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A bitter laugh huffed through her lips. Look at the irony now: She was the one who’d fallen apart, and now he was the one with everything together. If she tried to broach anything now, she’d be such a hypocrite. She wouldn’t broach anything anyway, because he was happy with Emily, and she wasn’t about to break up somebody’s relationship. To be the other woman. No.

Besides, what if she only wanted him now because he had everything together and she didn’t? If she only wanted a taste of what she’d had before everything fell apart?

“When my friends dumped me,” she said quietly, “it rocked my world. No, it rocked me. It made me realize that work wasn’t enough. That even if I had the best job ever that impressed everyone around me, it still wasn’t enough, and where did that leave me? What was the point of it all?” She shook her head. “And then Danica got that Whitney exhibit, and that fully broke me. Because nothing I could ever do would be more impressive than that. She’d won the image war. Forever. Even if I somehow eventually got one, which I won’t, she’d still be the youngest artist ever to do it. So again, what was the point? It really made me look inward. Think about what actually mattered.”

The woods were silent and still. Even Neptune was quiet, his ears perked for whatever came next. She continued, feeling each word like ice melting in her mouth, “I think that I don’t know who I am. I think that I’ve lived my life so far in pursuit of what other people want. First college admissions boards, then trying to get the dream job, then…I lost sight of myself. I don’t know what I actually want. I don’t know who I actually am.”

She let the words hang in the air for a few seconds in a cloud of fog. Her eyes had adjusted to the point where, when it cleared, she could see Leo looking at her not with pity but compassion. Her fingers flexed with the want to hold his.

Somewhere in the process of her thinking all this through, Leo had swiveled to face her, twisting the cords of his swing the way they used to when they were kids and they’d want to spin spin spin until they were dizzy. “I know the Shira Levinson that was there before you started joining clubs to impress the admissions committees at Harvard and Yale and Princeton.” And Brown, she thought, her first choice, which had rejected her. “She loved art, and she loved sharing art with others. None of that was made up to impress people. She’s meant to share art with the world. Maybe not in a high-pressure gallery but somehow.” He reached out as if going to grab her hand. She held her breath, but his arm fell before they could touch. “And she wanted to throw a Hanukkah party for her neighborhood so that she could share the joy of being Jewish with everybody, not so that she could show off.”

She felt like she might burst into tears. “It’s true. When did you get everything figured out?”

“I don’t have everything figured out,” he said softly, and she could hear the words he didn’t say. Just you, Shira.

She loved him, she realized suddenly. She’d always loved him.

How had she never realized it before?

Maybe this was the stripped-down core of her, or part of it, anyway. As a kid she’d loved Leo before she knew what romantic love even meant. And now, as an adult, with everything stripped away from her, this was still who she was. She still loved Leo David. She wanted Leo David.

And she couldn’t tell him that. He’d moved on.

Her stomach twisted. She’d figured the first bit of herself out, and that was good, she told herself. It gave her some sense of peace because it meant that there was still a Shira Levinson in there to find.

She didn’t burst into tears, but her eyes did well up. “I’m really happy for you,” she said, swallowing over the lump in her throat. “Genuinely, I am. I’m really happy that you’re doing so well.” That harsh laugh again. “You’ve really found your thing. Your passion. You’re living and breathing your game, right?” He was staring at her like she was leaking out of the ears instead of the eyes. “I cared too much about what people thought, and you didn’t care what anyone thought. You really had it right.”

He was quiet. His tongue darted out to lick his lips, then slipped back into his mouth. “Shira.” His voice was nothing more than the whisper of wind on trees. “That’s not true. I cared what one person thought.” He met her eyes, and his were soft now, like the carpet of pine needles underfoot in the summer. “That first winter I saw you, I was ready to rot at the warehouse forever, miserable and angry, and I didn’t care what my dad thought or the neighbors thought or my old classmates thought. But then you were here, and you were disappointed in me, and I could live with their disappointment, but I couldn’t live with yours.” She realized she was holding her breath. “I did this all for you.”

