That was all he’d said. Nothing about Lexie Pine or his own sad, related history. Not until now. I wanted to know why. I carried the question back into the den after I’d sent the email.

He was sitting stiffly on the sofa. He’d made coffee. I could smell it, though I’d been gone so long that the mug in front of him was empty. I couldn’t stand what the waiting had done to his face, lining it with stress and shame and impatience. He was braced, anxious to hear whatever I would say. So I simply asked.

“Why did you never tell me?”

He blinked, surprised. “It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“I get that. But still.” Even as I said it, I realized that my faint disapproval about Betsy’s much milder experiment wouldn’t have encouraged him to open up.

He looked away, and I felt his impatience growing along with his discomfort. “It’s not something I wanted to remember. Ever. It’s certainly not a thing you tell a woman you hope to marry.”

I didn’t like that. It was too close to saying, Not a thing you tell your wife. We told each other everything. We were partners. I had kept nothing from him.

Fresh on the heels of that thought came another. You never told him about kissing Marshall.

Instantly my mind filled with excuses. It had happened three years before I even met Trey, when I was a freshman myself. It had meant nothing. Telling him would have made it seem more important than it was and perhaps strained the couples friendship Betsy and I were working to grow between us and our husbands.

But it had happened. The old, trace memory was alive in the soap and cedarwood smell that I’d caught earlier, when I hugged him. Marshall and I were never huggy or touchy with each other. Perhaps that kiss was why.

It had happened on a long weekend when Bets and I came home to do our laundry in her mom’s big washer, free. She asked if I would go over to Marshall’s house and check on him. The idea made me uncomfortable, but he was my friend, and I could see how much it mattered to her. She was still in love with him, I thought, which made me wonder what the hell she was doing, going wild at Georgia State. It wasn’t like she’d traded a boyfriend for an education; she almost never went to class.

I agreed, on the condition that Bets would use her fake ID and get me some wine coolers. I couldn’t imagine being dead sober and asking stoic Marshall how his broken heart was mending.

He was a mess, of course. He tried his quiet, tough-guy thing on me, but I’d never seen such sad eyes.