When my fiancée disappeared, people expected me to walk away from her six kids and move on. I didn't. I raised them as my own for ten years, until her oldest son came home one Friday, stood in the kitchen doorway, and said something about his mother that made the room tilt under me.
I was holding three lemonades and a bag of melted fries when my whole life split in two.
That's the part I always come back to.
Not the sirens.
Not the coast guard's flashlight cutting across the water.
Just the fries going soft in my hand while I stood at the edge of the sand and felt, for the first time, that something was deeply, horribly wrong.
My whole life split in two.
Claire and I had driven her six kids down to Pelican Cove for one last weekend before school started. We weren't married yet, but that didn't matter much to me. I already loved those kids like they'd come from my own bones.
