The Nantahala summer

The best year the two of you have had, said plainly, four months mostly outdoors with nothing in it planned, and the year you have quietly been dating everything else from.

You were broke, the referrals had not come back and your caseload was fourteen, and you drove out to the lake nearly every weekend from May to September because it was free. Danny's two hundred dollar canoe leaked within tolerance. Tess and Marcus and whoever else turned up were there.

It ended in the spring of 2022, and you say it is not nostalgia that makes the present worse, it is that you had forgotten there was a version of the two of you with that much room in it until forty photographs of it turned up on a Sunday afternoon.