“I wanted to kiss you good night,” he says. “It’s your birthday. And no birthday girl should go to sleep without a good-night kiss.”

Did Dad knock on Mom’s window late at night? Did he send her into zero gravity? And when she found out about him and Rebecca—was it like falling, or another kind of floating?

The wind is a knife. Serrated. Death by a thousand cuts, that’s what this is. Caring about someone and knowing it will end.

“This is very romantic,” I say, carefully. “And you came all this way in the cold, and I wish I could be the girlfriend you want, Ben, but—”

“You are the girlfriend I want,” he says, leaning in a little, his hair dusted with snow. “And the one I have. How convenient.”

“It’s ANYTHING but convenient! I don’t have time for this! For girlfriend things. I don’t have space inside me for it.”

“I love you.”

Sometimes … sometimes you can actually hear Earth rotate.

I look at this boy who climbed to my window in a snowstorm. Who clings to the flimsy wood, patient. My quantum boy that I found in the chaos. And I want to grab him and never let him go.

But I can already feel what it will be like when he leaves.

I shake my head. I wish he hadn’t said it. Everyone who has ever said that to me goes away for good.

“Yes. I do. I love you,” he murmurs. “Right here, right now. The wave and your dad and your sister and Micah—no one, nothing, can take this moment from us. It’s ours and I love you and if you don’t have time, that’s okay, because I’m not asking you for anything more than this minute. I’m not even asking you for it—I want to give it to you. A minute can be a gift.”

His breath comes out in a puff, and I breathe him in, his heat melting me, melting that ice that built up so quickly inside. The physicist Carlo Rovelli says that time and heat are linked, that the only way you can see a detectable difference between the past and the future is when there is a flow of heat.

This heat I feel—does it mean that Ben and I have a future? Can thermodynamics keep two people from leaving each other? Maybe things got cold between Mom and Dad, and so there could be no future. No more time. No more minutes.

A minute can be a gift.

“I didn’t open any birthday gifts.”

Ben’s eyes are sad. And hopeful. “I know.”

Time is a gift.

I am learning this the hard way.

Sixty seconds. This minute, one minute with Ben. A gift.

His lips are a little blue, but he doesn’t complain.

I kiss them.

Then I drag him inside.