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“I always looked at you,” he said quietly. “Even when I wasn’t supposed to. Anytime I could. At the cabin when you were in the lake on the tube. I watched you from the window at the engagement party before I came down, because I knew I couldn’t look at you when I was there. I looked when you wouldn’t notice. Any chance I got.”

I smiled softly.

His face went a little serious. “You are my reason, you know that?”

I tilted my head. “For what?”

“For everything. For existing. For waiting forever, for not waiting at all.”

I sat up so I could look at him. He lay there, gazing at me.

“I thought I was going to have to watch you have a life with someone else, and that one day I was going to have to move on and do the same thing. But there would have been a morning sixty years from now when someone would search for a gravestone of a woman they don’t know to sprinkle their grandfather’s ashes over it in honor of a final request that nobody understands. I could never not love you. I tried.”

I felt my throat get tight.

“I will never forgive myself for the year we weren’t together,” I whispered.

“We were together. We got to be friends first. That’s better,” he said, brushing a thumb across my cheek. “You’re the best thing to ever happen to me, even if I had to wait for it. I’m just going to be grateful that it happened at all.”

We lay there, looking at each other. I could feel the love between us like a tangible thing. And I could feel the sadness too. I wished I could snip it like a frayed cord. Let it fall away and only the good parts would tether us. But we were bound by both.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to be with Mike on your birthday,” I said.

He stared past me at the rain-streaked window. “I wouldn’t have hung out with him anyway,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I couldn’t forgive him for what he did.”

“You might have. If he changed enough.”

He looked at me. “Could you? Forgive him if he changed enough?” he asked.

“That’s not the same thing.”

I felt his lungs fill with air and slowly breathe out. “I hate lying to them,” he said quietly. “I wish I could just tell them and get it over with. So we don’t have to hide and we can have a normal life.”

“It’s been more than two months since Mike and I broke up. It’s March. Maybe it won’t be so bad?”

“But what if it is? None of them will ever talk to me again. That’s fine. I expect that. But I just don’t know how he’ll take it. I don’t want to be the reason why Mike has a mental breakdown just so I can feel better about not keeping secrets.” He shook his head. “I just don’t know how to handle any of this.”

I put my head on his shoulder. He threaded his hand in mine and closed his eyes.

I hated this. I wished this wasn’t the price. Or that if it was, I could be the one to pay it.

It was hard to imagine that I was a consolation for what he was giving up, no matter how wonderful the last month was. In the four walls of our house, our life was perfect. But what about the rest of it? He had no family. He had no friends. He’d given up everyone and everything. He was grieving people who were still alive.

“You are enough, you know,” he said quietly, like he’d read my mind. “I would do it all over again. I wouldn’t change anything.” He kissed the side of my head. “Except not smiling more.”

I laughed a little.

“I had a great birthday,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I love you,” I whispered.

I loved the way these words changed his face. The softness it made around his eyes.

All I could do was love him with everything I had—and it wasn’t even hard.