What Looks Like Bravery

By her mid-thirties Laurel is a ship about to splinter on the rocks, having learned the hard way that no achievement can protect her from pain or remove the guilt and regret her dad’s death leaves her with. So, she determines to explore her troubled internal wilderness by way of some big exterior ones—Northern New Mexico, Western Alaska, her Tinder App. Joy in the wake of loss, she learns, isn’t possible despite the hardest things that happen to us, but because of the meaning we forge from them.