For our first Valentine’s Day together, I gave him my first big canvas oil painting—a periwinkle-blue sky just before sunrise, golden clouds tipped with the same color of glowing, lush vermillion that lit up my heart. He hung it in his bedroom and took down all his movie posters and memorabilia so my painting was the only thing on that wall.

Oh, the kissing, the sweaty tangle of young limbs and heated murmurs that painting saw . . .

In our junior and senior years, Noah went to a vocational school part-time, taking a bus to New London on Thursdays and Fridays to learn carpentry, since he loved woodworking as much as I loved painting. I thought we were perfect for each other, both of us artists, though he’d laugh when I said that and say making door frames or coffee tables wasn’t exactly art. Though I’d never thought of myself as unhappy before, being with Noah—so seen, so important . . . it taught me what happiness was.

He had one flaw: he wanted to stay put. He wanted life to be exactly like his parents’ and grandparents’. He wanted to marry me in a few years and raise a bunch of kids, preferably five. (How many teenage boys say they want five kids?) I loved that he saw us together, because I did, too. Just . . . not here. I pictured us traveling, hiking on the moors or walking through the streets of Rome, on the Great Wall, in the spice markets of Mumbai. How we would fund this was unclear, but we were young. We could, er, backpack or however it was that people without rich parents traveled.

But as graduation drew closer, things got a little prickly. Noah had no problem with my plans for the next four years, but there was always a hint of condescension somewhere in there. Like once I’d gotten this “see the world/live in the city” bug out of my system, I’d understand that Stoningham was the only place to be.

But there was no way on earth I wanted to live in the town I’d grown up in. A thousand year-round residents, thick with pretension because of the brushes with celebrity or true wealth—Genevieve London of the handbag empire; an Oscar-winning actress who spent all of two weeks a year in her six-thousand-square-foot house. I didn’t want to run into the same people on the same streets in the same places I’d already been every day of my life. Staying here was an admission of fear of something greater . . . or a total lack of ambition. Only people like Juliet, with her Ivy League degrees and brilliant success, could come back to Stoningham without seeming like a loser. Or so it seemed to me.