“She’s a good person. I care about her, as a friend. But she’s from another world, I guess. I thought, for a while, that I might try to fit into it, but we weren’t for each other. You knew it as well as we both did.” He pauses, strokes my hand, takes a breath. “As for your letters . . . well. Maybe I am glad to hear you’re reconsidering the things you sometimes hide, but my frustration last week, it was not about you. It was about—”

“New York,” I finish for him. “That’s three.”

He looks down at our joined hands. “New York,” he repeats. For the first time in this numbers game, Reid looks well and truly unsure. I’m leaving New York, he’d said to me once, and I don’t think all the games in the world could make him stay.

“This is home for me. This is where I built a life. And you’re leaving.”

There’s a long pause, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t holding my breath. I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t dip in disappointment at what he says when he speaks again.

“I’m here now.”

It’s an incomplete answer, a thing that won’t be fully resolved between us—not today, and probably not ever. He may be here now, but what he means is that he’s leaving later.

“I don’t want to stop seeing you,” he adds. “I’d see you any way you wanted. Only the walks, if that’s all I can have.”

It’s not all you can have. The thought is immediate, but I say nothing, not yet. This will hurt, after all; I can tell already. I can have gone through all this work to make it so both of us stay—last night, this morning, anything that happens from this moment on—but in the end, he’ll still leave.

“It’ll probably never work,” I say quietly, but I also desperately, desperately want him to convince me. “We’re total opposites.”

The hand that’s not holding mine reaches out, and Reid sets a gentle finger to one of the buttons on my jacket.

“Letters, numbers,” he says, a familiar beat to the words, as though he’s saying po-tay-to, po-tah-to. “They’re not so different.”

I raise my eyes to his, and I’m not sure when we managed to get so close. Close enough that I can see the red-blond stubble along his jaw, close enough that I can smell my soap on his skin.

“Both codes,” he adds. Then he moves his finger, tucking it under the edge of the button, tugging gently. The movement exerts no pressure, but I still lean closer to him.