Staying on in a summer community is like being in a department store after closing, or the zoo after dark. I wanted the place to empty out. I wanted to turn at the flashing light without waiting for the endless line of cars piling in from Boston. And yet the weekend after Labor Day, when I showed up at the flea market ready to bag the bargains that await the locals, I discovered there was no flea market after Labor Day. In high summer I bitterly complained about the busy, noisy beach where it was impossible to read undisturbed. But when I took a late September swim, it was eerie to find myself alone there. I felt like a ghost, condemned to wander the places where I was happiest.

The lake was quiet now, and we recognized the few year-round sails we saw in the distance. Taking our canoe down the Saco River, where in summer there are flotillas of canoes and beer rafts, we were now the only ones there. Arriving at Crescent Beach in Maine, where the parking lot is usually full of camp buses hugging the shade, we counted only 10 cars. By November, we were the only ones left on the lake, kayaking with hot tea in our thermoses, floating among the feathers left behind by the migrating Canadian geese. It was hard to shake the feeling that there was someplace we were supposed to be.

Without the academic calendar organizing our lives, there was a sense of unreality about where we were and what season we were in. Our life had the logic of dreams: “It was the New Hampshire house, but it wasn’t the New Hampshire house.” Brown leaves fell on the front porch, giving it an abandoned, haunted house feel – an effect heightened by our black cat, who sat on the porch railing watching the chipmunks. The weather further confounded us with a late October snowstorm (the headline in the local paper read “SNOWLIAGE!”). Watching the snow melt and the dirt roads growing muddy, it felt more like spring than autumn.

While new second homes are outfitted with every appliance, in this Cheever-y summerhouse it was considered a virtue to do without — to do without showers, dishwashers and dug wells. The water from the cistern had a bitter taste, and a washcloth left in the sink overnight would mysteriously turn blue. Whether it was the dubious water or the Dr. Bronner’s biodegradable soap, my hair was never entirely clean. Our clothing smelled like wood smoke and the cuffs of our jeans were perpetually muddy. When we went to town we were like Peruvian miners returning to daylight, blinking hard at civilization. The previously magical path to the lake became woodsy and damp and a late day swim now seemed medically ill advised. The milky sunset was moving earlier and earlier, but when we complained about the shortening days and the dark mornings, a year-rounder friend replied briskly: “What difference does it make if you don’t have to get up for work?”

The travails of a year off and the exigencies of an 18th-century summerhouse are a privileged set of problems to explore. But a sabbatical demands a kind of self-directed work that’s very different from an articulated class schedule and a proscribed roster of tutorials and department meetings. It requires a daily discipline, especially in the face of a beautiful New England fall. I careened from feeling stupid for staying indoors while the lakes and mountains beckoned, to feeling irritated that I hadn’t committed to a hard and fast writing schedule. Normally I worked on projects for someone; this year I was simply writing. There was no guarantee that anything I wrote would be produced or published and I was forced to confront the daily uncertainties of the freelancer.

I became obsessed with other writers’ schedules. I read an interview with Haruki Murakami in the New York Times Magazine in which I learned that he lived a “monkishly regimented life.” He ran or swam long distances, went to bed at 9 p.m. and woke up “without an alarm” at 4 a.m. to sit down to five to six hours of “concentrated writing.” It was implied that “concentrated writing” did not include answering emails or reading reviews and I remembered how Jonathan Franzen had famously put glue in his Internet port in order to avoid temptation.

As a professor one is perpetually needed, putting out logistical fires for the students on a daily basis, expected to respond immediately to their angsty, hormonal emails. Now when my BlackBerry blinked, it was only an email advertising a geographically irrelevant college lecture or the arrival of the new Athleta catalog. While we all fantasize about uninterrupted days, in practice there was something about the open calendar that inspired existential dread. Now when I had no students, and my two sons were both away at school, I missed the various human obstacles that used to stand between me and my writing. In the Nick Hornby book “About a Boy,” the wealthy, unemployed protagonist divides his days into 30-minute “units” to keep himself sane. How many times have you heard about the lottery winner whose life falls apart once he gives up his day job?

