Free Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron

over the years. There was nothing finer than beach glass—function gone, only form left—everything worn away except opaque, occluded beauty. Nora’s favorite place was Glass Beach, up the coast a couple of hours, a shore littered with sanded, colored glass. She usually tried to carry a piece of it in her pocket—to rub, to remember how strong glass was, how strong Glass was. Plastic bags biodegraded in twentyyears, plastic bottles in 450. But glass took a million years to biodegrade, to return to sand. The shards of beach glass she collected had almost nothing left of their former selves but had so much beauty and comfort left to give. And strength.
    Harrison had run his fingers through the glass in the bowl just the way Nora did before she went to sleep, each cool stone clicking against the others satisfyingly. Of course he got it. Nora had wanted to take the glass away from him as much as she’d wanted to give him every piece.
    She should never, ever have let him stay, even though the coast had been clear with Ellie out of the house for a night. How did you go from sleeping alone for thirteen years to warmth, twined arms and legs, to commingled morning breath? In the years since Paul left, she’d slept with exactly three men, and only a few careful times each. (The
planning
that went into sex as a single mother. It was an article she knew she should write someday.
Forget hotels with their suspect comforters. Minivans are your friend. Tinted glass helps. If you park at the mall, choose a parking spot as far as you can get from the elevators to minimize foot traffic near where your groove-on is being got.
)
    Harrison knew exactly how many men she’d slept with since the divorce. Two of them he’d met and approved of. That’s what
friends
did. Friends didn’t stay the night, naked, with each other. They didn’t cuddle. God, how Nora had missed that part—the skin against skin, the simple equation of body heat plus covers equaling a sweaty animallike warmth that was both erotic and slightly embarrassing in the morning.
    Now, three months and a whole new (non–sexually transmittable) disease later, she propped the Valentine’s Day card for Harrison on the windowsill in front of the kitchen sink. She had to decide what to do with it before Ellie got home, that was all she knew. It would be fine to tear it up and put it in the recycling. She should do that.
    But she didn’t.
    Nora scrubbed the sink drains with a paste of baking soda, water, and Dr. Bronner’s mint soap. Nothing got the steel brighter, and very little usually filled her with more satisfaction. But something didn’t feel right. She’d forgotten something.
    How many damn times in her life had she made this scrubbing paste? A thousand? More? There was an ingredient, a small one. A few drops of . . . The frustration bit at her, nipping at the back of her brain. Something small . . .
    The knock on the back kitchen door made her jump though it shouldn’t have. She’d been expecting it, but her stomach still clenched.
    “It’s open,” she called. Of course it was. She moved the stack of campus catalogs over so Harrison could take his normal seat at the kitchen island.
    “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said.
    “You, too,” she said, too flustered to look in his eyes. Her fingertips were smooth and slick from the baking soda.
    “I moved your trash cans in.”
    He always did. “Thank you.”
    “I got you a card.” He held out a dark red envelope. “I just wanted to drop it off and then I’ll go.”
    A funny friend card, that’s what he always got her. Something that said that year’s equivalent of
As long as we’re both single, let’s eat lots of chocolate in honor of those too busy having sex.
    “Don’t be silly—stay. Wine?” She put the envelope facedown on the counter.
    Harrison swung the barstool so that he straddled it backward. “Sure.”
    Nora felt goose bumps rise on her arms, as if it had just gotten colder. As if