The last time I saw my first love was on my 17th birthday—thirty years later, a woman who looked exactly like her stepped into my yard

the flowers against the stone.

I looked out across the river — the same water I’d hated for three decades, which was, I understood now, the wrong river to hate.

It wasn’t the river’s fault. It wasn’t even Thomas’s fault. It was a seventeen-year-old girl’s impossible choice, made with the best reasoning she had available at the time, and it had cost both continue reading …