

“Are you…alone?” The dip in his voice is unmistakable—hope, disappointment, pity? There was once a time when I knew every inflection.

This close, he smells like cigarette smoke and a midnight swim. He smells like a beach bonfire and a life so close I can touch it, with eyes that blaze like blue flames, which would explain why the air between us feels combustible. 

“Yeah.” I don’t want to say more at the moment, so I answer in a tone that I hope conceals the truth: I’m alone, spinning, and terrified. “I’m by myself.”

He nods.

“What about you?” I rush out.

“Am I alone?”

I swallow the lump in my throat at the thought of that—I’m not allowed to ask that, or wonder that, or be heartbroken by it. Not anymore. “No—what were you doing outside?”

“Smoking.”

“Since when do you smoke?”

Merritt’s smile is tense, brief, not a smile. “Since I needed a bad habit.”

I don’t know why I’m asking personal questions. Maybe I’m dreaming. In my dreams, he’s always this close, and we speak like this, like we used to.

He runs a hand down his shirt, once, twice, and I wonder if he wishes he could touch me, too. His mouth is close. So close. My mouth against his would say, It’s me. I’m home.

“So, you’re staying here?”

“Yes,” I answer, right next to the reason you threw me away. And whatever I do, I have to stay away from him.

Above us, the sunset thrashes in plum and coral streaks against the horizon. I can only see a sliver of Lake Michigan from here, where the sun settles onto the surface of the lake with tired splendor.

It’s familiar in a way that feels like mine. And that’s exactly the kind of win I came back to this town for. This place is still mine, even if it’s his, too. I can untangle him to get to the parts that belong to me.

When he takes a step backward, the agony of his retreat aches my bones in a way it absolutely should not. I can’t want this—there’s nothing between us and never can be again. After all, I married his brother.