I WAITED until I was outside the hotel’s empty lobby before I started jogging. After a minute, I broke into a sprint. Down the middle of the pitch-dark street, I huffed and puffed, sweating like a marathon runner, like an action movie star escaping an impending nuclear explosion.

I was fast, too. Maureen was the tall, blond, long-limbed pitcher. Cathy was the short, tough catcher, and I was the lean, mean, in-between fast one. The now-you-see-her, now-you-don’t, lay-one-down-the-third-base-line-and-beat-you-to-first-base fast one.

And at that moment, I needed every ounce of my speed to take me away from what I’d seen.

Because what I’d witnessed wasn’t just the two-for-one end of my relationships with my boyfriend and my best friend.

I guess you could call it the proverbial last straw.

My dad, a Maryland state trooper, had died in the line of duty when I was eleven. All dads are special, of course, but my dad actually was an extremely special human being. Exceedingly kind, deeply moral, and a gifted, natural listener, he was the person everyone he came into contact with—coworkers, neighbors, the mailman, complete strangers—turned to for comfort and advice.

Which was what made his unexpected death even more devastating. It tore something deep and fundamental inside of my mom. Once an intensely religious teetotaler, she started drinking. She put on eighty pounds and stopped taking care of herself. Everything came to a head in the spring of my junior year in college when she committed suicide in my dad’s old Ford F-150 with the help of a garden hose.

Maureen and Alex had bookended me throughout my mom’s funeral arrangements. Since I had no brothers or sisters or close relatives, they had been more than best friends to me. They had been the only family I had left.