“We never drove to Mexico,” Ed said.

“Or to New Orleans,” Grant said.

“Maybe they’ll go back to Europe next summer,” I said.

“Start leaving brochures around the house.” Ed spread out his palms, marquee-style. “Capri in July!”

Grant dropped his bag beside the car and hugged me hard.

“I love you.”

It was as if his big arms had squeezed the words out of me. I was embarrassed and I was also surprised, because I’d always thought I’d loved Ed more.

“Aw, we don’t like to leave our boy,” Ed said and came in on the hug. I breathed in his smell of cigarettes and hot asphalt.

I think we all felt certain we would see each other again, that this was not a real goodbye. In a week, after they’d gone home to see their families, they’d be back in their dorm a few miles from this road. They had pointed it out to me from the car, a big high-rise in the midst of squat brick buildings, and I imagined our life together would resume there in a few weeks. I could see the beanbag chairs, the box of pizza, the newspaper spread out with the movie listings. But when the school year began, I could never summon the confidence to step on campus, let alone go into a dorm and up to the eighth floor. Becca urged me to at least call or drop them a line but the summer closed up and there seemed no way back in.

I can look back on that time now as if rereading a book I was too young for the first time around. I see now how in love Grant was with Ed, how Ed knew it and needed it even if he couldn’t return it, how Ed was nursing a badly broken heart, and how well they understood what had gone on in my house before they arrived. I will carry that summer with me until I am, as Ed used to say, “passé composé.” I have never seen either of them since, though I have read all three of Ed’s novels and liked each one. I confess that I have hoped for some reference to that summer in them, a large gray house, a college town, a lonely boy whose parents have left the country, but there has been no sign of me yet, nor of Grant. It is strange to think that they both still walk this earth somewhere, that they have also had several decades more of life, that right now they are each lying down or standing up or reading a book or on an airplane or in a hospital room or a taxi or sitting in an office.