For a moment it was like the rest of the world faded away. The only two people in existence were Shira and Leo, sitting on their swings, their legs kicking into gray nothingness, the ropes reaching up into the endless sky above. For a moment she let herself imagine it could stay this way forever. No having to figure out her life and who she was. No dating apps. Only the swing set and Leo and his hands and his lips and the way her head fit perfectly into the crevice between his chin and his chest.

And then the bubble broke. “Leo? Neptune?” Emily’s voice echoed through the woods. “Are you guys still back here?”

Shira allowed herself a moment of wild, crazy hope that Leo would ignore his girlfriend, grab Shira’s hand, and—what? They would run away giggling madly into the dark woods, which eventually ended at the highway? Of course he didn’t. He had a whole life without her, one with a job and a girlfriend and friends and activities, that existed entirely outside this bubble. He stood, holding Neptune’s leash—when had he grabbed it?—and called back. “Yeah, we’re here.”

Dead leaves crunched softly as Emily approached. Her flashlight beam blinded Shira for a moment before she stood, too. “Oh, cute,” Emily said, squinting at the swing set. “I didn’t know this was back here.”

“Yeah, all this is technically my dad’s land.” Leo stepped closer to Emily and gave her a quick, casual hug. Shira hated how her heart squeezed to see it. “We didn’t get the swing set until I was older, and I begged for it to be back here, where we’d have more privacy. I think by then my parents knew they weren’t having another kid, so they were more than happy to have the screaming of older kids on a swing set farther away.”

“Nice,” Emily said. “Privacy.” She smiled at Shira. “I hear you found our runaway friend?”

Why did she have to be so nice? Why couldn’t she be stiff and snobby toward her boyfriend’s female childhood friend so that Shira could dislike her in peace? Shira forced a smile. “I didn’t find him so much as run away with him,” she said. “I should’ve let someone know I was taking him for a walk. Sorry.”

“All’s well that ends well,” Leo and Emily said in unison, and they laughed, her head resting on his shoulder—where, Shira hated to see, it fit perfectly. “Anyway,” Emily said. “They’re about to light the candles but didn’t want to do it without you. And by they, I mostly mean me, because I’ve been studying up on those blessings and you need to see the way I am going to rock them even though I don’t know any Hebrew.”

“Yeah you are,” said Leo, and the two of them, plus Neptune, pulled ahead of Shira. “By the way, I think I made my decision about Tiny Elephant.”

“You did?” Emily said. “What are you going to do?”

The rest of their conversation about a tiny elephant—Shira wanted a tiny elephant, honestly, because then people would ask her only about her tiny elephant and not about herself, and also it would be extremely cute—was swallowed up by the noise from the party. Even with the cold, the back windows were all flung wide open to let out some of the people steam inside.

Leo and Emily, still talking, disappeared through the back door. Shira stood there on the deck for a moment, watching them go. They didn’t notice her back there, and that was fine. Because you know what? Shira didn’t deserve Leo, anyway. Not the Shira she was now. Leo knew the Shira she’d been back then, but she wasn’t the same person now. She couldn’t be. And she couldn’t try to blow up his whole world without knowing if that new person would be worth it. Would deserve him.

A sense of peace spread through her as the sounds of the blessings poured out the window, bathing her in light. This was what she wanted. This was what she needed. By next year, she wouldn’t just have outer peace—she’d have inner peace, too.

From Leo David’s sent-emails folder, January:

Hi Eric—I really appreciate you reaching out. The idea of Tiny Elephant buying Washing Dishes and also bringing me on to head the department is an exciting one, and I’m thrilled to accept. As I’m sure you know, doing this on my own has been quite the undertaking—all the marketing, all the developing, all the storyboarding—and I’m ready to have a team to take on some of that work in the future…