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The answer hurt even more than I’d thought it would. Not because I hadn’t suspected it. Suspicion had been eating through me since Mr. Vale sat upstairs in Dean’s apartment and read those notes from his little pad. But suspicion still left room for rescue. Surely not Paul, not the man who remembered tulips and almond cookies, who would someday sit beside Claire with a yellow highlighter, who would warm my car in winter and complain about the heating bills while turning the thermostat up anyway.

But this Paul had looked at me and seen a life that fit. Maybe he’d seen me too, eventually. That was almost worse.

I crossed my arms tightly so I wouldn’t come apart and let him see how much it hurt.

For a few seconds, the only sound in the room was the refrigerator humming and the pool pump clicking on.

Then Paul said, “But that was before.”

I almost laughed. “Before what?”

“Before I fell in love with you.”

I turned so quickly the floor creaked beneath my foot.

“No.”

He put his beer down.

“You don’t get to say that and expect it to make the rest disappear.”

“I’m not.”

“You just admitted my money and breeding were part of the equation.”

“I know.”

“And now you want to talk about love as if it’s a sheet you can lay over the ugly parts.”

Paul looked down, then back at me.

“No. I’m saying the ugly parts were there before I understood what I was doing. Not because that excuses them. Because it’s true.”

I didn’t want to listen to another word, but unfortunately, my heart had spent too many years knowing when Paul was saying something true.

“When?” I asked as his expression changed.

“When what?”

“You said before you fell in love with me. When was that?”

He looked startled, then blinked at me.

“Do you remember when we saw Romancing the Stone when it came out back in March?”

I took a long drink of my wine cooler. “That movie was terrible.”

“You fell asleep during the ending.”

The memory rose before I could stop it. A dark theater. My shoulder against his. The smell of popcorn and Paul’s wool jacket, even though it had been too warm inside for wool, but he’d worn it anyway, because he said movie theaters were always cold. Kathleen Turner on screen, Michael Douglas doing something annoying, and me trying to stay awake because I’d worked a double shift, covering for Brian and Dean when they both came down with food poisoning from eating gas station burritos at three in the morning.

“I missed maybe five minutes,” I said.

“You missed the entire last act. You woke up during the credits and immediately told me the ending was unrealistic.”

“It probably was.”

Paul smiled faintly, then the smile faded.