I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t even realized she’d been thinking much about me at all during that time. She’d seemed so focused on her music and all her friends, living the life any beautiful seventeen-year-old girl should live. I’d distanced myself because I had no role in that sort of carefree existence. My life was falling apart as I watched each piece of my legacy dismantled and sold.

She turned her head, her gaze moving over my face. “You were in the barn working and I gathered all my courage and asked if you were going to the prom. You told me you didn’t have time for stupid dances and then you turned away.”

My chest deflated. “Shit. I’m sorry, Em.” I did remember that now. It had hurt me because I’d misunderstood it. “I didn’t know you were asking me to go with you. I thought your question was an indication you didn’t see what I was going through.”

“Maybe it was, partially anyway. Like I said, I thought you were angry and so I didn’t know how to approach you. I was confused and hurt too. And I was also seventeen. But see, Tuck, it was just a moment, a moment where either of us could have reacted differently—better maybe—but we didn’t, and so life moved forward the way it did. That’s what life does in the wake of our choices, good, bad, or in-between.”

My heart warmed. I appreciated the grace she was extending to me. I realized she was relating that moment, and perhaps several others between us, to that dreadful night Abel died. “Life moved forward with no dance-floor moment,” I said. “The one that would have righted everything.”

She turned her body and rested an elbow on the floor, supporting her head in her palm. “Do you think it’s too late to try it now?”

“To dance?”

“To dance the dance.”

“Here?”

Her lips were so close, and there was a tiny smear of yellow cheese on the corner of her mouth. The need to lean in and lick it off and taste her was so strong, I almost moaned, swelling to life, my body so needy. “Well, maybe not here,” she said. “I mean, we’re horizontal right now and there’s no music. But…in general. Do you think there’s such a thing as creating a moment that rights everything that’s gone so horribly wrong? If one moment can ruin everything, maybe one moment can fix it too.”