I sighed. “It happened so quickly I’m not even really sure,” I said, and then filled in the rest of the details I had omitted the day Carolyn moved in. I told him about Jimmy hitting her, of being faced with the choice of letting her go back to Iowa or insisting that she move in with me, all of the events leading up to me sitting on the couch and him looking at me with his legs crossed while wearing a blue robe. When I finished he leaned back and smiled.

“What?” I asked.

“That’s some story. Christ Almighty. Better you than me, kiddo.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t think this through. She’s already asking me stuff I’m years away from being ready to tell.”

“Like what?”

“Just stuff.”

Gene lifted his hands, showed me his palms in a questioning gesture, then dropped them on his thighs. “What the hell can you do? Give it a shot. You might be surprised. There’s no way of knowing whether or not a thing will work until you’ve tried it. But for Christ’s sake, put yourself in her shoes for a minute and quit thinking about yourself. Do you know how anxious she probably is, how vulnerable she must feel down there? She has almost no choice at this point but to try and please you. What would she do if you had a change of heart? She’d either crawl back to Iowa or to her ex, and it sounds as though neither is a very attractive option.”

I nodded. He was right; I hadn’t thought about it from her point of view. She had to be just as scared as I was, if not more. “I just wish we could have taken it a little slower.”

“Stratton, my boy, I married my wife after knowing her for seven days. If you don’t think I was scared shitless, then you’d be dead wrong. But when it’s right, it’s right. Don’t worry yourself over how quickly everything happened. Sometimes it’s better that way.”

I studied Gene’s earnest face staring back at mine. I had no idea he’d been married before. “We really don’t know that much about each other, do we?”

“I’m not the one you need to reveal yourself to. That’s the benefit of friendships over relationships.”

I smiled and nodded to the library. “Which of those books did that come from?”

“It comes from all of them. Now get your ass downstairs and make that girl happy.”

I guffawed. “I can’t even make myself happy.”

“Few of us can, kiddo.”

Downstairs, Carolyn was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees.

“It’s good to see you,” I said. “How was your day?”

She shook her head. “You’re crazy.”

“Crazy about you, maybe.”

She rolled her eyes. I sat beside her.