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He doesn’t say anything. He just listens, elbows on his knees, and lets me be wrong out loud, which is somehow the only thing that could keep me going.

“And then,” I say, and this is the one that takes my legs out, “then I drove to my best friend’s house. Ivy. And they’re leaving. Her and Gray. Ashen Mills, a farmhouse and goats and a slow beautiful life an hour and a half away, right next to Harper, the two of them. And I sat at their table and I was so happy for them and I have never in my life felt more alone.”

He starts to say something and I can’t let him, because there’s one more and it’s the one that shames me.

“And you know what I did?” I’m crying so hard now the words barely come. “I put on a front. For Ivy. So she wouldn’t feel bad. I did the exact thing I sat there and hated Natalie for. I smiled and told her I was thrilled and I’d have my own room out there and I’m not alone, I have Luke, I have church, I have a whole life. And none of it was true. None of it. And she believed me, because I’m good at it, I am so good at it, and I drove home and fell apart.” I press the heel of my hand against my mouth. “So I don’t even get to be angry at Natalie. I’m the same. Everyone’s the same. It’s fronts all the way down, and I am so tired, Luke. I’m so tired of pretending I don’t need people, and I’m so scared of what it costs to need them, and I don’t know how to do either one anymore.”

I stand there emptied, wrung out, shaking, more undone than I have let anyone see me since I was a child, in front of a man who came here tonight braced for me to leave him.

That’s everything. It’s on the table now, next to the noodles.

Luke stands up.

He comes around the table, slow, and he doesn’t grab me or shush me or tell me it’s okay, because it isn’t okay and he’s not a liar. He just stands close, close enough that I could fall into him if I decided to, and lets me decide.

“I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong about Natalie,” he says. “I don’t know Natalie. I don’t know what’s real with her and her mom, and I’m not going to stand here and pretend I’ve got that figured out for you, because I don’t, and you’d know I was making it up.”

That is not what I expected. I expected the fix. Everyone fixes. Gray would have a verse. Micah would have one perfect sentence.

Luke doesn’t fix it.

“But I know you,” he says. “And I know exactly what you’re about to do. I can see it from here. You’re going to take all of this and use it to prove the thing you’ve always wanted to be true, which is that it’s safer to be alone. You’re going to walk it all the way back to that seventeen-year-old and let her bolt the door again.”

He reaches up and wipes my face with his thumb, careful, and his eyes are wet too now, which undoes me further.

“Here’s the only thing I’ve got,” he says, plain, no verse, no flourish, just a firefighter in a kitchen. “I’m the guy everybody leaves. You know the list. My dad never knew me. My mom handed me off. Bo’s mom walked out on a four-day-old baby. If anybody ever earned the right to keep the door shut and never open it again, it’s me. And for ten years that’s exactly what I did.” He shrugs. “And then a wrong number texted me about coffee, and I decided, once, to risk it anyway. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done that wasn’t Bo.”

“Luke.”

He crosses the kitchen and takes my face in both hands, like I’m something he’s afraid of dropping, and tips it up so I can’t look at the floor or the counter or anywhere but him. His thumb moves once across my cheek, catching a tear I didn’t bother to stop.

“You can’t tell in advance who stays, Liv.” His voice drops all the way down, and he does not look away, not once, not even to blink. “You don’t get proof. You just get to decide. So whatever you do with the rest of it, whatever you land on about Natalie or church or any of it, I’m asking you one thing.” His eyes hold mine. “Don’t go away. Don’t run this all the way back to alone. Stay.”

Stay.

Then his face changes, and I watch him bend and pick up his own piece of the wreckage.

“And I’m sorry. I came in here tonight so sure you were leaving that I aimed straight at Bo, at the thing that would hurt you most, while you were already drowning over something I didn’t even know about. I read you wrong. I never read people wrong, and I read you exactly backward, because I was scared, and I let the scared drive.” He shakes his head. “Dottie told me not to, on my way out the door. Ask before you decide. And I decided first anyway.”

“I didn’t tell you,” I say. “About any of it. I went dark on you for two days. You didn’t read me wrong. I hid.”

“Then let’s not do that.” He brings both hands back up to my face and cups it, waits until I’m looking right at him and he’s looking right at me, nothing between us and no way for me to slide my eyes off to the side. “Either of us. That’s the deal I want. When it’s bad, we say it. Out loud. Right away. You tell me when you’re drowning, and I’ll tell you when I’m scared, and neither of us sits alone with the worst version of it. Deal?”

Nobody has ever asked me that. In my entire life, no one has ever sat across from me and made the truth a rule, a promise, a thing we owe each other. I spend my whole career pulling the truth out of people one careful inch at a time, and here is a man who just wants me to hand it over, all of it.

“Deal,” I say.

We eat eventually. The Chinese is cold and neither of us cares enough to fix it. We end up on the kitchen floor, backs against the cabinets, because I sank down there at some point and he just folded down next to me, and we eat fried rice out of the cartons and he lets me not talk.

Then we move to the couch, and that’s where we stay.

He doesn’t turn on the TV. He doesn’t fill the silence, which is the thing I keep learning about him. He can just be still with me and not need it to go anywhere. I’m tucked into his side with my legs pulled up, and his hand is in my hair, slow and absent, winding a piece of it around his fingers and letting it go and winding it again, and I feel the last two days drain out of me and into the cushions.

I don’t want him to leave.

I know he has to. There’s a ten-year-old across town who needs his dad home. I know all of it. I just keep not saying anything, because as long as I don’t say anything the night doesn’t have to end, and his hand stays in my hair like he’s in no hurry to end it either.

For a while, with his heartbeat under my ear, I believe every word he said in that kitchen. Stay. We say it out loud. Nobody sits alone with the worst version. I hold onto all of it with both hands.