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She gazed at me. “I wish you could come with me…” she said, almost too quiet for me to hear.

I held her eyes. Tried to decipher what that meant too.

The horn of a yacht blared outside.

“You should go,” she said.

“Can I call you tonight?”

“I’ll call you.”

I swallowed. “Okay.”

I kissed her. She did kiss me back, but by the way she was talking, I wondered if it was goodbye.

I grabbed my backpack and stood by the door to look at her one last time, then turned and made my way out. She watched me leave like she was getting a last look.

On the way back to the mainland, Neil was like Charon, the ferryman of Hades, taking a dead soul to shore.

I’d said what I could to Emma. I’d done all I could do.

My car felt foreign to me on the drive to Brad’s to get my dog. For four short days, my whole world had been her and that island. Now it wasn’t her. Maybe it never would be again. And now it was time to get back to real life.

I didn’t want my real life.

I drove around collecting my dog and my kids, the car getting louder with every pickup. Chelsea was grumpy and whining, probably because she was overly tired and sore. She looked like she’d spent the whole four days on the back of a pony, which she probably had. She had dirt under her nails and was sunburnt and needed a bath.

While I appreciated that Leigh took her, I wasn’t sure the trade-off was worth it if this was how I was going to get her back, and realizing that gave me a whole second wave of defeat because it meant I had one less viable option for overnight help.

Alex was going on animatedly about Leigh’s and I was trying to act interested, but the whole thing just felt overstimulating and exhausting.

I came home to laundry and a mailbox full of bills and a long list of back-to-school bullshit. By the time I got Chelsea cleaned up, I had to make dinner. I wanted to DoorDash something, but then I remembered I was back in the real world and needed to start tightening my belt, which only put me in a worse mood. I was days behind at work, Alex was on me to get his school supplies and he wanted to go to Target, Brad was scratching again and probably needed a medicated bath and to go to the vet for another allergy shot, Sarah wasn’t even back from Josie’s family’s cabin, so the stress wasn’t even at full steam yet.

This was the price I paid for those four days. And I wouldn’t have changed it for anything. Well, I might have changed the puking part. But not the rest of it.

I wanted to go back to the island.

I wanted to pretend to be young and child-free with a girl I was falling in love with, in a place where we could imagine it was all possible, because the further I got from those four days on the island, the more I realized it wasn’t. And the reality check was sobering.

She could never meet me here.

Who would want to? Why would she give up a lucrative career and traveling the world with her best friend for this? Dinners of frozen dino nuggets, corn that tastes like the can it comes out of, soggy Band-Aids in the bathtub drain, and all the mundane shit that my life consisted of now.

I wasn’t worth it. I didn’t even blame her.

Maybe that’s why she was crying. She liked me, but she didn’t want everything that came with me, so she felt torn. I was the right guy at the wrong time.

And maybe she was the right girl at the wrong time for me too.

I couldn’t think of a worse period in my life for this to be happening.

By 10:00 Emma didn’t text, and it didn’t even surprise me.

I got Chelsea in bed and I sat down at the desk in my room to try to get some work done. An hour into it she finally called.

I watched the phone ring for a few seconds. She was going to break things off with me. I knew it in my soul. I could feel it.

I hit the answer button. “Hey.”