I can’t, Mom. It hurts. My ankle hurts so bad.

Please. Let me help you. I can hear the train coming.

Then being hurled back to safety. Flung across the platform. Just to look around me and notice she wasn’t there.

I’m sobbing by the time the train arrives. My shoulders shake and my knees are bent. People are looking. The train stops in front of me. The doors slide open. I can’t do this. I can’t get inside. I turn around, toward the stairs, toward the world above. I’m going home. I can’t do this.

“Ever.” I hear a voice.

I look up, wiping my tears.

And there, in front of me, on the train in front of me, stands Joe. With his worn-out Levi’s. With tousled dark curls that frame my favorite face in the entire world. With a cigarette tucked behind one ear. Beautiful and handsome and alive. He offers me his hand.

“What are you doing h-here?” I stammer.

“You won’t find out unless you get on this train right about, let’s see . . .” He twists his wrist to check an invisible watch. “Now.”

I jump on the train a second before the doors slide shut. I fall into his open arms. He holds me up and tucks me under his armpit, like a protective older brother. He gazes down at me. “Hello, stranger.”

“You came here to watch me get on a BART?”

He rolls his eyes. “Don’t act like there’s anything good on TV these days. It’s not that big a deal.”

“You do have a point.” I decide to downplay the whole thing, to spare him any embarrassment.

I curl my fingers over his shirt, holding on to him. The train starts moving. We’re safe inside it. I don’t think about what happened last time I was here, and that is huge.

“I figured I can finish the book in a week if I lock myself up in a hotel room and write all day. I took some time off work.”

“Actual time off work?” I arch an eyebrow. “Holy moly, but I thought writing is not a real grown-up thing people do?”

He bites down a grin, hitching a shoulder up. “Call me Peter Pan.”

“You should be in the hotel, working.” I keep talking to distract myself from the fact I am on a train right now. And it’s moving fast, approaching another station, where someone could be under the tracks. I’m hyperaware of each breath coming in and out of my body.

“Because I need new experiences to write about, and as far as this one goes, it’s a pretty damn memorable one.”

I take a deep breath. “My breath might smell of vomit.”

“Sweetheart.” He tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear. “Nothing smells as bad as you did the night we went to the junkyard.”