Slowly, Alex stands to his full height. I see the suspicion in his still-watery eyes and do my best to maintain an innocent expression.
“Because of Ruthie?”
“Because of Ruthie,” I confirm.
“Are you going to change your mind once the emotion of this moment wears off?”
“I don’t think so. I’m sorry it took seeing you with Ruthie for me to believe it, but I know you love me. And it would be dumb of me to throw that away because of something you did”— I do the math in my head. He died at fifty-eight, he said, and we hooked up at Ellie’s wedding when we were twenty-five—“thirty-three years ago. That’s my entire life, you know. I’d hate for someone to judge me based on something dumb I did as a baby.”
I smile cheekily, and he laughs. I take a deep breath and decide to be a little braver.
“Also, there’s the fact that I’m in love with you too. I’m used to thinking only with my head—that’s why I said we couldn’t be together even though we wanted to. Maybe it’s time I start thinking with my heart.”
“And your heart is telling you to be with me.”
“My heart is telling me to be with you.”
“Because you love me.”
“Because I love you.”
“Because of Ruthie.”
His delivery is deadpan, but there’s a smile on his face that’s growing wider by the second. Before I know it, I’m smiling back, and we stand there just smiling at each other.
“Notjustbecause of Ruthie… I realized I loved you weeks ago. Before the party. But you adopting my cat after I died certainly doesn’t hurt your case.”
Alex laughs again, a short, surprised, maybe even amazed sound. And then I’m engulfed in his arms as he peppers kisses all over my face. Then we’re both laughing, and the thought passes through my mind: If I could spend the rest of my life laughing with Alex, it would be a second life well spent.
Epilogue
The water in the Gulf of Thailand is warmer in spring than the water off the coast of Southern California gets even at the peak of summer. I’m so used to all my nerves being jolted by frigid waters, so used to having to throw my entire body in and wait for the sensation to pass, that the warm waters on this side of the globe feel unnatural to me.
It feels like something as powerful as the ocean should come with a little bite to it.
“We should move here,” says a smooth voice behind me, but I don’t turn away from the ocean, allowing myself to continue basking in the tranquility of it.
“You say that no matter where we are,” I point out.
It’s true. He said it when we backpacked through South America after freshman year—nothing like a three-month language immersion to kick-start my Spanish lessons—and on our spring-break trips to Greece and Spain. After we spent our junior year studying in Paris, I had to play hardball to actually get him on the plane back home—he’d made quite the case for staying, saying we shouldn’t put Ruthie and Penguin through a second transatlantic flight if we could help it.
I was originally hesitant to travel—I didn’t want the cats to feel abandoned—but at this point, Kimiko is so used to cat-sitting that I feel like she thinks they’re partially hers. She’s watched them every trip except this one and our year in Paris.
Luckily, Sierra is proving to be a great cat-sitter, sending photos and videos twice a day.
“But this time I actually mean it,” he says, wrapping his arms around me. I look up into Alex’s warm brown eyes, overcome by affection for this boy who, year by year, grows closer in appearance to the man I remember.
“You always mean it,” I counter. I really think he does, and I’m always tempted to take him up on it. We’ve been here only a few days, but so far I love Thailand.
Last night, I tried scorpion, the experience calling to mind that first conversation, the only one eighteen-year-old Alex and I had before he came back for his second life. We said lobsters were basically just sea scorpions.
I can now say with absolute certainty that that isnottrue.
“Say the word, and I’ll invest in real estate right now. Don’t you want a vacation home?”
I roll my eyes, even though his words bring to mind our most recent fight.
Over the past four years, I’ve carefully pinched every penny to be able to afford the vacations we take, working three jobs at one point. When we were planning this trip—which was both easier and harder than the others because it’s the first one we’ve taken with friends and therefore the first that allowed us to split the cost of rooms so many ways but it also involved taking five additional budgets into consideration—I nearly had a meltdown and called the whole thing off.
