I suddenly felt like a knife had just been thrust into my lungs. I couldn’t think of what to say. I just sat there on my elbows, in someone else’s bed, wearing nothing but a sheet, my mouth gaping like a stupid, hooked fish on a line. I thought of my husband popping the champagne bottle before our big move here, rummaging around our kitchen with fresh candles and flashlights, rambling on and on to this random woman about me. This morning when we lay in bed before we both awoke, his breath rising and falling against the nape of my neck, his hand resting on the curve of my side, so soft that I almost couldn’t feel it there. And I thought of how he could never, and would never, be able to make me happy.

We didn’t speak, the silence rising between us like a monsoon. I found that I also couldn’t meet his eye. Finally, I swallowed hard.

“I should go.”

I caught a Metro on his street corner; he hadn’t offered to drive me home. My husband wouldn’t be back from work for several hours, but instead of getting off at our stop I waited until the bus drove past the ocean. The wind was much stronger now, the clouds bunched and gathered like blanket rumples, and as I rolled up my jeans and walked along the shore, my sandals dangling from one hand, there was even a cold spattering of rain. The sea was a dark, brewing gray, the waves frothy and hurling, and above me seagulls careened and shrieked their calls. I longed to hear those childhood whales.

My foot clamped down on something hard but soft, something still alive. I quickly stepped back and glanced down: a sea star. Swiftly I bent to my haunches and scooped it up in my hand. Against my palm I could feel a twitch, its tiny feelers, searching. It didn’t look so vicious to me. In fact, it was probably dying, out of water, far from its home.

I didn’t care how wet I got my jeans. Wading into the gray, tumbling water up to my knees, I dunked my arm into the waves and let go. As I sloshed my way back to shore, my hair whipping around my face and my skin trembling with the chill of salt-spray, I knew that what I had just done was worthless and that the little sea star would probably just wash up to shore again within minutes. Actually, by the time the hurricane had blown through this beach would probably be littered with starfish, mollusks, crabs, and gaping fish, all either bone-dry or scale-slimy and long dead.

But still, I couldn’t bear not to do it. I just couldn’t let it be alone.