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He peered at me with those gentle eyes. “I know you can. But let me help you anyway.”

I studied him while he waited for me to answer.

“I’d need wooden boards and some nice plates,” I said. “Everything for the boxes are disposable, but for a graze table I’d need permanent fixtures to display the food. That’s going to be most of the cost. For the mock-up I’d need flowers, the meat and cheese, fruit—enough to serve at least twenty-five to look impressive enough… A thousand dollars?”

“I can give you that.”

I shook my head. “No. I am not taking money from you.”

We had a little stare-down. He took a careful bite of mac and cheese and chewed it while I watched his brain working.

He swallowed. “What if…”

“What if what?”

“What if you pay me back?”

He wouldn’t let me pay him back. I knew this without even thinking about it, it was a trick.

“Look,” he said. “There’s never going to be a better time to try this. The universe made the decision for you—rewrite the script. Don’t go back to waitressing. Pick a different door.”

My eyes roamed his face. His earnest expression. He really wanted to do this. He genuinely wanted to help me—but then he always had, even when I didn’t know it.

Every man I’d ever trusted had let me down. All of them except for one.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try it. But I won’t borrow money from you. I’ll let you co-sign on a loan. If you’re willing.”

“Is it because I won’t let you pay me back?”

“Yes, it one hundred percent is.”

He coughed out a laugh. “Okay. We’ll go to the bank tomorrow.”

He went back to eating and I sat there and watched him, my bowl in my lap. He turned on the TV and flipped through the channels as an ache bloomed in my chest. It crept through my body like a slow-moving flood, the words he said last night floating on the top.

Do you understand…

I did.

In fact, it was the only thing in a really long time that actually made sense.

This man loved me.

Many men had claimed to, but this is what love looks like. And I was almost glad that I’d been shown what love isn’t my whole life so I’d know what it was when I finally saw it.

I set my bowl on the table and climbed into his arms. He didn’t even pause. He folded around me, and I held on to him with my eyes squeezed shut and he drew me in closer and anchored me. He’d just gotten out of the shower. I could smell the soap he used, and he was wearing the hoodie I’d worn that one time. I knew how it felt to wear it and now I knew how it felt to be held by him when he had it on, and all I could think sitting on this couch in his arms was that I loved him too.

This feeling wasn’t fragile. It wasn’t the wisp of a thing I’d felt for Mike. It was roots and trunk and branches reaching to the sky. It was under and over and in the middle and it had been growing longer than I’d even realized.

I was too spent to unravel it, to decide what it meant, or what I should do about it. I just knew that I felt it. I was reduced to the barest bones of myself, broken and on the verge of giving up. Everything was bad, everything ruined.

Maybe that’s how you learn truths about yourself, when you’re withered down to nothing so it’s easy to see what’s left. And Chris was it. He was the sliver of light coming through a crack in the door in a dark room. The scent of home, a soft landing, a port in the storm. The only person in the world I trusted to catch me when I’m falling. And how can you not love someone who’s that? You can’t help it even if you want to.

45

CHRIS

Larissa had been staying at my house for over a week. We ate all our meals together, spent almost every minute hanging out.