One: June

I KNOW IT’S COMING before it actually happens. We’re underneath a sprawling elm in Prospect Park, eating a picnic lunch Kyle packed—baguette and sliced pears and Comté cheese the shade of caramelized butter, paired with a notoriously hard-to-find Australian bottle that I’d mentioned was one of the best orange wines I’d ever tasted. It’s the wine that tips me off, from a small husband-and-wife-operated natural winery in Victoria, too special for a regular lunch.

He doesn’t get down on one knee, because I told him I didn’t want him to. I wanted casual, just us. No dimly lit restaurant, no audience of family and friends. His hand reaches behind his back, where he must have been hiding the ring box in his pocket all morning. The ring itself is not a surprise: we picked it out together, a one-carat oval diamond on a thin gold band. Its design is simple and classic, something I knew I wouldn’t question in five or ten or thirty years.

“June Emery, you know how much I love you. You’re my best friend and the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. I’ve never been so sure about anything, and I’ll do whatever it takes to make you as happy and loved as you make me feel. Do you think … will you marry me?” he says, his smile almost sheepish, as though he’s afraid I’m going to respond with anything other than a resounding yes. We’ve been together for six years, and marriage has been on the table for at least two of them. It was a conversation Kyle was ready to have long before I was. Now, in the warm late-summer air, his question lingers between us.

I pause for only a second. “Yes. Yes! Of course I will.” My hand extends, and he slides the ring onto my finger. It’s a perfect fit. My nails are buffed and polished a neutral pink. I suspected, when he asked me yesterday if I wanted to spend Sunday afternoon at the park, that he had something planned, and the minute I saw the wine, I was certain that this was it. That we’d leave engaged.

Kyle embraces me tightly, my face embedded in his soft flannel shirt, which is his weekend-casual uniform when he’s not in suits for work. Tears burn my eyes, and when I pull away, he notices.

“I didn’t think I’d cry,” I say, holding my smile steady. “They’re happy tears, I promise. This just feels so right.”

And it does feel right, me and Kyle. But the tears aren’t simply those of happiness. My intense emotion in this moment has nothing to do with Kyle and everything to do with a past he isn’t part of, a version of me that preceded him. The other ring, the one I wore before, a tiny cluster of diamonds I’d thought was the most beautiful piece of jewelry I’d ever seen. The one I continued to wear for years after Josh was gone.

“Hey,” Kyle says, brushing his thumb under my eye. “This is different for you than it is for me, and I get it. You don’t have to pretend otherwise.”

I nestle under his arm, grateful beyond words that he’s this understanding, this forgiving. A lot of men in Kyle’s situation might feel like they were perpetually competing against a ghost, locked in a comparison game they had no chance of winning. I half-heartedly dated a few guys in the years after Josh, but they never stuck around, either because they sensed my hesitation or because they didn’t want to live under the weight of my trauma. Kyle has only ever been thoughtful and patient. He’s so good to me that sometimes I fear I don’t deserve him.

“You absolutely deserve him,” my best friend, Phoebe, has repeated more than once. “You of all people deserve to find love again.”

Again, because this isn’t my first time feeling that I’ve found the one. This won’t be my first wedding. The happiest day of my life was followed a week later by the worst day imaginable. Until Kyle, I didn’t think I’d get that second chance at passionate, true love.

Kyle tips up my chin to kiss me, his lips soft and yielding. My fiancé. This time will be different, because everything is different, including me. I’m thirty-nine now, Kyle forty in November. We’re more established—I own a natural wine bar; he’s a vice president at a private equity firm—we’ve lived together in our Prospect Heights apartment ever since the start of the pandemic when our individual leases expired; and we’ve talked extensively about the future, mapping out what our lives might look like next year, five years, a decade from now. We discussed a short engagement, mostly because we both want kids. I’ve been off the pill for six months: we’re not actively trying, but we’re not being careful either, though so far, my period has still shown up every month like clockwork.

From our spot in Long Meadow, we FaceTime Phoebe and then my parents, who still live in Connecticut, along with Kyle’s parents in Pasadena. Pam and Richard, my future in-laws, are gray-haired but tanned and fit from years of hiking in the canyons. Pam has become like a second mother to me, perpetually warm and welcoming—the opposite of Josh’s mother, so many years ago, whom I barely got to know.

My own parents are thrilled, but not surprised. Kyle lets me know that he secretly asked them for their blessing weeks ago. “It was really important for me to do things right,” he says with a little shrug, and my love for him swells. My mom has tears in her eyes as I show her the ring. We keep the calls short, a flurry of gleeful congratulations. It was hard for my parents, after Josh. They didn’t know what to say or how to act around me, my grief as raw as an exposed nerve. Every time I tried to tell them his death hadn’t been an accident, they’d exchange a look, a quick flicker of their eyes that told me they thought I was letting the sadness destroy me. I knew they wanted me to find a way to move on.

A stranger offers to take our picture, and I hold up my hand while Kyle swings his arm reassuringly across my shoulders, I said yes, I’ll type underneath it later before posting on social media, and there will be so many comments from friends and coworkers and clients, people who have supported and loved us, who genuinely want the best for us both.

