“I know.”

“This . . . explains.” Elliot shakes his head, digging a hand into the front of his hair. “Why you didn’t call me back.”

Quietly, I tell him, “I wasn’t thinking very clearly—after—I wasn’t able to separate—you. And it.”

I’m so bad at words.

“Holy shit, Macy.” Catching himself, he turns and pulls me back into his arms, but it’s different.

Stiffer.

I’ve had more than a decade to deal with this; Elliot has had two minutes.

“When you stopped me outside Saul’s,” I say into his shirt, “and asked how Duncan was?”

He nods against me. “I had no idea.”

“I thought you knew,” I told him. “I thought you would have heard . . . somehow.”

“We didn’t have anyone else in common,” he says quietly. “It was like you disappeared.”

I nod, and he tightens. Something seems to occur to him. “All this time you weren’t out there thinking that I intentionally slept with Emma, knew your dad died, and was fine with it, were you?”

I try my best to explain the fogginess of my logic at the time. “I don’t think I really thought about it like that—that you were fine with it. I knew you were trying to call me. I knew, rationally, that you did love me. But I thought that maybe you and Emma had more of a thing going on than you ever told me. I was embarrassed and heartbroken . . .”

“We didn’t have a thing,” he says urgently.

“I think it was Christian who said you two hooked up sometimes—”

“Macy,” Elliot says quietly, cupping my face so I’ll look at him. “Christian is an idiot. You knew everything that happened with me and Emma. There wasn’t some other secret layer to it.”

I want to tell him that, in truth, this is all moot now, but I can see that to him, it isn’t. His intent means everything.

He squints, still struggling to put this all together. “Andreas said he saw you, the next summer. Coming in here with your dad.”

I shake my head, until I realize what he means. “That was my uncle Kennet.” I sniff, wiping my nose again. “We drove up to pack our things and put them away.” I look around us, at the familiar, now-drab paint on the walls, remembering how I didn’t actually want to move a single thing. I wanted it left exactly the way it was, a museum. “That was the last time I was here.”

“I was home that summer,” he whispers. “All summer. I spent every day looking for you. I wondered how I could have possibly missed the moment you came by.”

“We went in late. We kept the lights off.” Even now, it sounds utterly ridiculous how we snuck in like burglars, using flashlights to get what we needed. Kennet thought I’d lost it again. “I was worried I would see you.”

Elliot pulls back, mouth turned down. I hate that this is opening old wounds, but I hate even more that it’s making fresh ones.