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“They keep trying to set me up with their friends’ asshole sons,” she said. “They’re relentless.”

She’d said it with a joking tone, but I saw the look on her face. It was dread. Fear.

I’d been drunk when she’d confessed this to me. Out of my mind when I joked that I could act as a decoy for her. “My dating life is shit anyway,” I’d said, apparently. I even made a fake proposal. I had a problem with remembering anything when I drank too much, which was why I very rarely did.

But that time, when we sobered up, she told me what I’d promised. The painfully hopeful look on her face had made my heart hurt.

Lila and her parents had the relationship those of us with messed-up families only dreamed of. They’d given her everything she’d wanted growing up—they’d been older when they had her and she was a miracle baby, her mother said, after over a decade of no success.

They were generous philanthropists. Doting parents. They had lunch once a week in the city and she told them everything about her life.

Everything except one thing. Lila told me they’d made their views about certain things very clear, and having a gay daughter was not something they’d take easily into stride.

I saw the heartbreak on her face the first time she told me—the choices she’d had to make. Loving people so much when she knew their love was conditional.

What did it matter if I fake-married someone, if it would save their life? A real committed relationship was the last thing I ever saw as a goal for myself. My only goal back then, anyway, was to make a name for myself—to be the best.

I’d be protecting my friend, and the truth was, it was protection for me too. I got to hide in a place where I’d never have to deal with real love, something I knew I couldn’t handle anyway.

So we’d gotten married. Fake-married. My younger brother Conrad was the only one who knew in my family. We were close, and we’d managed to talk Lila’s parents into letting him officiate. They didn’t know he hadn’t gotten certified like we said, or that Lila made the certificates in a graphic design program.

Then we’d started to talk business—we were both in school for it anyway. As it turned out, Lila and I wanted the same things, only for different reasons. She wanted to make her parents proud, while I wanted to show my father I was good for something—even if he thought I wasn’t. So, we turned our fake marriage into a real business relationship. And the rest was history—very successful history.

But now, all these years later, every day I was a little less convinced that all our success was worth it. I’d thought I was going for true happiness by making sure I could never have a real relationship and focusing only on work. So why did I feel so goddamn hollow so often?

I could have found someone maybe—someone who didn’t mind being tucked away. But I saw how hard it was on Lila and Brynn, too. For all the ways they were settled and loving and happy, I could see the strain between them, the way Lila watched couples holding hands and leaning into each other.

I saw those couples too.

No. What we had worked.

Well enough, anyway.

The water-logged woman had migrated up shore—not far, but far enough I had to take several steps to catch up with her, during which time I grew deeply irritated with myself for where my brain kept wanting to take me.

“You don’t really have to look for my rod with me,” I said, hoping it was enough to be a peace offering.

“It’s fine,” she said, without turning around. “I don’t exactly have anything else to be doing.”

Our wet sneakers crunched and squeaked as we walked up the shoreline.

The island was small, maybe only a couple hundred feet long, and studded with trees, but thin enough that I could see through them to the other side of the river. There were a few sticks snagged along the shore, but no rod.

“Maybe we should look in there,” she said, moving towards the trees. “I can’t see much from down here.”

This was ridiculous—the rod was long gone—but for some reason, I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to forget everything else and spend the whole day walking up and down this beach with this woman in amicable silence, pretending there was no one else in the world. A life built on the simple truth of anonymity, instead of a lie.

But when she looked at me, giving a quick, small smile as if to show she was no longer upset, that tingling sensation came back. There was definitely something familiar about her. But any thoughts about who she was were wiped away when she angled her body to peer around a tree, stretching her damp clothes tight against her skin. I turned away, rubbing my hand against the back of my neck. Maybe the tingling wasn’t familiarity, but something more primal.

I was suddenly aware of how alone we were, how removed. We were mostly concealed from the trail on shore now.

When she looked at me she must have sensed the shift, because she swallowed, then turned quickly away. “So… where did you say you threw it again? And why?”

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. I forced myself to focus. “When I saw a pink blob in the water I just yeeted it as hard as I could.”

She paused. “I’m sorry. Yeeted? Pink blob?”

“What?”