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We looked so right together. It was hard to look at the image, and remember just why we were so wrong.

“It’s not mine,” burst from him the second we sat down on our fifth mandatory weekly one hour meeting. He was beaming at me.

“Excuse me?”

“Fatima finally took a paternity test. The baby isn’t mine.” His expression was asking for a reaction I didn’t want to give.

Was I relieved? Yes. God, yes. Did it fix even one single broken thing inside me? Hardly.

“What would you have done if it was yours?” I asked him, wanting to lash out at the relief I felt inside of me. “Would you have stayed together for the baby?”

That got the reaction I wanted. His eyes widened in horror. “Stayed together?” He sounded offended. He sounded pissed. “We’re not together. That was never on the table. And I don’t know. I never really believed there was a chance it was mine. I suppose I would have been as much of a father as she’d let me, but me and her getting back together, I know that’s what she was aiming for, but it was not even in the realm of possibility.”

I studied him, wondering if I believed it. Their toxic attachment to each other had survived a lot of obstacles. “So her husband is the father?”

“I have no clue. Frankly, it’s none of my business and I’m happy with that. She and I are done for good, Noura. I mean it. Her trying to hurt you . . . It put the nail in the coffin of every good memory I ever had of her. Fatima was a habit for me. An affliction. You’re a cure.”

“I don’t want to be your cure. Don’t put that on me.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just . . . I haven’t been living right for a while now. Too much resentment for all the wrong reasons. If some relationships bring out the worst in people, the opposite must be true. And you’re the opposite. I’m not giving up on us, Noura.”

“God, I miss you,” he told me on our eighth weekly meet-up. It was a cheap shot straight to my gut. Not even the words themselves, but the way he said them. Like he couldn’t keep them in. Like they’d become the whole sum of him.

I figured he just missed the sex. He was my first and only so far, but even I knew we had something rare between us there. If sex was always like that there’d be less fighting in the world and more cases of people fucking themselves to death. “It’ll pass,” I assured him.

“I want to see you more often. This isn’t enough.” He said it with such surety, with such an entitled air, that I found myself bristling with outrage.

“That’s not for you to decide. You don’t value what you don’t earn. And your father may have paid for me, but you never had to earn me.”

“So give me a chance to earn you.”

“How do you propose to do that?” I couldn’t believe I’d even said the words. I wasn’t going to entertain this madness.

“Let me show you that I can treat you better. That I can be better. I’ve been celibate, you know. I’m going to wait for you, as long as it takes.”

My breath shuddered in and out. He was too much. What a fool I’d been to think he’d ever fight fair. “I can’t ask you to do that,” I bit out.

“You didn’t ask. You shouldn’t have to ask. I didn’t make you promises before, and even though you won’t listen to them, I’ve made them now. You’re the only one I want. I won’t settle for less.”

That time, I left before our hour was up.

The next time he showed up with an armful of pink peonies, my favorite, smiling like I hadn’t cursed him out and stormed off at our last meet-up.

He was courting me, the subversive bastard.

And so it went. I had to miss a few dates because I was traveling for work.

Once he showed up in Hong Kong just to make sure that he wouldn’t miss out on our hour.

I tried hard to convince myself that it wasn’t romantic of him.

Once we had a big blowout fight in public when he found out about my nude editorial in Vogue Italia.

“First of all, it’s none of your business,” I told him after I let him rant about it for a while. He was being loud and unconstrained enough that I knew we were going to dominate the news cycle for at least a solid twenty-four hours. “Second, everything is covered.”

“You always say that, I’m not sure you know what it means.”

I laughed.