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I jot a few other notes below his in the margins, until at last the pressure to move back downstairs is too great, and I know it is time to leave. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to find Lyla on the phone with the doctor, arranging to kidnap me and drag me to their office herself.

I feel myself smiling—a foreign expression for my face given these last few days—as I walk back down to my floor.

But when I reach my office door, Lyla is nowhere to be seen.

Instead, it’s Ferris who is standing beside my desk.

Oh. Right. Is it that time already?

With two fingers tapping on the wood, he’s peering at the picture frames on my desk, deep in his own thoughts. There’s something in his eyes as he looks at the one of Olivia and me. It’s the one we took at my college graduation.

I remember that day clearly. One of our better moments, both of our arms clasped tightly around the other’s waist, bright-eyed grins as Dad said something playful about his beautiful, brilliant girls and snapped the photo. Ferris had his own college graduation that day, as I remember. He missed mine but met up with me later that evening out with friends. And in doing so, like so many other times through our lives, both he and Olivia were ships sailing in the night. How many hundreds, thousands, of times I’ve wondered, How much sooner would we have broken it off had they really gotten to know each other at an earlier point?

Had he joined us during the family beach trip my senior year?

Had he come that Easter when his family traveled to Oklahoma and he almost stayed with us?

Exactly how much heartache and time would’ve been spared, for both of us, had they really gotten to know their soul mates earlier?

I imagine, from the look on his face, he is wondering the same thing now.

He must’ve heard me, because he turns around. His former expression erases, and in its place his face lifts into a smile. If I hadn’t been so certain about what I’d seen before, I’d believe the light in his mahogany eyes. His gentle soul. So quick to try to shield me from unnecessary reminders of the love I had lost and he had gained.

These are the moments when forgiving him is both easier . . . and harder.

“Ready to go, Sav?”

I push the thought away, fight off the swelling in my chest as I watch him standing that way with his hands in both coat pockets, collar popped up, expression just so. I nod. “Where’s Olivia?”

“In the car,” he says. “You’ll want a coat. It’s starting to come down.”

I set down my laptop and stack of papers on the desk and, as I do so, fight the sudden urge to start organizing. How did I not notice before? My desk is an absolute mess. Multiple pens are scattered just about everywhere except actually inside my pen jar. I have a pile of books sitting precariously on one ledge and three old, half-drunk coffee mugs littering the area around half a dozen picture frames of family and friends.

No wonder he left me for her.

Olivia would never leave her life so cluttered.

“You can go on ahead, and I’ll meet you down there,” I say, anxious to get him away from the embarrassment of my workspace. “I have to finish up something really quick anyway.”

Ferris makes a face. “Don’t be silly. I don’t mind waiting.”

So instead of jumping into a pretend task and only elongating his stay, I shrug into my black coat and reach swiftly toward the hook behind the door for my scarf.

I’m just stepping out into the hallway, fumbling to get my phone into my coat pocket while winding the scarf around my neck, when I nearly collide with Will—and his mug of coffee. We’re like magnets of the same pole, and just as his chest comes within two inches of mine, we repel ourselves so far back I knock into Ferris, and Will, along with his coffee mug, bumps into the opposite wall.

Ferris, thankfully, has a quick reaction and grabs beneath my arms before I can do any damage.

But, for a moment, I can’t help myself. It’s been so long since I’ve felt Ferris’s hands, since I’ve been surrounded by the scent of musk and citrus coming off his cologne, since I’ve been so close to his face. For a second I’m lost.

But in the next, I pull myself out of it and return to stable ground.

“Sorry, Ferris. Thanks,” I say, pulling myself off his chest. My scarf is wound around me now like some sort of torture device. In fact, it’s actually doing a fairly good job of choking me. My fingers get to work unwinding it, and as I do so I look over to Will. Coffee has splattered all over his hand, I notice, and he’s moving his mug from one hand to another to quietly shake the remaining droplets off.

“I’m so sorry, Will,” I say, not really certain whether he or I was to blame.

“Hazards of these narrow halls,” he replies. But then he’s shifting his preoccupied gaze from his hand and the still dripping mug to us, and I notice that it stops not at my face but on my middle. And his frown deepens.

It’s only then that I look down and realize Ferris still has his hands around my waist.