I heard resentment in his voice, over the freedom I had to be trusted to make my own decisions, when my family always expected my brother to make the wrong choices. He told me he didn’t want to talk for a while, so he could be his own man, and I respected his wishes. Three years later, I got a call from my stepmother. Tony’s heroin addiction had started during his first stint in juvenile detention and ended at a drug rehab facility in Manila, where my brother hanged himself with one of his bedsheets.

—

Lenora decided to have a going-away party for me at her place, the night before I left for Thailand—I would move directly to San Francisco for art school after my recovery. I’d left some books at the old apartment I shared with Ralph, who offered to drive with me to Lenora’s after I picked them up.

Though the two of us had dinner at least once a month since we had broken up, I knew it might be the last time I would get to talk to Ralph alone before I moved, not only across the country but to a gender that would permanently separate us. A typical Englishman, Ralph was not prone to talking about his feelings at length, so I figured I needed to be the one to draw them out, as we entered that largely desolate zone between our old apartment and Lenora’s South Boston loft, plunged into darkness except for the car’s headlights.

“I keep thinking about how strange it is that we love each other so much, but this one thing stands between us.”

“It’s a big thing, the biggest really,” he replied. “When I look at you I feel as if the person I fell in love with died, and the person in front of me is very much like him, but isn’t him.” Maybe he felt the immensity of that ride too and was more forthcoming than he had ever been. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

“I am.” I looked down at my lap because I was about to say something hard. “But if there’s a chance we can still be together, I’ll call it off.” Maybe that could be our compromise, that I wouldn’t transition all the way if he could accept me as a woman.

“That wouldn’t be fair to you,” Ralph said, his eyes on the road. “You’ll always wonder what your life could have become.”

“I’ll always love you, Ralph,” I said as we reached Lenora’s, and I could finally see his face, from his headlights’ reflection when he parked the car in front of a brick wall. He turned off the ignition, and it was dark again.

“I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone as much as I loved you.”