Writing full-time, my wardrobe was reduced to pajamas, jeans and the same red plaid flannel shirt. I’d put sneakers on to take a walk and then return to the same shearling-lined Merrell clogs. Once I discovered how little clothing I needed when I wasn’t teaching, the siren song of the nearby outlets was stilled.

In late October we moved into a winterized house that we’d planned to rent out, but our young tenants were blind-sided by medical bills, caught without health insurance after a complicated ectopic pregnancy, and moved out unexpectedly. Unsure how soon we’d be able find another renter, we decided to move into the unfurnished house ourselves.

When the snow finally flew, our world was enveloped in silence, compounded by the extra insulation of a new house. The only sounds I heard were the wood furnace kicking in or the occasional flying squirrel in the walls. This sepulchral quality was the aural equivalent of our empty nest, and the newfound quiet made it remarkably easy to concentrate. My husband painted in the heated basement while I worked long hours in the living room by the wood stove. When I looked out the window at a snowcapped Mount Washington, my heart swooned like a teenage girl spotting her crush at a party.

I often remind my playwriting students to ask the Passover question: What makes this day different from all other days? Talking to our children on the phone I struggled to answer that question myself. A writing routine requires, well, routine. When life is uneventful — when you don’t get dressed, go to work or see other people — there are suddenly many hours in the day for writing.

As the pages stacked up, I began to see how this sabbatical thing worked, and the twinges of guilt and embarrassment I’d felt about a year off went away.  Teaching not only takes up the time that might otherwise go to writing, but the short-term ego gratification can supplant the need to write. Posterity can come to seem less important than the student in your office insisting that your class is “awesome.”

I subscribed to a website called I Done This that emailed me at 6 every evening asking me to account for my day. Replying with the list of tasks I’d accomplished opened up the larger question of what counted.  Did grocery shopping count? Laundry? Taking a walk?

I also wanted to use the year to check off a private bucket list that included reading Dickens, learning Spanish and returning to figure skating.  Middle-aged fear had supplanted my pre-pubescent skills so I took lessons at the local ice rink to recoup what I’d lost. Children were now being taught to skate by pushing milk crates around the ice so I skated among the jangling, periodic clatter of the falling stacks. I knew that Murakami or Franzen would never take time away from their writing to learn how to do a Lutz but I also knew that being a student, being bad at something, is the best way to remind yourself how to be a teacher, both because it’s humbling and because it reminds you that teaching involves breaking something down into manageable steps. How do you go from the security of skating on two feet to lifting one foot up and crossing it over the other while moving? Like writing, like everything, it’s harder than it looks.

A sabbatical too is harder than it looks. A sabbatical reminds you that humans are like working dogs. We like tasks; we like to be where we’re supposed to be at a certain time. A sabbatical also makes you confront the fact that you are replaceable. (A tone-deaf junior colleague emailed me early on to tell me what a great job my replacement was doing.) And a sabbatical forces you to articulate your definition of time well spent. If there were nothing standing between you and your writing, what would you write? And what else would you want to do? Is happiness grounded in geography? Is life about checking off bucket lists?

By the time April rolled around we knew that back in Ohio our colleagues were in the home stretch. We became nostalgic for those hooky-playing autumn days when we were floating around in kayaks with the year off stretching ahead of us. A sabbatical wasn’t quite as sweet once everyone had the summer off. Though I’m only halfway through “Bleak House,” I can still point to a respectable stack of pages written. I’m speaking some present-tense Spanish and skating with the 13-year-old divas in the center of the rink. Come August, I will have to repeatedly answer the question “How was your sabbatical?”

This essay is the long answer. The short answer will be: “It was great.”

My ability to just listen to her, to treat her like any other human being, would move her to tears. She would confess that she had never met anyone like me since becoming famous, someone who could just interact with her without any other agenda other than offering assistance. I would modestly dismiss this compliment yet secretly bask in a newfound sense of warm and fuzzy altruism. We would hug goodbye, and I would proceed to tell friends and family: Wow, Lindsay is so down-to-earth! The media has her wrong!

A year later, the actress has fled my neighborhood and I never once spoke to her. I never rescued her from the paparazzi hordes. I never knocked on her door bearing a homemade fruit pie. And I never found out whether discrepancies existed between the LiLo of the tabloids and the young, often harried-looking woman who darted in and out of her garage as if she were a soldier en route from the minefield to the relative safety of the barracks.