“I have one more surprise,” Kyle says as we leave the park. “You now have the night off work, and we have a reservation at a place I know you’re going to love.”

“But how?” I say. “The bar’s going to be busy—”

He smiles, laugh lines creasing around his glasses. “I might have told Trish about this and sworn her to secrecy, and she made it happen.”

“Seriously? I can’t believe Trish could keep that secret.”

Trish is the manager at Grape Juice, my wine bar. Even though she and the rest of my staff are very capable, I still find it difficult not to be there to oversee everything. I knew when I began to pursue the idea of opening my own bar that I’d need to pour all of myself into it to even have a chance at succeeding. It’s notoriously easy for bars to fail in their first year, especially in Brooklyn, where patrons have seemingly infinite options to choose from. People advised me against it—Phoebe, my parents—just like they’d warned me against getting engaged to Josh so quickly. But I wanted the bar to consume me. In the absence of Josh, I ached for a distraction from my sadness. And I knew failure wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

There was interest in Grape Juice from the start because of my existing connections through the wine bar I’d previously managed and increasing curiosity about natural wine. After the uncertainty of lockdowns and closures during the pandemic, business has picked up again, and I’m grateful to my small but loyal staff for sticking with me. Grape Juice is now a popular weekend destination for twenty- and thirtysomethings and a favorite dinner spot for couples, thanks to our careful recommendations for pairing natural wines with locally sourced food choices.

“You really thought of everything.” I touch the stubbly skin on his cheeks. Tomorrow morning, he’ll be clean-shaven for the office, but I like him this way best.

We dress up for dinner and our Lyft takes us to Modern Love, a cozy vegan restaurant where we’d had one of our first dates. Kyle’s eyes meet mine, both of us doing a bad job at suppressing grins. Shortly after we’d started dating, I’d told Kyle I was a vegetarian, and he’d said he wanted to surprise me with the next restaurant we went to. I tried to act impressed when we arrived at Modern Love, but when the waitstaff greeted me by name and he realized I was already a regular there, we both burst into laughter. Even funnier was watching Kyle—a red-meat lover—pretend to be enthralled by the menu options. But he grew to like the food, even teaching himself a few vegetarian recipes to prepare at home.

After dinner, when it’s just us in our apartment, Kyle undresses me carefully, trailing kisses down my body. He uses his mouth to make me come before he enters me, moving slowly, deliberately, taking cues for what I want. Our sex life has always been great, and I know how lucky I am that Kyle has my pleasure at the forefront of his mind. Some of my friends are married to men who do the bare minimum, men who expect them to be turned on after a long day without doing the work to get them there.

After, he quickly falls asleep, his arm slung loosely across my chest. He doesn’t notice when I get up and shrug into an oversize hoodie and retreat to the living room, tiptoeing across the parquet floor. I sink onto the sofa and, with a shuddering breath, stare at my ring finger. It’s everything I wanted, the ring and the man who gave it to me. I have a beautiful life.

And yet—there’s a life running parallel to it, threaded somewhere beneath the surface like an unfinished seam. A life where I’m celebrating my tenth wedding anniversary next month, where I already have children. We’d be living outside the city by now, on a property with a bit of acreage where the kids could run free, the kind of idyllic country childhood Josh had always wanted for our future children. He’d probably be graying by now, his dimples creased more sharply into his face, the skin around his slate-blue eyes feathering. Would we still love each other as much as we did back then?

Maybe we would have crashed abruptly after entering the real world together. Maybe we would have gotten on each other’s nerves in that tiny studio walk-up. Maybe he would have hated how I crunched my cereal and I would have hated how he left his clothes in a growing pile on the floor.

I could imagine that. But in my heart, I know we would have still loved each other. That when we said till death do us part in our vows, we both meant it.

Till death do us part. I’d smiled when I said those words at the beach-side altar, my hands knotted with Josh’s, both of us jittery with anticipation that we were actually doing this—the elopement had been his idea, but I loved the romance of it and had been more than eager to be carried along with his excitement.

But a week later, death would do us part, and now our love story is just that: a story, suspended like an insect in amber, embalmed forever.

I reach into my purse on the coffee table, pull out my phone, and open my texts to scroll past the new congratulations and well wishes to the very bottom of my message history, to a phone number that will never contact me again. I click on Josh’s name and stare at the last text he ever sent me.

Decided to go for a quick swim first, be back soon ❤

I’ve lost track of how many people I showed the message to after Josh didn’t come back to our Airbnb that day. The police, the same officers who collected his belongings from the beach. His mom, his friends, my parents, my friends. My body twitching with sleeplessness, my eyes manic, my voice a feverish staccato. I told them how Josh hated emojis; he thought they were a lazy substitute for words and never used them. And how he was supposed to be getting us breakfast that morning, not going for a swim.

I made everyone look at the message, but the general reaction was pity. Everyone just told me they were sorry for my loss and tried to change the subject. I wasn’t ever able to convince a single person of the thing that was so obvious to me.

That the text hadn’t come from Josh at all.