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“What book? What list?”

“Well, you know, Rejection Therapy: Reprogram Your Day to Reprogram Your Mind. Or in your case, Affirmation Therapy: Training Your Mind Through Intentional Yeses. By Yelensky.”

When he looks at me blankly, I feel compelled to continue my point. “The quote you said the other day was from it. How saying yes is often the simplest way to love someone well.”

His brows furrow. “I know the quote, Chloe. It’s a well-known saying from Augustus Avery. But I gotta be honest, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You said, ‘Saying yes is often the simplest way to love someone well,’” I repeat. I’m starting to sound like a madwoman. “And then . . . I thought you had read Yelensky’s book—”

“Who?”

“—and were playing a game from it.”

The words fall from my mouth with a thud. Like a meat loaf dropping on the porch floor.

I feel his posture changing. His shoulders shift away just slightly as he adjusts himself on the swing. “What kind of game?”

“Oh. I had thought you . . .”

My temple is sweating, little pinpricks across my forehead that the cold sweeps up the second they rise to rest there.

Just get through it.

I speak quickly. “I had thought you read Yelensky because you decided you wanted to work on yourself and be more attentive to your family and so you were enacting the challenge it has at the end of the book to say yes to every request that comes your way to break the cycle of negativity. And then you met me. So I assumed you . . . of course . . . were doing that with me.”

I’m so confused here.

Part of me had hoped that he was clueless to Yelensky’s work. But a bigger part of me was so certain he had been playing the yes game all along—and then abusing the game and trashing my heart for the sake of it—that I was mentally prepared to find any slew of excuses for his bad behavior of using me romantically for his own gain. Hoping, perhaps, he had fallen in love with me in the midst of it, despite all the problems that scenario would still contain.

I was prepared for that messy bit.

Which, frankly, makes me a mess, doesn’t it? Where is my growth? Where is my overcoming?

Genie was right.

But now, here, I find it challenging to explain the thing that never occurred to me once I formed a suspicion: that he really was clueless. And me?

Well . . .

I was the one who had been playing him.

I watch as, like an incoming storm on the ocean, all of this registers on his face. The surprise. The distaste. And ultimately, the disgust at everything I’m insinuating. “You thought I was pursuing you this past week and doing these things with you because I was trying to overcome some deficiency within myself? By playing a tacky self-therapeutic game? Chloe. I would never.”

I hear the unspoken end of his sentence. I would never do something so selfish.

“How could you even suspect this of me?” he continues. “Because I sang karaoke? Because I went camping to get closer to you?”

Thoughts are firing now as he registers exactly what I’m implying.

“Do you really think so little of yourself that you assume a man has to be playing some kind of twisted game when he tries to get close to you?”

“Well—”

“I like you, Chloe. I said yes at the airport because I was intrigued by you then and have been every moment since.”

“But . . . when you were kind of distant when you offered to take my bags . . .”

“I had just stepped off the plane in Maple Hills, middle of nowhere, and heard the sound of your laughter as you stood there by the baggage claim. And I was struck by you. All of you. Your beauty. Your ease. I wasn’t even certain what you were talking about, but there was a wit in your voice as you bantered back and forth with who I’m now certain was Genie. And I had no idea how to approach the situation. It was ridiculous, being hundreds of miles away from home and second-guessing myself the whole time, and I knew there was a ninety-nine percent chance the whole idea of talking to you was going to fail. And like I said before, I’m not really used to doing this, Chloe. I just got out of a long relationship. It’d been years since I’d approached a woman. The whole thing was crazy and out of character for me.” He shakes his head. “So. I was rusty.”