He barreled on, determined to get the rest out. “I think you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, and it has very little to do with clothes or makeup or whatever. It’s you, Mary. It’s your whole thing that you have going on. That’s the best I can describe it. It doesn’t have anything to do with age. I don’t want to date a twenty-five-year-old. Not even the twenty-five-year-old version of you. I want you, as you are right in this moment. With the sum of all your experiences making you who you are. I wouldn’t shave a single day off your life. This is who you are. And you are what I want.”

Mary blinked at him for a long moment and then shocked him when she burst into tears. She covered her mouth with one hand but looked up at him with red, watery eyes, tears practically pouring down her cheeks. Apparently, Ruth was concerned as well, because when John tried to lean toward Mary to hold her, suddenly there was a twenty-pound ball of yowling fur in the way, putting her paws on Mary’s shoulder and staring her in the face.

Laughter mixed with Mary’s tears, and she settled the cat on her lap. “It’s okay, Ruth. It’s okay.”

“What’s happening?” John asked nervously, having just poured his entire heart out and now desperately unsure if it had been well received or not.

Mary brushed at her tears with the shoulder of her T-shirt. “I always knew that people like you existed. That there was a man like you out there, and that I deserved him. But my mother almost, almost had me convinced that I was wrong.” She held up two fingers a centimeter apart to show how close she’d come to succumbing to her mother’s beliefs.

“Someday,” John said, “if I ever meet your mother, I’m bringing a foghorn to drown out every single thing she says to you.”

Mary burst out laughing. “Then she’d just take it upon herself to email me her opinions and complaints.”

“Seriously, it sounds like your mother has a very skewed view of the world.” Taking a deep breath, John scooted forward and shooed Ruth off Mary’s lap. “I’d really like to be the person who counterbalances all her whacked opinions.”

Mary laughed again and then stood up all of a sudden. John felt like she’d ripped Velcro off one whole side of him. He’d been about to kiss her, but she was striding away into the kitchen, gulping more water from her glass, and then into the bathroom. She left the door open, and he heard the sink running.

“So,” she called through the open door. “You like me for the sum of all my experiences, huh?”