If you can’t let go of anything, let go of everything.

These are the words Mara recalls one night as she considers her circumstance: solitary, penurious, sleeping on an attic floor, hiding in a seaside village.

Mara took that advice: She fled her home in Canada for the Maine coast, carrying only a handful of clothes, some cash, and a burning, charring, hollowing grief ignited by her stillborn child. Left behind are husband and family, and the illusions of desire and happiness that held them all together.

Mara is broken, fragmented, and this is how Freeman tells her story: in shards – a paragraph or two per page, connected by narrative, but separated by space. Like Mara herself, her outer and inner selves apart like repelling magnets. Each paragraph is a complete vignette, soulful, but descriptive, never yielding to linguistic sleight of hand. It is language a journalist would love for its directness, but also a logophile for its elegance.

The timeline loops, but not excessively. As Mara finds her footing, details emerge from her past, deepening the context of her flight, and by the time the story reaches its apex, we see Mara in full, a woman set adrift by grief, but also one in the midst of an opportunity to gauge the value of the life she’s abandoned.

You might think we humans would be good at grieving, given all the loss we experience, but mostly we’re not. Once sorrow encases us, there are but two options: give in or move through and beyond. Both are painful, but one offers hope. “Tides” is a beautiful story about a woman who chooses hope.