I'd first learned what a miscarriage was when I was eight. I was watching TV with my mother, and a woman on an early morning talk discussed how she'd coped with not one or two, but three different miscarriages before her identical twins had been born.

As a mere third grader, I'd somewhat understood the compounded trauma, but it was a different story to witness someone you knew, someone you loved, go through the loss of wanted life.

I'd held Stella for over an hour as she'd cried and cried, until her cries had turned into sniffles and a few sniffles into a smile. Some remarkable sense of courage had overwhelmed her the next day, and she'd told her parents everything, from the boyfriend to the pregnancy to the miscarriage. During our Facetime call yesterday, she hadn't described exactly how they'd reacted, but I knew she was still alive, at least.

But before she had hung up on me, she'd decided to drop one last minor detail.

Alex now knew.

"Hey, Hanna, you have any idea what's going on with Alex?"

Janelle caught up to me on our morning jog, long legs taking her from the end of the pack to the beginning rather easily.

At the mere mention of him, I perked up as if I'd already had my morning coffee. "With Alex? Is something wrong?"

"See, that's why I'm asking you," she chuckled. "I don't know, he was just so...spacey when he showed up to work today. And then he snapped at me when I asked what was wrong, which usually isn't like him."

"I think he received some bad news," I said, mindlessly adjusting my ponytail. "Ex-girlfriend stuff. But he'll probably tell you soon enough."

It wasn't a total lie. After all, it wasn't fair to out Stella if she hadn't yet given me her permission to tell people what had happened to her. I could never betray the years of trust we'd built, knowing how many secrets of mine she'd kept over the past eleven years.

"Oh, alright then." We continued a couple more feet before she turned her head to me again. "Is Stella okay, at least? I know Alex broke up with her pretty randomly."

"Yeah, she's fine." At least physically, according to her doctor. No emotional guarantees. "She's had some—uh—personal issues...to deal with."

"Well, send my best wishes her way, then. I know you two are close friends." I thanked the heavens that Janelle wasn't nosy, already struggling to bite my tongue. "Now, I'm dying to know, how are things with you and your absolute hunk of a partner?"

"With who?"

"Jesse." She suggestively raised her eyebrows. "I mean, come on, we all know."

"Know what?" I didn't know what I was trying to accomplish from transforming her statements into questions, but I hated these types of conversations. They reminded me of high school, where my love life had somehow always been the interest of everyone else but me—kind of like my mother and Samantha in those diary entries.

"Hanna, if I was in elementary school, I'd start singing that Jesse and Hanna sitting in a tree shit, but I don't think you'd need me to sing that even if we were ten. You like him. He likes you. It's practically science at this point."

"I mean is it really?" She stared at me from underneath a curtain of dark eyelashes. "Okay, fine, yes. I did go out on a date with him. But how exactly does everyone know?"

"We're a small team, Hanna. Word gets around." We stopped at the other end of the beach, taking a moment to catch our breaths. "If it makes you feel better, Ian and Olivia don't think we all know they're still fucking after every shift."

"I thought that was common knowledge since that party last year." They couldn't possibly believe that none of us had noticed the way they'd practically shoved their hands down each other's pants before consuming any alcohol.

"Obvious to us, a secret to them." We began to make our way back. She winked, adding, "Kinda like you and Jesse."

I blushed, trying to suppress a lovestruck smile. "I think your point is more than clear by now. But...I'm curious about something. Mind if I ask?"

"Ask away."

I spotted Alex in the distance, watching him talk to our captain. "Has anything ever happened between you and Alex? I know this question might sound ridiculous, but try to get with me."

"Me and Alex?" She snorted, shaking her head. "He treats me like I'm his baby sister. But to be fair, you're not the first person to ask."

I breathed an internal sigh of relief. "Really?"

She nodded. "Alison thought we were dating, too, because he's apparently always staring at me. But I've worked with him long enough to know he's just trying to figure out the time until his shift ends from my watch. To be honest, I'll never understand why his dumbass won't buy one."

The waterproof watch on her thin wrist backed up her words. So did the angle of Alex's stares. "Sounds enough like Alex," I laughed. "Oh, and I didn't mean to come off accusatory. I know you have a boyfriend—well, according to the last round of team gossip I didn't miss."

