"This vacation sucks and you suck." I saved four months for that resort, raising both kids alone since the divorce — My 7-year-old called his dad in front of me to say it again, and then my ex asked me for the phone.

We had one full day left.

I decided, somewhere between breakfast and the beach, that I wasn't going to spend it inside my own head.

The messages would be there when I got home.

The conversation with Mark would happen when it happened.

The kids were here, now, and the trip had cost eleven hundred dollars across three payment installments, and I was going to use every hour of it.

So I did.

We rented paddleboards and fell off them repeatedly.

Mia refused to get on one herself but sat on mine like a small, imperious figurehead while I paddled us in slow circles.

Caleb, after two failed attempts, figured out the balance and spent twenty minutes standing up on his own, grinning in a way I hadn't seen from him in months.

"Mom, look," he kept saying.

"Mom.

Are you looking?"

"I'm looking," I kept saying.

We had fish tacos from a place with plastic chairs and paper plates.

Mia ate the tortilla and left the fish.

Caleb ate everything and then half of mine.

In the late afternoon we went back to the pier.

This time Mia wanted to walk the whole length of it, which took a while because she stopped to examine every gap between the boards and ask questions about what lived underneath.

"Crabs," Caleb told her.

"Thousands of them."

"Are they friendly?"

"Some of them."

"How do you know which ones?"

"You have to ask."

She considered this seriously.

"What language do crabs speak?"

"Crab," Caleb said, without missing a beat.

I laughed.

A real one, the kind that comes up without warning.

Caleb looked at me sideways and almost smiled.

We stood at the end of the pier as the sun started dropping.

The light went orange and flat across the water.

Mia pressed her face between the railings again, looking for the friendly crabs.

"I'm glad we came," Caleb said.

I looked at him.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He was quiet for a moment.

"I'm sorry it took me until day three to figure that out."

"You're seven," I said.

"You get some time."

"Dad said—" He stopped.

"You can say it."

"Dad said you probably picked this place because it was the only thing you could afford and that I shouldn't expect much." He said it quickly, like he'd been holding it and needed to put it down.

"He said it the night before we left."

The orange light on the water.

Mia's voice asking about crabs.

"Caleb," I said.

"Look at where we are."

He looked.

The pier, the water, the last of the sun.

"This is what I could afford," I said.

"And it's pretty good."

He didn't say anything for a moment.

"It's really good," he said.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I didn't take it out.

It buzzed again.

Then a third time.

Caleb watched my pocket.

"Dad?"

"Probably."

"Are you going to answer?"

"Not right now."

He nodded.

Turned back to the water.

The phone went quiet.

Later, after the kids were in bed, I finally looked.

Not three texts this time.

A missed call and a voicemail.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and pressed play.

Mark's voice.

Calm.

Measured.

The voice he used when he'd prepared what he wanted to say.

*I've been thinking about our situation and I think we need to revisit the custody arrangement.

I'm not trying to make this difficult.

I just think, given some of the things Caleb has been sharing with me, that it might be worth having a more formal conversation about what's best for the kids.

I've already spoken to someone.

I think you should too.*

I listened to it twice.

Then I set the phone down on the nightstand.

He'd already spoken to someone.

He had been building this — quietly, carefully, message by message, month by month — and now he was telling me it was already in motion.

I sat in the dark for a long time.

Then I picked up the phone and opened my contacts.

I scrolled to a name I hadn't called in over a year.