Husbands & Lovers

by Beatriz Williams

Who filled an old jam jar with fireflies the night before he left for camp and told me he figured the lights came from all your ancestors in heaven, keeping watch over you.

Dr. Stephens was a slight, intense, blond-ponytail woman of the type who runs eight miles at dawn before she goes to work.

but then she was always a little drunk by evening—that was the only way you got through the day without picking up one of those slim, elegant silver knives they laid out in the dining room and murdering somebody.

Those eyes, she remembered thinking. The color of hope.

“Do you think that’s wise?” Hannah said. Lucien shrugged. “I don’t especially care if it’s wise or not.”

Three, that he was the handsomest boy I’d ever seen, like a movie star playing a high school student, so far out of my league he might have lived in another state.

“Oh, I see you. All desperate to spill the tea.” “Tea is for basic bitches like you, honey,”

I have to say, Mike mixes a decent cosmo, even though he probably died a little inside as he measured the Cointreau.

His expression turns to shock. “Holy shit,” he says. “Pinks?”

My thin cotton sundress stretched between my legs, offering the crabs an eyeful.

Walk around four years with fucking legacy admit stamped on my forehead? Or worse, fucking lacrosse.”

“I can’t bring you back to life, Hannah,” he said. “You can choose to live again, or not. But I can make you remember what it was like to be alive.”

Steering us both through the bullshit. Brave as hell.”

“Buckle up, buttercup. We’re late.”

It’s not like we’re having some fling.” “We kind of are.” “Maybe you’re having a fling,” he said. “I’m having a full-on affair.”

I suppose, when your parents fail you, you either go to pieces or you become the grown-up you require.

Just then a massive contraction walloped me, blasting through the epidural meds like a red-hot knife through a pound of cold buttercream frosting.

I feel so passionately about this. I do. I feel like women should just be out there helping one another out. Lifting one another up?”

To go running on Winthrop Island at dawn is about as close to heaven as I can imagine, at least anymore.

“Oh, you know me. It’s my dream to fly private and buy those shoes with the red soles. Limousines or whatever they’re called.”

“Incorruptible. He had no power over you. All these assholes, it’s about power.”

“It’s important to know where you came from,” she says. “It’s a part of you. But it doesn’t have to define you. They give you the paper and ink, but you write the story yourself.”