“HI,” HE SAYS.

I stare.

I’d been expecting a version of the Gabe from photos. A combination of that and who he’d been ten years ago. Boyish. Open. Carelessly handsome.

He’s still handsome—breathtakingly so—but it isn’t careless anymore.

There’s the beard hiding the lower part of his face and the baseball cap which tries to conceal the rest of it. But he tilts his head back far enough so I can see his eyes. He looks tired and worn, but it suits him. Or rather, it suits me. It blunts his beauty a bit, makes him seem more real, more touchable, which in turn makes him seem more distant.

“It’s good to see you,” Gabe says.

He’s still holding my elbow and I can feel the warmth of his fingers through my sweater.

“Unngh,” I say.

And I know, right then, that all the growing up I thought I’d done, all the walls I’d erected around my heart after six years of marriage and what since then has felt like constant heartache, are damn near useless against this.

I also know the answer to my question. About what he remembers. How much he remembers.

Amber, meet mosquito.

We sit, and he takes off his hat.

He’s had a beard before—a while back, seen briefly in the grainy photos of him being escorted into rehab. The first time. The tabloids had made a point to focus on his weight gain and the loss of the Bond six-pack, but plenty of people complained about the beard or the scruffy way he was wearing his hair. His hair has far more gray than I would have expected, far more than I saw in pictures. Contradictory bitch that I am, I prefer this look.

I don’t mind that he’s gained weight. Don’t mind that I can see a curl of chest hair peering out from the undone top button of his shirt. Don’t mind that he’s gotten older.

I’d seen a hint of what it had cost to look the way he did on the big screen back then. Starving himself, waxing his chest, getting things plucked and shined and oiled. It had been part of the job and even then, he hadn’t complained.

I like this version of him better.

I don’t want to like him. Not the way I liked him back then—that starry-eyed girl who had fallen head—and heart—first into what turned out to be the generic trap of celebrity. Gabe is a movie star. An actor. It’s his job to make people fall in love with him.

At least I hadn’t fallen in love with him.

I hadn’t.

Because that would have been truly ridiculous.