We grew up in the same quiet town, rode the same school bus, and eventually found ourselves working for the same company, a marine insurance office on Water Street with a brass bell on the door.
She was the one who handed me a folder one rainy Tuesday and said, “That surveyor in the corner keeps looking at you.”
His name was Neal Overton.
I married him eighteen months later.
He was a thoughtful, loving man with big, scarred hands and a laugh that filled a room, a marine surveyor who walked the hulls of freighters and yachts for a living and came home smelling of rust and cold water.
He became my closest companion.
Our mothers frequently joked that we were practically sisters.
And I genuinely believed we were.
When my first boyfriend broke my heart in tenth grade, Tracy was the person who stayed up all night with me on the bathroom floor.
