She was an event coordinator for the conference. That’s how he always tells it. How they “just clicked.” How she felt like a fresh start.
Looking back, it’s more like she smelled opportunity.
Tracy—early forties now, so early thirties then—had one of those carefully curated appearances. Blonde bob, always exactly the same neat angle. Nails done. Clothes that looked expensive if you didn’t know what real expensive looked like. She smiled a lot. Too much. It never reached her eyes.
She also had two kids in tow:
Brandon, who was eleven then and already a raging combination of entitlement and Axe body spray.
Sierra, seven, who started out shy and normal and slowly got sculpted into a mini version of her mother.
Tracy moved from Chicago to Boston after three months of dating my dad. Three. Months.
Six months after they met, they were married.
Red flags? Oh, we had a whole parade.
I remember standing in the front yard in a dress Grandma had ironed three times, watching Tracy step out of her Uber with her kids and her luggage and that smile, thinking:
She doesn’t look like us.
And not just on the outside.