There it was again, one of the words. Throwing. According to my therapist I was gaining a new life. That’s what I needed to focus on. But that was so hard. I felt selfish. I felt like I was doing something wrong.

Yet now that I had told my husband, there was no way back.

Joe leaned forward and kissed my forehead. I could tell he was holding back tears.

“I love you so much, and I just want you to be happy. I’m just still a little… I’m finding it a little hard to grasp.”

I swallowed, trying to get rid of the huge lump in my throat. I wanted to scream or run away or both at the same time. We barely slept all night. He was tossing and turning and getting up every half an hour, pacing back and forth. I knew it was a bomb I had thrown the night before. I knew he was still in shock and needed time to process it. Heck, so did I. Even if I had been dealing with it for years. It was still new territory for me, and I kept wondering if it was worth it.

“I know,” I said. “It’s gonna take some time for all of us to adjust.”

“I just… I don’t get it,” he continued, sipping his coffee. His skin was gray from the lack of sleep. It was torture to watch him like this. He kept staring into blank air, repeating the same thing over and over again.

“I just don’t get it…”

I couldn’t blame him. While it had taken years for me to get to this point, his whole life had blown up in his face overnight.

So far, we had agreed to continue our normal lives and not talk to the children about it yet. Not till we knew how to deal with this situation. Not till we made any decisions that would affect their lives. I had told Joe about the numerous times I had ended up kissing girls when I was younger and had too much to drink. And that it had happened more recently…

Joe handed me a cup of coffee without looking at me. He had been my partner and best friend for eighteen years. Was that about to end? We hadn’t been intimate for a long time, but we were a team. We were best friends. I would do anything not to lose him completely.

The kids came storming down the stairs, backpacks in hands, grabbed their lunches and took off while fighting over something ridiculous. I watched them from the window as they got into Charlene’s Toyota pickup truck, which we got her for her sweet sixteen, and took off. I spotted our neighbors, Trevor and Marge, walking their goldendoodle on the sidewalk outside my window. Their dog, Sonny, stopped to pee by the tall palm tree in front of my house. I lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, which had been a very safe environment for my kids to grow up in. They would bike and skateboard around, and I never had to worry about them. Sonny did a little more than just pee, and Trevor bent down to pick it up. They were an elderly couple who had lived in Cocoa Beach their entire lives and never wanted to leave. “This is paradise but don’t tell anyone because then they’ll all want to come here too,” they always said.

I waved at them. They waved back with big smiles in tanned faces. They were both very fit for their age. Marge did beach yoga every morning with her friends, and Trevor was an avid surfer. Our street was only two blocks from the beach, so he would get up at the crack of dawn and sometimes I would see him rushing down the street, barefoot, wearing nothing but boardshorts with his surfboard under his arm. That’s when I knew the waves were good and most of the town would probably be out there in the lineup. Most of the neighbors on my street with only eight houses surfed or stand-up paddled on the river, some kayaked in the canals behind our houses. We all had boats by our docks in the backyards that we would occasionally go out on. It had been a while, though, since Joe and I had last been out on the water with the kids. They used to love it and would fight over whose turn it was to go in the tube, being pulled behind it. Or to go wakeboarding. That was fun. I chuckled at the memories we had created, then felt awful for my children. They had no idea what was about to happen to them, how their world was about to crumble, once their parents separated.

The very thought made me want to throw up.

“Can you take Zelda out?” I asked Joe, and he nodded quickly as I looked at my watch. “I’m running late for the morning meeting.”

TWOOLIVIA

She was ahead of her target time. Olivia Thomson’s Apple Watch told her so in her Air Pods. She had run the first kilometer in less than five minutes, and that was a good time for her. She was going for ten kilometers this morning, as she did three times a week, getting herself ready for the half-marathon she had signed up for in two months. Today she felt stronger than she had in a long time. She was almost flying as she ran through her neighborhood, her Salomon running shoes crunching on the pavement. In her ears she was listening to Pitbull, and the upbeat Latin rhythms made her go even faster. She wasn’t usually a Pitbull fan, but she had found that when running, she was way faster while listening to his music.

When she reached two kilometers, her Apple Watch told her she had run the last kilometer at 04:45. It was a new record for her, and now she couldn’t stop smiling.

Olivia had started running after her boyfriend of six years broke up with her. One day they had been on the couch, watching TV, when he paused the movie and simply told her he was leaving to be with her best friend of more than fifteen years.

She’d needed to get the anger out. It was piling up inside of her. Olivia wasn’t good at showing emotions, especially not anger; instead, she would internalize it and that wasn’t very healthy for her, her sister said.

“You need to yell at him. Get angry. Tell him how you really feel,” she had told her over and over again.

But Olivia simply couldn’t. She didn’t feel like she was allowed to for some reason. She didn’t like people seeing her being vulnerable. She needed people to think she was strong. After all she was an investment banker, one who had made it well for herself in a man’s world. She couldn’t lose her cool.

