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“I stayed away because being here complicated things. You complicated things. Then I came back thinking maybe I’d finally know whether I was making the right choice staying with Paul.”

“And do you?”

“No.” I rubbed my thumb over my palm. “I keep wondering what would’ve happened if I’d been more honest months ago. If I’d said I didn’t want everybody planning the rest of my life before I figured out what I wanted.”

Dean leaned against the kitchen counter.

“I could’ve been more honest too.”

I looked at him.

He stared down at his hands for a second. “I watched you start spending more time with Paul. I watched you stop taking shifts. And every time I thought about saying something, I told myself you’d already made your choice.”

“I hadn’t.”

“I know that now.”

Dean lifted his head. “I wanted you, Lorrie.”

I stared at him.

“I wanted you all summer. I wanted you when you argued with me about where Springsteen belonged. I wanted you when you came upstairs and drank wine coolers. And I wanted you every time you left to go out with Paul.”

My heart beat harder. “You never said anything.”

“No.”

“Why?”

He gave me a look. “You were dating him, what was I supposed to say?”

He stepped away from the counter.

“That I wanted you to dump the guy your family loved and your parents had already started treating like a son? That I wanted you to stay in Madison and work in a record store that barely pays its electric bill?”

“You could’ve told me how you felt.”

“I should have.”

There was no defensiveness in it, which somehow hurt more.

Dean stopped a few feet away from me. “I thought you knew.”

“I didn’t.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I know that now.”

I looked at him. Twenty-seven years of remembering him, wondering, what if, had given me a hundred versions of this moment.

In some, he declared himself at the country club before Paul proposed. In others, he kissed me and complicated everything, or he showed up at my parents’ house. Regret, apparently, was a very productive screenwriter.

None of those invented scenes had felt like this, with him barefoot in faded jeans and a gray T-shirt, his hair falling over his forehead while he looked nervous enough to keep flexing one hand at his side. This was the real man, not the one I’d polished smooth in my head until he was almost fictional.

“You still want me?” I asked.

His eyes stayed on mine. “Yes.”

The answer moved through me slowly as I stood, though Dean didn’t move closer. After everything I’d learned that day, after finding out how many people seemed to believe they had some right to arrange my life, he left the distance between us completely mine, so I crossed it.