“No, you don’t need to know. Consider it secret women’s business.” I avoided his gaze in case I caved under the scrutiny of those ridiculously gorgeous grey eyes. “So, what about you?”

“I’m letting you off the hook, you know?” I said nothing. “Okay, well, I did think about absolving myself of the whole ‘bigger life’ thing.” I turned my head to him, a frown planted firmly on my face.

He held up his hand as if to stave me off. “Kidding! I’m kidding.”

“We’re going to have to talk about it at some point, you know.” I took the final sip of my drink. Boy, it was potent.

“Yeah, yeah. I know. I’m surprised you haven’t asked about it already.”

Why haven’t I? I tried to kid myself it was because we were having such a great time, and I didn’t want to spoil things by bringing it up. But really it was because I was afraid of what he would say—that I might find out we were on completely different trajectories and despite how we felt, we should just go our separate ways.

I was playing emotional ping pong with myself.

“So, yeah, I don’t know …” he said, clearly thinking aloud. “I definitely absolve myself of buying those skinny jeans with the low crotch. I know they’re kind of the thing right now, but they just look stupid.”

I raised the hand that wasn’t holding my empty cup. “I couldn’t agree more. Anything else?”

“Hmm, I’ll have to think about it.” That was fair. I’d had plenty of time to think about mine and, besides, none of them were serious. I figured it was time to loop back to what was.

“So, what about the other thing?” I glanced at him and he was rubbing the back of his neck one-handed, his “everything is not okay” gesture.

“Yeah.” I waited, giving him time to say what he needed to say. Eventually, he launched into an explanation. “You know, I was so fired up after I got home from Greece. I was going to take charge of my career and do more with my time and start thinking about where to travel to next year—well, now it’s almost this year.”

“And what happened?”

“I don’t know. Life, I guess. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but routine and work and just normalcy. And I didn’t have you guys around.” I knew he meant the people from the sailing trip, our floating family. And then, “I didn’t have you around.”

Oh, wow. The weight of his words hung between us, a call back to what he’d said when we arrived at the party. Maybe he really was thinking about being in a relationship with me.

But I was confused. This wasn’t the Josh I’d talked to dozens of times, or the Josh from his emails. How had I not seen what he was going through? “I’m really sorry I didn’t realise. It always seemed like you had a lot going on. I’ve been a crap friend.”