Instead, my year-long experience as the actress’ nearly next-door neighbor can be summed up in three missed opportunities for potentially friendly interaction, all of which occurred in the alley behind our houses.

Missed opportunity No. 1: While taking out my trash, I spotted her engaged in the identical task. It was a Sunday afternoon and we both had our hair in ponytails and wore sweat pants and T-shirts. Our sartorial similarities made her seem all that more approachable. Be neighborly, I told myself. Go over there and say hello! Tell her you don’t really believe she shoplifted that necklace. But before I could act, she had disappeared into her garage. After that, I only saw her assistants take out the garbage, along with the many strangers who combed through it.

Missed opportunity No. 2: Driving my car one day, I almost ran her over. She had been speed-walking down a sidewalk that intersected the alley, and I had to brake hard to avoid a collision. I raised my hand in apology, and she gave me an uninterested glance before walking onward. Up close, I could see the roots of her bleached blond hair, and she looked tired, fragile and older than her 25 years. After that, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her despite my increasing resentment that she had transformed my street into a media circus and necessary tourist detour from the nearby Venice Beach boardwalk.

Missed opportunity No. 3: My husband and I had just wheeled our bikes outside for a morning ride and could not help noticing the actress’s black Cadillac Escalade idling in front of our garage. So we stood there with our bikes and waited until she emerged from her own garage. We pretended not to watch her get into her vehicle and she pretended that we didn’t exist.

Recently, I told my sister that I had never met my famous former neighbor. She was shocked and not because she took me for a celebrity brown-noser. Rather, she lives in a New Jersey town where to be a good neighbor means to interact with the people who live among you. “I can’t imagine not knowing my neighbors,” she said.

I, on the other hand, have lived my entire adult life in either New York City or Los Angeles, in apartment buildings and on streets where most of my neighbors remained nameless if recognizable strangers. For the most part, I’ve lived in places that bear not even the slightest traces of the era where people traded gossip over clothing lines and knew when to knock on each other’s doors bearing cakes and casseroles. Today, I know much more about the lives of remote acquaintances who frequently post on Facebook than I do about the people who physically inhabit my street.

Of course, my neighbors and I knew plenty about the actress in our midst, no matter that she had installed a bamboo fence to obscure her roof deck. So when we did run into each other, we finally had a common topic of conversation to which we could collectively shake our heads and say things equal parts blasé and judgmental like: There goes the neighborhood. We could say these things with authority, because even though we couldn’t see beyond our neighbor’s bamboo fence, someone else could, since we could get online updates on the actress’ troubled life from dozens of celebrity news sites. Thanks to the actress in our midst, we now had a reason to gather on a street where privacy and anonymity generally trumped interaction. And we could mock her with impunity. Hadn’t the tabloids made it clear that she deserved it?

In truth, my fantasy of rescuing and bonding with the actress didn’t stem from a desire to be a good neighbor but from my own conflicted relationship with celebrity. As the actress’ year on my block progressed and people camped out on beach chairs hoping for Lindsay sightings, I had to ask myself whether I was any different from those interloping looky-loos I wanted off my street. Because while I might have physically avoided the actress all those months, giving her the privacy she seemed to desperately need, I also sucked up all the tabloid information on her I could in the name of wanting to know what was happening two doors down.

When meeting new people at parties, I could mention my famous neighbor and, boom, we’d have something to talk about for at least the next 10 minutes. I could feel special when friends told me they just spotted a fraction of my house in some TMZ photo that mostly depicted the side-by-side townhouses of the actress and on-again, off-again flame Samantha Ronson. My physical proximity to the actress made me interesting to other people and so I mattered in a way that could only apply in a world obsessed by celebrity and inundated by the public gossip of Internet tabloid culture.

A few months ago, I noticed the actress’ overflowing mailbox, much of its contents soggy from rain. So I did what I always did whenever I saw a crowd amass on the sidewalk in front of my house or spotted more than one news van parked across the street. I consulted TMZ and E! Online to help make sense of what I saw, and I learned, along with the rest of the world, that the actress, fed up with all the gawkers and stalkers, had evacuated Venice Beach for the Chateau Marmont.