She rolled her dark eyes. "You always worry too much about the wrong things, Hanna. You should start worrying about getting Jesse to be your boyfriend, instead."

I smiled. "Well, I think I might already have my work cut out for me."

***

I lingered on the beach after my shift had ended, hoping to catch Alex as he headed out. As he cleared up his belongings from his chair and made his way up the sand, I ambled to the parking lot in a perfectly coordinated coincidence. He didn't notice me until he paused for a car backing out of a narrow parking space.

Turning his head to the left, he looked me over with two bloodshot eyes, lips pressing into a flat line. Surprisingly, he spoke first. "You knew, right. About Stella."

"How couldn't I?"

"Why didn't she tell me?"

No impending accusations bubbled underneath his tone. Instead, a kind of sadness that went hand in hand with guilt weighed him down, transforming his usual cocky front to a dull exterior. For a brief moment, my heart ached, finally registering that the miscarriage was as much as a loss for him as it was for Stella.

"Alex," I breathed, "she barely had the courage to tell me." He might have been her boyfriend for five months, but she was my best friend of eleven years. "She must have explained herself when she told you, right?"

He shook his head, running a hand through his dark-blond hair. "I was about to go to bed when I got a call from her. She barely let me get in a few words before she hung up on me. I wonder why she even decided to call if she was just going to spring the news on me like that."

Do you think if Alex knew that I was pregnant...he'd want to be here for this baby? "Maybe she wants you to call her back," I said softly. His head perked up, a little bit of life returning to his emotionless brown eyes. "Unless, I guess, she cursed you out before she hung up."

"She didn't do that at all," he whispered, voice as heavy as his heart. "She seemed so broken, actually."

The humid air somehow felt even thicker, the tension more suffocating as we competed in a staring contest of sort, with the whole premise of the game destroyed by the eyes refusing to meet. I began to take a step backwards towards my car when he called out my name.

"I never really apologized for that night," he said. "I'm sorry, Hanna. It was a total asshole move of me. Not saying you need to forgive me, but it doesn't feel right not to say it."

I tightened my arms over my chest, breathing out slowly. I had yet to hear an apology over a matter that wasn't as trivial as spilled coffee or a missed meeting. My response to those kinds of apologies was always a smile and an okay.

I saved my grudges for when they mattered, after all.

He licked his bottom lip and pulled it in, staring off at the busy road. "Never mind. I feel even dumber now."

"Thanks, I guess. For saying it." That was the best I could do. He nodded slowly, fishing his keys from his pocket. I did the same, but neither of us advanced to our cars yet.

He had one more thing to say. "You know, I would have told Stella to keep the baby, if she had told me in the beginning. I have money. I don't mind kids." Looking over his shoulder, he barely uttered the last thought on his heart. "But don't bother telling her I said that."

***

By nighttime, my exhaustion had hit new heights.

With hardly any appetite for dinner, I'd dragged myself to the shower and stayed under the warm water for nearly an hour. I wouldn't have left, save for the environment and my dad's water bill repeatedly screaming at me to spare them.

It was that awful time of year when it felt hot even with the AC on, so I slipped on a tank top and the skimpiest of shorts and crawled under my covers with a groan. My eyes snapped open when I recalled my promise to myself this week. Blowing out a heavy breath, I leaned over my mattress to my side table and fumbled for the key necklace on my chest, eyes barely hanging open.

As I began to flip to the last page I had read, something fell out from between the center pages of the book. Just skimming the surface, I could tell it was a photo, a weakened adhesive on the back side just barely sticking to my fingers.

I held it away from my face and squinted. If I already didn't know the end of the story I was reading, I would have felt like the photo was a spoiler. My dad kissed my mom on the cheek underneath a palm tree while two people in the background made exaggerated faces of disgust. I wasn't so interested in my lovestruck parents as I was in the guy and girl in the corner of the photo.

Were they Samantha and Benjamin? My mother hadn't described them much in her journal, but I knew that Sam had long black hair and Ben's height dwarfed hers. The rudimentary description matched, but it wasn't enough to feel like I had really found something.

I sighed and fell asleep dreaming of people I'd never met before.

Or had I...?