Priya laughed, too. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ll stop. But . . . choices are made all the time,” she said. “One choice doesn’t have to define a life.”

Emily grabbed her friend’s hand and squeezed it. “I know,” she said.

She thought about her mom’s belief that we all made the choices we were supposed to make, we just didn’t know what they were supposed to be until we made them. She was supposed to be here tonight. She was supposed to see Rob again. But what was she supposed to do after that?

—

“You ladies ready for some pizza?” Rob called back, as they neared the restaurant.

Eat pizza. The next thing she was supposed to do was eat pizza.

xxix

Ezra and I were dating for three months when he asked if I wanted to meet his parents. We were at his place, making breakfast together after a lazy morning in bed where we’d twined ourselves around each other, holding each other close, both before and after sex. I think we needed those moments of physical contact.

“You know, touch is analgesic,” Ezra said to me, as he wrapped both arms around me, pulling me even closer to him. “It’s the oxytocin.”

“So you mean if I have a headache, I can either take Tylenol or hug you?” I asked, pulling him toward me, tucking my head under his chin.

“We should try that,” he said, “next time you have a headache. But we can see it on the monitor at work: patients’ heart rates slow when their hands are stroked, when someone climbs into bed with them and holds them tight.”

It made sense to me. Ari and I felt better holding each other’s hands when our mom died. I felt better curled with her on the couch when I lost you, when I lost music, when I lost your dad. And I felt better in Ezra’s arms than I did nearly anywhere else.

“Does holding me like this make you feel better?” I asked.

“It does,” he said. “It makes me feel more ready to take on whatever comes my way, to face whatever challenges there are ahead of me.”

I nodded against his collarbone. “Me too,” I said.

—

We got up after that and made an omelet. I took an egg to crack against the edge of the counter but then stopped to watch him. He was tapping the top of a second egg with a butter knife until it cracked, then sticking the tip of the knife in the crack and turning it slowly and steadily to make a hole big enough for the yolk and albumen to flow out.

“I’ve never seen anyone crack an egg like that,” I said, fascinated.

“No possibility of shell,” he said.

I left the eggs to him and started chopping peppers and dicing tomatoes, wondering if he had some magical way to cut those, too.