Several days later, I watched two moving trucks cart away her belongings and observed her assistants darting in and out of her townhouse on last-ditch errands. Afterward, I went online to read more articles about the actress’s departure featuring anonymous quotes from my “rejoicing” neighbors who basically pronounced the nightmare over. The anonymous neighbors said other mean things about the actress that made me briefly resurrect my fantasy of rescuing her from peril. And then I said goodbye to the actress from a distance, in very much the same way I had not exactly welcomed her to the neighborhood.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: You’ve been a mommy for three years. Get over it.

But it wasn’t the prospect of becoming a parent that freaked me out. I loved my little boy and wanted to add another goofball to the family. What threw me into a tizzy was the prospect of being a mommy and all the cultural baggage that came along with it. With one child, you could be that interesting woman with the cute kid who still retained a modicum of cool. But the second child would define you. This is faulty logic, I know, but I believed it nonetheless: A mommy is invisible. A mommy has bad jeans and a minivan. Twenty-five-year-old boys would never check me out. I would never take off to London on a whim.

Our culture certainly didn’t help these insecurities. “Mommy” is used to denigrate female parents. Professional women planning to have children are on the “Mommy track.” When we write about our experiences, we are “Mommy bloggers.” When we differ about parenting, we engage in “Mommy wars.” When we get into a little erotica, it becomes “Mommy porn.” Once identified as a “mommy,” we’re identified as little else.

No matter that I was never that cool or adventurous in the first place. I was the high school valedictorian, the Goody Two-Shoes. I’d had two boyfriends and married one of them. I always win “I’ve Never” because, really, I’ve never. But now I had no chance to be cool. Any possibility was off the table. I considered getting a tattoo or tarting up my wardrobe, but then I realized that doing these things to avoid being a mommy cliché was a cliché in and of itself.

Eventually, I realized I needed to get over myself. The demands of parenting a small child did not leave time to wallow, and at lucid moments I recognized that I would not have young kids forever. I would be able to go to London someday, and I didn’t have to drive a minivan. But my mommy fears still nagged.

A year later — pregnant as can be and irreversibly a mommy — I learned that a favorite local photographer was looking for models for a project on pregnant women. It was an appealing proposition, but there was a catch: She wanted nudes. I dismissed the idea; I couldn’t do a nude photo shoot. But I also realized I did not want to be the type of person who would say no to this.

This is how I found myself in my yard in the nude. I had spent an hour posing with my clothes on — the black bike shorts and black tank that had become my uniform in those sweltering final weeks. The photographer, Ellen, posed shots of me contemplating my belly on the back deck, family portraits in front of a nearby dilapidated barn, and shots of my boy and me frolicking in the neighboring cemetery. We chatted while she clicked away: about pregnancy, our kids, our town, and her work, and I tried not to think about where this was leading.

Eventually it started to rain and we ducked into the front yard, sheltered by a tall hedge. I ignored my misgivings, summoned a little confidence, and shed my clothes.

All along, I hadn’t been sure I could strip. I may not be the person so neurotic she changes in the bathroom at the gym, but I’m also not the woman who wanders around the locker room stark naked. I’ve often struggled with my weight, and I fight the urge to hide my body: too much belly, too much breast, flab and curves where I don’t want them.

But pregnancy gave me a freedom with my body that I didn’t have before and haven’t had since. At nearly nine months, my body was supposed to look like this. I was supposed to have an enormous belly, giant breasts, and a little something extra in the back. I could have done without the tree-trunk thighs, but I could live with those, too. Much to my surprise, revealing this body felt fine. So did the rain on my skin — it was awfully hot being pregnant in June.

Once Ellen began shooting, I adopted a strategy of “don’t look down.” It was best to ignore the absurdity of standing in our tiny front yard, separated from the sidewalk and street by only a hedge. As the shoot progressed, I felt an amazement that I could do this, that I was doing this. I can still see it in the small, pleased smile I’m wearing in the photos. It is equal parts relief, surprise and satisfaction.

Looking at the photos now, years later, I feel a bittersweet pang for those last few days when we were just three, before we became something new. I’m gobsmacked not only by the size of my belly and breasts but also by my nerve.