Besides, she wasn’t going to give her ex the pleasure of seeing her angry or even sad. So instead, she had just watched him pack his stuff and leave, then decided never to talk to him or Katie again. It wasn’t like she needed them or anything. She was very fine on her own.

Running had given her the outlet that she needed. When she pushed her body to its limits, that’s when she was able to let it all out. The anger, the tears, the frustration. It would all come at once, and she could push through it, making her body ache so bad she was about to throw up.

Boy that made her feel good.

She ran the third kilometer in 04:35, her watch told her.

Olivia smiled widely. This was yet another record. She couldn’t believe it. Usually, she would slow down on the third and fourth kilometer and struggle at the fifth, before picking up pace again on the sixth. But not today.

Today she was on fire.

Olivia turned a corner around the pink house, which she had always thought was so cute, then ran into another street and down toward the pond. There was such a nice little water fountain in the middle of it, making the entire neighborhood look expensive. It was beautiful. The houses with yards facing toward the pond were old and gorgeous. Olivia was always on the lookout for one of them coming up for sale, because she would love to buy one someday. Lord knows she had the money for it. But they rarely came up for sale.

“I’d really like that one,” she mumbled to herself and pointed up at a small house with wraparound porches and the cutest little fenced-in yard. That one was her absolute favorite because it was so private. She had often tried to look into the yard when running past it on the trail surrounding the pond, but the tall bushes blocked her view. She liked that a lot.

“Privacy is king,” she mumbled, then continued on her run. There was no slowing down now that she was doing so well. She would circle the pond, then go back. Once she made it halfway around it, she would hit five kilometers, and then she was halfway. Olivia took in a deep breath of fresh air. She could smell the ocean and the beach on the other side of A1A. She would occasionally run on the beach, but it was so darn hard on the knees when it wasn’t low tide. She was scared of getting an injury and then where would that leave her? She needed to run. She was addicted to it, her sister had said. And maybe she was right.

It wasn’t exactly the worst thing to be addicted to, was it?

Olivia shook her head with a scoff at the thought of her sister who couldn’t get her own life together, and then she dared criticize Olivia’s. Who did she think she was? Telling her she needed to grieve her loss and face her emotions.

It was all nonsense.

Olivia had her own way of dealing with things, and running was all she needed right now.

She ran the fifth kilometer in 04:40. Slower than the last one. She’d have to speed up, if she wanted to run her personal best, like she had been on track for. She wasn’t going to slow down now.

Olivia accelerated, pushing her legs to the limit of what she was capable of, feeling her heart pound in her chest as she sprinted across the trail and around the pond. She turned for a second to look at the fountain in the middle, and how beautiful the rays of the sun hit it and created such a gorgeous light, when there was something else that caught her eye.

At first, she thought it was a gator. She had seen them occasionally in the pond, which wasn’t a big deal, as they were in most ponds in Florida from time to time. But there was something about this floating mass that just struck her as odd.

It was sort of bobbing up and down below the surface.

Was it an animal?

Olivia stared at it as she came closer to where the lump was stuck in the mangrove bushes growing at the edge of the pond. She didn’t even realize she had started to slow down till her watch suddenly said she was way behind her target pace.

But at this point, Olivia wasn’t listening. She took out her Air Pods and stopped running. She stared at the small mass in the water, especially at the pink shirt bobbing on the surface.

Then she screamed.

THREEBILLIE ANN

“Billie Ann Wilde, as I live and breathe. What the heck did you do to your hair? You joining the Army or somethin’?”

Big Tom stopped himself, and his expression became serious. “Wait a second, you’re not telling me that it’s back, are you? Is the cancer back—?”

I raised a hand to prevent my colleague from saying something he would be embarrassed about later.

“I’m gonna stop you right there. It’s not back,” I said. “I’m still in remission.”

He stared at me with his brown eyes. His handsome face smiled with relief. Tom was a big guy, hence the nickname, not as much in height as in volume—and character. He took up a lot of space in any room. He was very muscular and went to the gym several times a week, working out with the other guy in our division, Scott. I had recently been promoted to be the head of homicide, which basically meant the Chief left me in charge of these two goofballs. They were good people, and hard workers, and I loved them dearly, but they were also young and untrained, whereas I came with experience from another homicide division, not far from my hometown.

I grew up in Central Florida, out in the wetlands, fishing and hunting hogs and gators in the Green Swamp with the boys of my town. If I saw a snake, I knew not to tread on it, because it was my friend. If it snuck into my house, I knew how to grab it by the neck so it couldn’t bite me and take it outside and let it go. My dad had taught me how to shoot a rifle from the moment I could hold one, and I was a better shot than both of my brothers. I knew how to deal with boys like Tom and Scott and had done so my entire life.