The protagonist, an aging man who is still recovering from his divorce many years earlier, is attending a “divorce party” with a woman he just met named Cristina. Both lonely and desperate, the two had shared a night of drunken sex and emotional confessions that the protagonist had quickly forgotten by the next morning. The divorce party is for Cristina’s friends who have decided to end their marriage and celebrate being newly single with this new-age, contemporary take on divorce. The protagonist thinks instead about his own divorce and how brutal it was as Cristina fills him in on the history of the couple, their families, and the gossip about them all. Soon, the protagonist notices that there is a large desert tortoise slowly roaming around the party. At first he is shocked, but Cristina assures him that the tortoise is just the groom’s beloved pet, Greeley. The protagonist becomes transfixed on the tortoise. Cristina tells him the story of how Greeley was hit by a truck but survived with nothing but a large scar on her shell. The protagonist begins to follow Greeley around the party. He is fascinated by what she represents; endurance, longevity, strength, history, nature, and survival. As he chats to various people and tracks Greeley, the protagonist thinks about how he needs to remain anonymous so that he doesn’t feel judged by these strangers, and so that he doesn’t have to think about himself and his past. The protagonist drinks more and thinks about the freedom of being unknown and unnoticed. Eventually, the protagonist leaves the tent and wanders into the desert to go to the bathroom. While there, he is startled by a young girl — the flower girl from the wedding — who suddenly emerges from the foliage. He asks her what she’s doing, and she explains that she is following Greeley, who has started to head off into the night. He questions whether he is hallucinating, and even asks the flower girl if she is his daughter. Together they sit and watch Greeley dig a hole in the sand. The protagonist thinks about his daughter, Sylvie. She was eight years old when she was killed in a freak accident when a bridge collapsed as the protagonist was driving them to the liquor store. The protagonist is haunted by his past and wishes that he could be with his daughter in heaven. He snaps out of this memory and returns to the desert with the flower girl. He tells her to make her promises carefully. Soon, the girl’s parents break through the brush and interrogate the protagonist about what he’s doing drunk in the desert with their young daughter, and he explains that they were just watching the tortoise. When they ask him who he is there with, he says “no one.”