“This is Blake from birth to age two,” she says, flipping by memory to her favorite snapshots. “He refused to wear clothes until he was in preschool. Buck naked in every photo.”

“Sorry I’m not as cute as I was back then,” he deadpans to me.

“Eh, you’re cute enough—in a different way,” I joke back.

Seeing his family gently rag on him makes it easy to join in. I start to relax around them.

My phone begins to vibrate in my pocket. I know it’s rude to check it, but I so rarely get phone calls—I figure I should at least see who it is. I pull out my phone to check the screen. It’s Mom. I send her call to voicemail and put my phone away. But fifteen seconds later, my phone buzzes again with a text.

“Are you around to talk? Dad and I want to hear more about the shop’s finances,” Mom wrote.

They know we’re in a precarious position. They’d bail us out if they could—but that’s not an option right now.

“Will call tomorrow,” I type back.

Michelle draws my attention back by tapping a manicured finger against a photo of toddler Blake in a lumpy pumpkin costume complete with an orange felt hat dripping in green vines.

“Halloween. Wasn’t he the cutest? Look at those chubby cheeks.”

Saturday with Blake is delightfully low-key. Sunlight streams in through the window in his childhood bedroom to wake us up. He looks overgrown against the sky blue walls and neat rows of Harry Potter books lined up on the bookshelf. He drives us into the town’s center for bagels at Cafe Fresh, his favorite spot since he was a kid. (“New York bagels don’t even come close to these, I swear,” he says, sinking his teeth into the doughy mass.) He shows me around his hometown: his high school; the parking lot where everyone went to make out in cars; the mossy, abandoned railroad tracks stretched across a river where he used to smoke pot during summers home from college.

We’re perched there now, lying across the creaky wooden slats. My head is in his lap and he absentmindedly winds his fingers through my hair. There’s a sense of calm and peace out here that’s hard to find in the city. It’s just us surrounded by sky-high pine trees and a lazy river below. I don’t always know what to say to fill the silent lulls, but he does. He tells me more about growing up here and asks if we can visit Portland soon, so he can see my hometown through my eyes. He muses about how lucky he is to have met me, and how rare it is to find someone he can feel so comfortable around.