Free Retreat to Love by Melanie Greene

she was seventeen and had run away in order to find a home where no one would force her to pack up every few months. Her college fund paid for the bus to Norwich, Connecticut, a deposit on the two-bedroom duplex, and a print run of thirty resumes. She’d been in the same place for the intervening years and had never since traveled further than Cape Cod. GED obtained, she commuted to New London three times a week for five years to get a studio arts degree at Connecticut College. Flying to Austin for FireWind was her first plane ride since her childhood trips to summer with her grandmother in Alaska.
    Zach hung around until almost two, long after Caleb and Wren headed out of my den. “You think they’re going off together?” he asked when the sound of her flats on the short concrete path had faded off.
    “Dunno. They weren’t being obvious enough for me.”
    “Well, I think we done good. Did you notice the way I kept bringing the conversation back to her?”
    “Yeah, you’re a master of subtlety, but I picked up on it.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. ‘No, I can’t stand watching baseball on TV. Wren, what will you do when FireWind is over?’”
    He threw a vegan marshmallow at me from the bag he’d imported for my hot chocolate. “You told me to set them up.”
    “And you did. Thank you.” I ate the mallow. “Don’t forget to load me up with dirt on college days.”
    He groaned. “I don’t know anything. We weren’t exactly bosom buddies, you know, we just saw each other at the lab.”
    “Which you were at for hours every day. You know stuff, so spill it.”
    “I honestly don’t remember much. He had some girlfriends, off-and-on kind of things. One of them, this brunette with a ponytail, she and Eva hit it off. We doubled a couple of times.” He did the usual brow-crinkling thing, which meant he was pretending to think hard but was just looking for a way to end the stream of the conversation. “Her name was Ellen or Lucy, something like that. Ellen, I think. Helen. Pre-med. They lasted a few months, a year, I don’t know. Then she moved. Or got a new boyfriend, or something.”
    “Was her name Ann and she dropped him after sleeping with some guy she met because y’all were meeting at Eva’s place for a movie and this guy lived next door?” I asked.
    He sat up and thunked his mug on the table. “Oh God.”
    “That was him?”
    “Oh Mother God. I’d forgotten.”
    “Zach? It was Caleb, wasn’t it?”
    He nodded. “Do you think he hates me?”
    “Where would you get that?”
    “Cause Ann and Shawn ...”
    “Cause nothing, Zach, Ann was a bitch. She’d have done it with someone else if it wasn’t with Eva’s neighbor. You just wouldn’t have known so much about it, is all.”
    “Well, I’d hate me.”
    “Maybe you’re more into displacing your emotions than he is. He hasn’t acted at all like he’s got a problem with you.”
    “Has he mentioned Ann at all?”
    “Why would he? It was like a decade ago. Do you still mention Eva all the time?” Stupid me. Because of course he doesn’t. He hasn’t dealt with it, which I, the trusted and knowing little sister, am perfectly aware of. “Sorry,” I added.
    He sat back down. “No, it’s okay. Like you said, it was years ago.”
    “Zach. Come on, it can’t still hurt that bad?”
    He wouldn’t focus on me. He just shook his head.
    “You wanna talk about it?”
    He shook his head again. “It’s not her, Ashlyn. It’s me. I mean, I’m worldly enough to know things just don’t work out sometimes, and at least she didn’t do anything cruel, like Ann. So it ended. Life goes on.”
    “Well, then?”
    “Well, then, she lives in Marin with her law degree and architect husband and baby girl. She’s happy, I’ve moved on.”
    “So you keep saying.” It wasn’t the first time we’ve talked about love and the way it ends and what happens afterwards. But I’ve always let him bring it up before, or else