Later that day, after Ellen left and I had dressed, my husband observed, “Now you’ll never have to get a tattoo.” I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful that the postman didn’t choose that moment to deliver the mail.

“Oh, just living with Mom,” I said, throwing an ironic thumbs up. I shrugged. “You know, with this economy…” Not even a full sentence, it worked as an excuse without technically being a lie. They all nodded with sympathy as if something had happened to me, and not because of me.

They’d heard I’d been in the Peace Corps and surely they pictured me suffering, knee-deep in river mud, hand-scrubbing a tattered poncho. Surely they didn’t picture me lounging on a Brazilian beach, or drinking red wine in Buenos Aires. Surely they didn’t picture my fellow volunteers and me heading to the capital at least once a month, watching dubbed American cable and feeding each other crème brûlée we got delivered to our hotel rooms, almost as a joke on poverty. Surely they didn’t suspect that I’d bought myself an air conditioner when my host mom offered to sell me hers and a horse just because it would probably be my only chance in life to have one, even if being a single woman going out in fields by herself started rumors that I was a hussy. They assumed I suffered in poverty, because suffering was supposed to be part of the fun.

But, out of sight of our host families, we gave in to the temptation to grab at the luxury within reach to break up the sweat, grisly meals and discomfort, both social and physical, that made up so much of our lives there. All you had to do was think in dollars, take out a 20 here and there from that one ATM that accessed American banks, and over two years you could deflate your savings on so many small comforts of the First World.

Even though it was my job to teach the locals about sustainability, I was leading my own unsustainable life, outspending my earnings 2-to-1, living on the edge of my credit limit and willfully ignoring the ticking of borrowed time. This is what leads to recession, on any scale.

At my high school reunion, I let the assumed victimhood ride, but at home, Mom knew better.

“You have three months,” she said. My stimulus package: 90 days of free rent, free food, unlimited pool and pool floatie raft access, as well as full-time use of her Jeep Cherokee while she drove her husband’s work truck with the 7-foot blind spot.

I slipped into the refuge of her life, but at night, lying under her seashell comforter, I felt the absence of everything I’d let myself lose. She knocked on her own guest bedroom door and came in, smiling, delighted to have her daughter on the same continent. She sat on the edge of the bed, stroking my hair. “Everything will be OK,” she said, seeing my red eyes. Her voice smoothed the hot shame, even though I had no reason to believe what she said.

The story was always that she and Dad had balanced each other out in every way, except that they were both bad with money. This was my breeding. I had lived paycheck to paycheck since I started scooping ice cream for a living at 14. In middle school, I was the one asking if anyone had 50 cents. In high school, I was the one losing the clothes I’d borrowed from friends. In college, I was the one lying in a clinic, selling my plasma for $20 of beer money.

Windfalls came at times: a tax return or a student loan check. After swearing I’d hold tight to the money this time, I never failed to let it slip through my fingers. Mom had bailed me out so many times that we put her name on my bank account so she could make deposits more quickly. Over the years, I sunk into debt with greater and greater abandon until I now found myself wearing my mom’s shoes to a temp job processing insurance forms.

Mom and I crossed paths in the kitchen while getting ready in the mornings, just like when I was in high school. “Honey, do you want a fruit cup?” she asked, packing me a lunch just this once. As I left, she handed me an insulated turquoise lunch box.

At work that day, I scraped my fruit cup with a plastic spoon and said to the other temps, one of whom was living in a homeless shelter, “You know, right now you just gotta do what you gotta do.”

I couldn’t even begin to make a plan. Plans required hope. After so many failures, failure became an all caps noun that I wore across my forehead at my second job as a bad waitress, pouring coffee for my former high school classmates out to organic brunches with their husbands and babies.

I could barely scrounge up the gas money to visit my best friends in their adult lives. They listened to my speech about digging myself out of the hole, doing the right thing this time and said, “That’s good.” When we went out to dinner, I let them pick up the check, making clear once again who was who.

Though already on hardship forbearance for my student loans, I thought the best move would be to apply to grad school. Acceptance would mean those magical student loan checks, a years-long break from paying back my undergrad loans, and, best of all, another smokescreen. You can be poor because you’re in the Peace Corps, you can be poor because of the recession, you can be poor because you’re a grad student, and no one will know that you’re poor because you’re too immature to stop yourself from getting a frappuccino when you have $7 in the bank. I’d worry about paying the debt back later, of course, once I had the great job a fine arts degree would land me.

