What We Carry in Summer

The hat sat on the dashboard, still smelling of him—tobacco and expensive cologne and the particular scent of a man who'd spent too many years forgiving himself for nothing. Sarah had hated that hat. She'd said it made him look like a professor mid-life crisis, which was exactly what he was.

That was the thing about friendship: you kept loving people even when they became strangers to themselves.

Maggie had been running for three months when the texts stopped. Not running like she used to—those morning stretches along the lakefront, their breath pluming in the Chicago cold, comfortable silence stretching between them like something you could wrap around yourself. No, Maggie was running from something else. From what she'd seen. From what she'd chosen not to say.

The corporate investigation had found nothing, of course. They never did. But Maggie knew—she'd been in that bar, had seen the way he'd touched that junior analyst's knee under the table, the way his palm had rested there like he owned something he hadn't earned. And she'd said nothing because friendship, she'd learned, was just another word for complicity.

Now here she was, standing at the edge of his property in upstate New York, holding a box of his things his sister had mailed. The woods were dense here, older than secrets, older than the particular way men destroyed themselves slowly enough that no one noticed until it was too late.

She saw it through the trees—massive, dark, moving with the careful indifference of something that had never needed to perform goodness. A bear. It paused, turned its head toward her, and Maggie understood suddenly why she'd come. Why she'd driven six hours with a dead man's hat in her passenger seat.

The bear watched her with eyes that knew something about hunger. About what you did when winter came and there was nothing left but to take what you needed, regardless of who it belonged to.

That's what David had done, wasn't it? What they'd all done, in their way.

She placed the hat on the porch step. Then she drove away, leaving behind the friend she'd protected and the truth she'd buried, both of them sleeping like something you could wake up from if you just closed your eyes long enough.