He grabbed my hand and toted me along to the kitchen, as if I were a Thanksgiving parade balloon. I felt like one. Light and bobbing along. He made me a sandwich that was crazy good. He buttered the bread and put it facedown to toast in the same pan where he’d cooked onions and some paper-thin steaks his mom kept in the freezer. I’d described that sandwich to a dozen people over the years. Never the kiss.

I did not tell Betsy, and I knew without asking that Marshall hadn’t either. It was a moment born of alcohol and youth and his compelling sorrow. Telling would have hurt her for no reason. I’d been ashamed and sorry, but I’d learned from that moment, piling good decisions on top of it until I was no longer the girl who had kissed him. Until I was a woman who would not, in the same situation, make that same mistake.

I understood then that Trey’s story was a larger, darker version of my own. He hadn’t lied or worked hard to hide this. It was a thing of his past that had pushed him to become the man he was. It had changed him, so that it was no longer his. He’d distanced himself from Spencer in the wake of it, and from the boy he’d been. He was a better man now.

He was still looking at me, his last words hanging in the air. Not a thing you tell a woman you hope to marry.

“Okay,” I said. There was a wealth of meaning in the simple word.

He heard it. His face crumpled, and then we were in each other’s arms, and he was kissing me with such relief, such pain, such awful desperation. We fell back on the sofa, and what happened between us then was quick and rough and necessary.

My body wasn’t ready. It hurt as he came into me. He heard my gasp and tried to stop, but I would not let him. I pulled him in, legs and arms tightening around him. I wanted the urgent reconnection, and I wanted the pain, too. It was like the bite of the too-tight gold bracelet I’d shoved high on my arm before I’d gone to that ill-fated party. It was a place to hide my larger pain and be with him. I forgave him with my body and my pain, and he held me so tight, moving in me.