So, instead of using my paychecks to pay back my mom, I spent them, more than $1,000, on the GRE testing costs and fees to apply for schools that would require more loans to attend. I mailed in the checks and did the approximate math, figuring they’d be OK. I let days pass without facing my bank balance. The longer I procrastinated, the more scared I became of what awaited me behind my user name and password. I held out another day. Then my debit card got declined at the gas station. I used my credit card, which I was pretty sure had at least $12 left to use. Then I went home and had to confront my computer.

Red. NSF. NSF. -$34. -$34. Balance: -$97. By the time I weighed the entire situation, I was hot all over again, panicked as if trapped somewhere, though I was only trapped inside myself.

There was only one place to turn, but the thought of asking my mom for money one more time almost made me nauseous. I had already stretched her generosity so far, who knew when it was going to snap?

When she asked how my day was, I told her what was going on, and she didn’t even make me ask.

“How about $100?” she said, just like I hoped she would.

“How about two?” I said, just to be safe.

She scrunched her brow and stared a second, as if she didn’t recognize the person in front of her.  “Don’t be a taker,” she said.

I had no facial expression in my repertoire to respond to my own mother, looking at me like that, so I just looked down.

Weeks later, I got an acceptance letter to grad school, an invitation to spend $40,000 a year living in one of the world’s most expensive cities, educating myself in the arts, paid for with interest by my future self, guaranteed to be bolstered by emergency loans from my future mom and dinners out from my future friends picking up the tab for their broke grad student buddy. The person I hated myself for being would have accepted. But by that time, I knew what a better person would do, and I knew I wanted to be a better person.

After we said goodbye and got into the car, John sighed. “Well, that was a waste of 200 bucks,” he said. Then he reached over and squeezed my hand.

We’d been searching for another couple — people to hang out with and take vacations and trade stories about our three nearly grown children — for more than a year. Ever since our breakup with Sara and Greg.

- – - – - -

Those aren’t their real names. But the story is true: It’s about the wonderful couple we fell for and how we were happy for a while and then how our relationship died.

We met at a mutual friend’s and talked for hours. We were all in our 40s. Greg and I had both married — and divorced — young; we each had an adult son with disabilities. John and Sara were devoted stepparents, walking that awkward line between authority and friend. We were all weekend travelers and motorcycle riders. Our tastes overlapped on every level, from Eritrean food to Robert Downey Jr. films.

Things got intense really fast. Greg and Sara came by with takeout twice a week. We showed up at their place with wine every Saturday night. When we were apart for more than a couple days, the texts between us flew.

I based the sardonic-yet-loyal best friend in my  new novel on Sara and sent her the manuscript the moment I finished a draft. Then I waited a tense week for her to read it. I was ecstatic when she approved.

On our anniversaries, which happened to fall on the same autumn weekend, we rented adjoining cottages at a bed and breakfast. I’d been injured earlier that week, trying to help my autistic son get dressed. So I arrived with three cracked ribs and John, Greg and Sara took care of me, lifting me from the booth where we had our celebratory dinner and — when we got back to our cottage — settling me gently into a chair with pillows to support my aching side.

We stayed up that night drinking port and eating apple slices and sharp cheese by a slow-burning fire. Quite late, Greg began speaking in a broken voice about my injury and our afflicted sons. He wept.

“It never gets easier,” he said. “I wake up at night wondering what’s going to happen after I die. But then I think of you guys, in the same situation …”

Sara nodded, leaned over to kiss her husband and put one thumb to the tear rolling into his silver beard. “Finding you two has been … healing,” she said.

Then they hugged us both and left for their own cottage. John ran a hot bath and eased me into it, holding me carefully so I wouldn’t slip. We climbed into our pedestal bed that night, with Greg and Sara next door. And I felt as safe and cared for as I ever had in my life.

I assumed we would take this friendship to our graves.  But shortly after that weekend, small fissures began.

- – - – - -

Look back at any relationship that’s splintered and you’ll probably see a series of wrong turns leading up to the end.

