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“I’ve thought the same thing,” I assured him. “If you want to be around somebody, you are. If you care, you show it. But it doesn’t really matter why they were spurred into action, because the result for me was beneficial either way.”

“That’s how you ended up in boarding school.”

“That’s how I ended up in boarding school, except that I had to do a lot of tutoring first,” I agreed. “It was because of a bunch of generous artists who were happy for a place to sleep and a good party. I’ve always wondered if my mom was hoping for the same thing when she would form a new friend group.”

“Maybe. Maybe she just liked having people around,” he suggested. “Speaking of which, I’m having people over tomorrow night for drinks and dinner.”

“Oh, ok. I won’t pound on the ceiling with a broomstick if you get loud.”

“I hope not, because the doctors who live on the third floor are very considerate neighbors.”

“What?” I asked.

“I was planning on asking you to come, too, so that you would be in my apartment with us,” he explained. “You’d be pounding on my ceiling.”

“Oh!” A party. That sounded sophisticated and it also sounded like something for which I had nothing to wear. “Thank you. I’ll come.”

“Good. The other people there will be some of my old friends from high school, the ones who still live around here. We kept up through college but over the last few years, we haven’t been in touch.”

“Until now.”

“Until now,” he repeated, nodding. “They can come over and see Milaflores Building before I move.”

“Do you think that Tudor house was the one for you?” I turned and looked over my shoulder, but we were well past it. “Does it match all the criteria that you put on your list?”

“What list?”

“The one you must have made about where you wanted to live,” I said. “You did that, right?”

He hadn’t, so I spent a while quizzing him. He did have a lot of ideas but unlike me, he hadn’t recorded them. One was that he wanted to be in a place like the Milaflores, where he could walk to things. “It is a great neighborhood,” I pointed out. “When it’s not so cold, you’ll be able to go to those little shops and the park.”

“It’s big for just one guy.”

“That was why I thought you might want to have roomma…”

After a moment, Oliver looked over at me. “Kat? You all right?”

I nodded. The reason I’d stopped speaking in the first place still loomed up large in my thoughts: he could have been buying a big house with an eye on the future. That future could have included his former wife, who was now living about an hour away. He might have been planning to have kids, who would attend the nearby, highly rated elementary school.

“Would you always live there alone?” I asked. “Or would you want a partner?”

“I always imagined that I’d have a family. A wife, kids. More than one, because I love having a sister. I’m not sure that Frances always loved having a little brother, but she got used to me.”

“You thought that you would be married to that Lexi forever,” I said and he shrugged.

“Isn’t it what I promised? Till death do us part? I think I said that, but I was so nervous that I don’t remember the exact phrasing.”

“Did you have a big, fancy wedding?”

“No, we went to the courthouse while she was on a lunch break from work and I could step away from the lab,” he answered. “She’s a little older than I am and she thought it was the logical next step. We’d been together for a couple of years, so we went ahead with it. My family was upset.”

“They didn’t like her?”

“They didn’t know Lexi very well. She was always busy, too busy to fly back to Michigan with me on the holidays. My parents and sister came to California one year for Thanksgiving but she went out with friends. She wasn’t much of a family person. And then, they were upset that they hadn’t been able to be there for the wedding. I was Frances’s man of honor,” he told me. “It would have been nice for me to return the favor.”

“It was probably a good thing that you guys didn’t have kids together, if she wasn’t interested in families.”

“She would have been interested in her own family. That was what she said, anyway.” He sounded slightly doubtful to me, though.