Eureka, California
I hadn’t even wanted to return to Anchor Bay that June. My sister-in-law Michelle had died of Covid just a few months earlier, the day before her fiftieth birthday. This tiny slice of heaven in Northern California, tucked between Highway One and the Pacific Ocean, was her favorite spot in the entire world. The thought of walking the beach, marveling at those picture-perfect sunsets without her, seemed wrong somehow.
Michelle and I weren’t connected just because we’d married men who were brothers. We were also dear friends. We’d talked often about growing old together, watching our kids start families of their own.
“I don’t know if we should go this year,” I said to my husband, Tom. “It would be too painful.”
From the time that he and his brothers, Charlie and Paul, were boys, their family had