My first marriage, for instance. There was no defining event: no affair, no beating, no fight so cruel it couldn’t be taken back. There were, instead, a number of bad decisions whose consequences we suffered together until there was simply too much difficulty between us. So it was with Sara and Greg.

We talked about everything, from condo association problems in the building where John and I lived to employee hassles at the cafe Greg and Sara owned to parenting decisions involving our five collective kids. Looking back, it’s clear this was a problem. We definitely overstepped and overshared.

Take the bitter fight that John and I had over a $12,000 plumbing bill. It was a horrible episode — the biggest rift ever in our marriage — that somehow escalated to a point where John stormed out of the house and stayed gone for several days.

While things were still heated, we made the colossal mistake of airing the fight to our friends. Sara immediately took my side; Greg was stoic, but it was clear he skewed toward John’s. Once the episode was over and our marriage repaired, Sara asked me over for dinner, alone, to talk.

“I still love you,” Sara said, “but I’ll never feel the same way about John. So far as I’m concerned, you never should have taken him back.”

Greg was quiet for a moment. Then he said simply: “Sara and I disagree about this. Please give John my best.”

We resumed as best we could, Sara bristling and John on edge. It wasn’t like before, but I was determined to get back that perfect foursome we’d been in the cottage on that dark September night.

- – - – - -

It was as if something invisible had broken. On the surface we looked the same, but now nothing quite worked.

It had long been our habit to meet for dinners where Greg and Sara would cook and John and I would supply the wine. But suddenly, the invitations were waning. So I tried switching it up, inviting them to our place and stirring risottos until my hand went numb. These were awkward events, full of silences; neither of them could hide their disappointment in my lackluster meals.

Also, now that they were coming to our house more frequently one of my teenagers had revolted, saying it was fine to have one stepparent but too much to have three. “Greg and Sara are your friends, not mine,” she said. “I don’t really want their opinions about my life.”

Gradually, our dates grew farther apart and we talked less in between. During a rare walk in spring, Sara told me they were cutting down their social circle. “We’re excising the B list,” she said. Then she paused. I felt an icy sense of dread.

There was one more dinner — a potluck that was weird and strained. Greg and Sara had decided to move down South, help take care of her aging parents, and start life afresh. They were leaving in a couple of months. They said they hoped we’d stay in touch.

But when I sent an email a few weeks later, it went unanswered. I followed with a text message, forgetting I was using a new phone. “Who is this?” Sara texted back. “It’s Ann,” I keyed. “Sorry. Forgot to give you new #.” Silence followed, reproachful and complete.

I thought about begging, calling their voice mail to say: “I miss you. I love you. Can’t we try again?”

I didn’t, for two reasons. The first was my pride — but I could have gotten over that. The second was that John no longer wanted to try; so far as he was concerned, the relationship was dead.

We limped through months of bad dates, with couples we found at John’s workplace and at mine. But some element of the four-way chemistry was always wrong. There was a brief relationship with an editor and her longtime boyfriend. We had hopes for them until the night they showed up for dinner, grim-faced, and told us they’d broken up earlier that day.

Meanwhile, I stalked Sara and Greg online, where they posted news of their going-away party, their older son’s wedding, and their new home. They looked so happy in the photos! Each time, I welled up with affection. But they were gone and our weekend nights were empty. I was sure we’d never find friends like that again.

- – - – - -

Shortly after our dinner with the boat captain, a close friend of mine who’d been widowed announced that she’d reconnected with her high school boyfriend and they were planning to marry within the month.

John and I went in wary. Expectations were very low and, sure enough, our first dinner as a foursome was strained. I don’t know what made us try again. But over the next year, something quiet and comfortable grew. Each of us is equally invested and every permutation works; in other words, no one’s taking sides.

We meet once a month or so to talk about almost everything: Our careers, our plans, the puzzlement and joys of our seven collective adult kids. But we don’t get emotionally tangled in each other’s intimate lives or occupy each other’s homes.

I still miss Greg and Sara, but in the way you do a youthful romance so fierce and consuming it burned itself out. We needed them too much; the power dynamic in our relationship was off. What we have now is less dramatic but more durable — much like the marriage John and I built when we came back together.

As a couple, we finally grew up.