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I bite down on a smile. “With that amazing NFL salary you’ll get one day?”

He laughs. “I’m good for a D3 school. I’m not NFL good.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugs. “It’s easy when you’re in a small town to think you’re the shit. You hear all this crazy stuff from people, but it’s kind of meaningless. I’m not Tom Brady, and I’m never gonna be Tom Brady.”

“Even Tom Brady didn’t know he was Tom Brady at eighteen,” I offer.

He looks at me for a long moment. “I need to keep my focus on what matters.”

“Which is what?” I ask, and then I elbow him. “I mean, religion, obviously, is your primary focus. But what else?”

He laughs. “Yeah, religion is definitely first. You ought to get me an application to that mission bullshit you’re doing next year.”

“Try not to refer to it as mission bullshit when you apply.”

He grins again, and then it fades. “I don’t know. I want to be able to take care of my mom and my sister. I want to make enough that my mom doesn’t have to work anymore. Or can do what she loves.”

My heart squeezes a little. No matter what he’s said or done, at heart, Ford is a sweet boy who just loves his family and wants to make things right. And to think I once lumped him in with those rich assholes at school with their expensive cars and their endless swagger.

“What does your mom love?”

“She always wanted to be a nurse. She’s a home health aide, and she likes that, but she'd love to go to school and get her degree. I mean...she was barely older than me when she had me and Leila. She's got her whole life ahead of her. I just want her to be able to go to school and not worry about us."

I blink. The woman he’s describing sounds so different from what my parents have implied. Is it possible to be a “drunk floozy” at some points and a caring, insightful parent at others?

The more likely explanation is that my parents sold me a fictitious story about Mrs. James, just like the one they sold me about Ford.

He grins at me. “I also want to get to the point where I can afford a place down here. Me and Matt and Ty and Nico…that’s the plan.”

I laugh. “You’re all going to live together?” I ask. “Like some kind of adult frat house?”

His fingers link with mine. “Nah, just near each other.”

“And then it’ll be your kids losing shoes in the lake?” I ask.

He bites his lip, trying not to smile, and my heart gives a single hard thud. Ford James, acting bashful for the first time in our acquaintance. “That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?”

Our eyes meet. “No,” I say quietly. “It wouldn’t.”

He leans in, holding my jaw in the palm of his hand, and presses his lips to mine. It’s a soft kiss, a sweet kiss, but his lips are full and perfect and I know, from the moment it begins, that I want more. That I, a girl who wasn’t even okay with hand-holding a few months ago, won’t be satisfied until his skin is pressed to mine, and I hear him gasping my name.

But he pulls back, his cheeks slightly flushed, his gaze still on my mouth. “How late can you stay out?”

I frown. “My parents will expect me home by six at the latest, so I’ll need to be back before then.”

He squeezes my hand. “That’s pretty normal. But the other stuff...like the way you’ve got to beg to go to the mall? Or them telling you that you can’t even hold hands...it isn’t. You know that right?”

I stare at the water. In the past, I’d have blamed his negative view of my parents on him, on the fact that he did something wrong and got caught. I no longer can. “They’re just doing what they think is best,” I say quietly. “They were both raised this way, and they’ve seen so many kids just fall apart when they don’t do things this way. My cousin—the one I told you about—she wound up dying in childbirth at sixteen, alone. Her parents had to leave the town after it was over. And in our church, there are a hundred examples of that.”

“And I have a million examples of people who weren’t in your church and didn’t go on this mission thing and turned out just fine. Let me ask you something: when your cousin got pregnant, what did her parents do?”

I glance up at him, frowning. “Well, she’d already left home when it happened.”

“Yeah, but did they reach out to her? Did they offer to help in any way? Did they ask her to move home and tell her they’d help with the kid so she could get her degree?”

The wind picks up, blowing my hair into my face. “No,” I reply as he pushes a lock behind my ear. “They sent her to this home for unwed mothers, but she brought shame on their family, so they moved away after it was all said and done.”