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It got silent for a beat.

“So why didn’t it work out with you and Beau?” he asked.

I shrugged, turning the pages absently. “He just wasn’t it.”

“How come?”

“We just didn’t work well once we lived together.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. He’d drop his clothes on the floor,” I said.

He looked at me, amused. “That’s it? Clothes on the floor?”

“No, that’s not it. It was a lot of stuff.”

“Like?”

I gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Like the way he’d never be able to find anything. Or the second I said I was getting a scratchy throat, suddenly he has the same thing and it’s worse than mine, and now he can’t get out of bed but I’m somehow still able to do the dishes and the laundry while he’s in the bedroom perishing.”

“So he annoyed you,” he said, humor around his eyes.

I gave him a look. “Yes, he annoyed me.”

“I used to annoy you.”

“You still do.”

He let out a hearty laugh. I tried to hold back my smile, but it slipped through anyway.

“What about you?” I asked. “Why didn’t it work out with… what was her name?”

“Payton.”

“Why didn’t it work out with Payton?” I said, trying not to hate her just for existing.

“I ended it.”

“Why?”

His face fell the tiniest bit. “More time with the wrong person is less time with the right one.”

He gazed at me.

I understood that. The truth was, Beau’s biggest crime had been not being Jeremy. It was the same with everyone, really. I just wasn’t willing to accept the flaws of anyone who wasn’t him. I expected a level of inhuman perfection that simply didn’t exist. Not even in the man I lost.

It’s funny how when you love someone, truly, truly love someone, some things just don’t matter. You’re going to put up with their bad habits and quirks because you know that no matter how much they irritate you, your world is inherently better with them in it. I’d punished Beau for not being someone else. And then I’d just come to the conclusion that maybe I should be alone because nobody could pass that test. I was hurting everyone who failed and I was getting more despondent when they did.

On our trip to the Dominican during Jodie’s wedding, I saw someone who looked like Jeremy. It was just a flash: a man walking on the beach at sunset while she was saying her vows, too far away to see his face. But that tiny flicker, that dip in the pit of my stomach, that ache in my chest, was enough. If I could feel this way with a glance at a man who wasn’t even him, what was I doing engaged to someone else? Why was I wasting both of our time setting a bar that he could never meet? So I came home and broke it off and I’d been single for the last two years—and maybe I’d always be single.

Jeremy Todd was a hard act to follow. I hated him for it. For putting me in a position where I had to find someone to try.

The doorbell rang. My family. I heard the commotion of the front door opening, people coming in, enthusiastic welcomes while jackets came off and got hung on hooks. We didn’t get up. I wanted to keep looking through the photos for evidence of the old us.

“Do you still have any pictures of me and you?” he asked.

“Our prom photo was on my parents’ mantel for a few years. They took it down when I started dating Beau.”