The wine glasses in the dishwasher are not actually clean.

I know this because I am holding the third one up to the kitchen window, where the November light is the color of weak tea, and there is a faint pink film at the bottom that the rinse cycle has politely declined to address. I rinse it again, by hand, with the little brush we never use, and I think — and this is the kind of thing my therapist tells me not to do — about how much of my life I have spent rinsing things that were already supposed to be clean.

The phone buzzes on the counter.

Won't make dinner. Hospital wants to keep that case overnight. Don't wait up. xo

That's Brian. That's also a lie, because Brian is a pediatric dentist, and the pediatric dentistry of Charlotte, North Carolina, has not been known to keep cases overnight since approximately the dawn of pediatric dentistry. He is at the gym. Or at the bar attached to the gym. Or — let us be adults about this — he is at the apartment of the dental hygienist named Kelsey whose name has come up in our text history seven times in three weeks.

I do not text back. I put the phone face down. I rinse the fourth glass.

The house is too quiet. Sophie has field hockey until six. Ben is at his friend Lucas's house playing some video game I am not technologically literate enough to have an opinion on. The dog is at the groomer. The dishwasher is humming with its load of glasses I do not trust. And I am forty years old, and it is three twelve in the afternoon, and I have nothing to do for the next two hours and forty-eight minutes except not have a feeling about my marriage.

I pour myself a glass of the chardonnay that is open in the fridge.

I take the glass and the bottle into the bedroom and I do what I have been doing on Tuesday afternoons for the better part of the year, which is open the closet and pull out the wooden box at the back, behind the suitcases, behind the wedding album in its cream silk slipcase, behind the maternity dresses I will never wear again and have not yet found the heart to give away.

The box is full of journals.

There are eleven of them. They start at twelve, when my mother bought me my first one because I had been caught reading my older cousin's diary, and they end at twenty-three, when I got married and apparently lost the urge to write anything down ever again. I open them at random sometimes, the way other women open old photo albums, the way Brian's mother opens her cookbooks. I read myself in them. I look for clues.

Today the one in my hand is purple. Spiral-bound. The cover says, in Sharpie, in my own seventeen-year-old handwriting: MAGGIE WHITFIELD — DO NOT READ — THIS MEANS YOU TOMMY.

Tommy was my prom date. Tommy made out with me in the back of his father's Camry for forty-five minutes after prom and then asked me, very politely, in the tone of a young man who has been raised to be considerate, whether I wanted to go further. I said no, because I had been told by every adult in my life since I was a child that going further would render me damaged goods, would make me unmarriageable, would — in the actual phrasing of my actual mother on my actual fourteenth birthday, while serving sheet cake — give it away.

I said no. Tommy said that's cool, Mags, no pressure. He drove me home. We held hands in the driveway. He went off to NC State in the fall and I went off to Chapel Hill and I never saw him again.

I sit cross-legged on the bedroom carpet with my chardonnay and I open the journal to the page I have read so many times the spine cracks open to it on its own.

It's a list. I wrote it the summer I turned twenty-two, the summer Brian proposed, the summer I was about to graduate and start medical school and become, in my mother's word, settled. I had been at a wedding the weekend before, my college roommate Jess Park's wedding, and I had watched Jess slow-dance with her new husband and laugh into his neck like she was about to bite him, and I had come home and gotten very drunk on a bottle of pinot grigio and I had written this:

THINGS I DID NOT DO — A LIST > > 1. The Pi Kapp party first weekend of school. > 2. Cabo with the girls — junior year spring break. > 3. Letting Tommy go further on prom night. > 4. Going up to a guy at any of the four bars I have been to in my life. > 5. The bachelorette weekend — the strippers, the actual strippers, not the fake ones in the Magic Mike movie. > > If I could tell my past self anything I would tell her: go. Just go. You are not going to die. You are not going to be given away. You are going to be twenty-two in a sundress on a balcony in Mexico with your best friends and you are going to be so happy that the rest of your life will not have to spend itself trying to be that happy. JUST GO.

I read it. I read it again. I pour more wine.

The thing about being forty is that you start to understand that the women who told you to be careful were not protecting you. They were drafting you into the same long, careful, polite, dish-rinsing life they had been drafted into themselves, and the worst part is that they meant well. The worst part is that I love my mother. The worst part is that I would not be unkind to her, even now, even knowing what I know, and what I know is this:

I am forty years old, and I have been with one man, and that man is currently at the apartment of a woman named Kelsey, and I have not, in the entire span of my one and only adult life, ever been kissed by anyone who wanted to kiss me more than they wanted to be polite.

The wine bottle is empty. I do not remember finishing it.

I am crying, and not the soft kind. I am crying the kind that I have not cried in a very long time, the kind that sounds bad enough that if anyone were home they would come running. No one is home. I sit on the bathroom floor with my back against the tub because the bedroom suddenly seems too soft to hold what I am doing, and I open the journal to the list, and I read it again, and I say it out loud — just go, just go, just go — and I cry until I am hollow and then I close my eyes for what I think will be a second.

The light through the bathroom window goes from weak tea to nothing.

Somewhere in the house, very faintly, a phone is ringing.

I do not answer it. I do not move. I think, very clearly, in the kind of voice that only arrives in the moment before you fall asleep:

If I could go back. If I could just go back and tell her.

And then I do not think anything for a very long time.