A year later you were both invited to the same wedding in a vineyard. You were smoking cigarettes and drinking bourbon and he had quit everything, which, no matter what had passed between you, you acknowledged as a very good and impressive thing. The two of you walked down rows of grapevines and he asked you to let him make amends. You said amends were made. Check it off the list. Consider it done. You crushed a cigarette under your boot and ground it into the soil. You kissed the boy on the cheek when he drove you back to your shitty motel and you thought that was a pretty good way to say goodbye to someone forever.

The next morning the woman at the front desk said a man had come looking for you in the middle of the night, around four a.m., and she’d told him there was no one by your name staying there. You gave her back your key on its plastic ring and thanked her. You realized that this generous woman working the night shift at the goddamn Sea Breeze motel had more sense than you, and she’d met him for only two minutes.

You visit your hometown. You are driving aimlessly when you see the wall. You stop and slowly back up to the right-hand turn. It is built. There it is, all real and caked together with stones, and you feel a pang. You can get rid of everything else, the phone numbers and the photos, and still you will have these stories banging around inside you.

This is the first time you understand that, when people talk about moving on, they don’t mean that you won’t remember or bleed anymore. Just that you’ll go on to do other things. Meet other people. And yet, in the middle of a normal day, something as simple as a stone wall can still suddenly and invisibly destroy you. And because it’s too much to explain, most days, when this happens, you’ll just keep driving along. You won’t mention the wall or what it summons to anyone. And it’s this silence, more than anything else, that defines moving on.