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Now I could see the trap in that too. Dean had been real. His hands on touching a new record. His apartment above Side A. His good jacket that didn’t fit quite right. Otis, who believed ham was a love language. The way he looked at me as if I wasn’t too loud, too restless, too much trouble. I’d loved him. I loved him still, in the strange way a heart could make room for a life that would never happen and still beat for the one that had.

But Dean wasn’t the magic door I’d failed to walk through and therefore ruined everything after.

He was a man. A good one, funny, and stubborn, who’d rather sleep under the counter at Side A than take my family money, and who deserved Minneapolis, music, and the kind of future that didn’t require him to stand forever in the corner of my regret.

I set the cassette down and pressed both hands over my face. Paul had stayed.

He’d stayed by moving my coffee cup closer after I came back from saying goodbye to Dean, by not asking what he had no right to demand. He had stayed in hospital rooms, snowy driveways, parent-teacher conferences, funeral homes, and restaurants where our grown children teased me over birthday cake.

I could no longer hold all the details, but I knew the feel of him in my life.

Bread baskets. Jumper cables. Yellow highlighters. Warm cars. Almond cookies. A hand on my knee at red lights. A man who respected closed doors so completely that we had spent too many years not opening them.

That had been my failure too. The thought hurt. It also settled something in me that had been running since I woke in this room.

I’d wanted a different choice, wanted to stand at the old door and prove I could be brave. But bravery wasn’t always leaving. Sometimes it was looking at the life you’d complained about for twenty-seven years and admitting you’d stopped showing up for parts of it long before you wished your way out.

The rain fell harder, lightning flashing across the lake as I opened the cassette case. The tape inside was black, the little wheels visible through the plastic. Music had once been something you could hold, ruin, fix with a pencil, and blame on someone else when the tape jammed. I missed that suddenly, missed rewinding songs, missed liner notes.

My hands shook as I pushed the cassette into the player and pressed play. For a second there was only the soft mechanical click, then the hiss of tape. Then Prince filled the pool house, “When Doves Cry” spilling into the room exactly as it had at Hudson’s before the ganache arrived and my life split open.

The first time I heard this song in 2011, I had thought it was calling me back to Dean.

Maybe it had been, maybe it had brought me back to him so I could finally stop making him carry a life he’d never lived. Maybe it had brought me back to Paul so I could remember who he used to be. Maybe it had brought me back to my parents so I would have a little more time with them.

Or maybe the cassette had no explanation at all. Maybe magic didn’t care whether I understood the mechanics. It had given me thirteen days.

The music played on.

I stood, pacing because sitting still had become impossible. The hem of my dress stuck to my damp calves. My bare feet left faint marks on the floor. I went to the mirror over the kitchenette sink and saw twenty-three-year-old Lorrie looking back at me, hair coming down, mascara smudged, eyes puffy, and mouth trembling.

She looked so young and I had been so angry with her for years. For saying yes. For being afraid, and for wanting approval. For mistaking safety for the whole answer and passion for the only escape. I’d blamed her for a life that had grown quiet.

“You did the best you could,” I told her.

I looked around the pool house one last time. The yellow curtains. The bed. The Tab cans on the counter. The old Princess phone with its tangled cord. The Purple Rain case lying open.

I thought of Dean walking out of the club.

I thought of Paul, always being there.

I thought of Claire’s crease between her eyebrows and Ben’s crooked grin, even if I could no longer see either clearly enough to trust the picture.

I thought of fifty-year-old me on the blue couch in Cleveland, with Paul upstairs in the shower and my children driving away from my birthday dinner, all of us alive in a life I’d spent too many years treating as something that had happened to me.

I picked up the cassette player with both hands and sat cross-legged on the bed.

“I want to go home,” I said.

The words sounded small in the room. No thunder answered. No light burst through the windows. The rain kept falling. Prince kept singing. Somewhere across the lawn, my mother probably stood at the kitchen window deciding whether to come check on me, and my father probably told her to wait five more minutes.

“I choose Paul,” I said, and my voice broke, as tears streamed down my face, because the sentence was both too simple and not nearly large enough.

“I choose Claire. I choose Ben. I choose the life I had. I choose home.”

The cassette grew warm beneath my hands, then hot.

I gasped and tried to pull away, but the heat spread through my palms and up my arms, bright enough to make the room tilt. The pool house blurred. The yellow curtains, the radio, the rain on the windows, all of it bending at the edges as if the world had become a photograph left too close to a flame.