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“What?”

“Move to New York with me.”

Phoebe set the flowers down on the table. She felt the unease inside her make way for anger. “Come with you? You know I have a job lined up.”

“I know, but”—Jonathan looked agitated—“maybe this is more important than a job. You’d find a new one, no problem. If we’re meant to be, then I think—”

“But maybe we’re not.” Phoebe’s cold, level voice snapped Jonathan to attention. He stopped fidgeting and just stared at her. “I never said we were meant to be. You’re saying that, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Phoebe… we both said that we have this connection that—”

“Yeah. But we’re twenty-two. Maybe there are dozens of people out there that we’ll have even more amazing connections with; we just haven’t met them yet.”

Jonathan sprang to his feet and paced her tiny kitchen. “Do you really think that?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Okay, then, I guess I have my answer.” He ran a hand over his face, chuckled morosely, and kept pacing. “I thought—but I guess you don’t feel the same way after all. It’s okay; it’s not my first experience with unrequited l—”

Phoebe’s heart lurched. He stopped himself before the word love spilled out of his mouth.

“Jonathan…”

He stopped in the middle of the kitchen, took a deep breath, and walked over to her. He got down on his knees in front of her, where she sat unmoving in the chair. He held both of her hands in his and looked into her eyes.

“Phoebe Keller. I think you’ve known from the first night we met that I love you. You’re my best friend. And I thought maybe we could be more than that. But apparently, you don’t feel the same way.”

“But I—”

“I know you love me, too. In a best-friend way.” He swallowed and squeezed her hands more tightly. “But I had to at least try. Now I won’t be leaving for New York with this what-if hanging over my head.”

“But…” Tears flooded down Phoebe’s cheeks. “We can still be friends, right?”

Jonathan cupped her cheek and brushed her tears away with his thumb. “Of course.”

They moved to the couch and sat there with their arms around each other for a long time until their conversation turned to more mundane things and they were able to laugh together. He said goodbye a little while later. They parted with a long hug.

And that was the last time she’d seen him until now.

Phoebe assumed that he’d put on a brave face at the time but couldn’t handle being her friend after all. Or didn’t want to. Their text exchanges had gotten shorter and shorter, and he’d taken longer and longer to reply, and their plans to meet up before he moved never panned out, and then they’d stopped keeping in touch.

Now the ache of having missed him for eight years bloomed like an ugly bruise in Phoebe’s chest.

She couldn’t blame her twenty-two-year-old self for being so certain that dozens of exciting men awaited her in her future. But oh, how wrong she had been. She’d met some nice guys, some she’d even dated for a while, but no one had ever felt like a kindred spirit the way Jonathan had. The way he had immediately, the very first time they’d met.

And she’d been so confident that her shiny new job was the most important thing, but had it been? In theory, she would never advise a young woman to follow a man at the expense of a job. But that first job out of college had proven to be a lot of mind-numbing grunt work. They’d treated Phoebe like an intern. She’d found a better job eighteen months later. Of course, it was all part of her career trajectory—one job led to another. So perhaps without that first job, she wouldn’t have ended up where she was today.

Unemployed, her brain reminded her. She groaned and smushed her face into the couch pillows, which immediately brought on a sneezing attack.

When she recovered, Phoebe looked around for the source of her allergies. “Mittens? Want your dinner?”

She didn’t see him anywhere. She looked in Arden’s bedroom, even under the bed. When was the last time she had seen that cat?

“Mittens?”

She checked the patio, but he wasn’t on the outdoor sofa or prowling around nearby. Arden had said he was free to come and go as he liked, but Phoebe couldn’t recall having seen him since this morning.

After a fruitless fifteen minutes of running around the property calling for Mittens, Phoebe started to panic. She could not lose Arden’s cat. That would be heinous.