Even so, there were no other girls in those long months. How could there be? He and Betsy had invented what love should look like. His parents were divorced, hers hated each other, so they’d made up something different. They’d discovered sex together, too, the summer after junior year, and developed their own lexicon of looks and phrases that no one else could read or follow.

When Betsy did come back, they called her months at Georgia State her rumspringa, when they talked of it at all. They didn’t, much. No need, once it was over. It had been a good thing. She’d needed that time, free, before she could choose a life with him and never wonder, never wander. He’d never had her restlessness, but the separation had taught him his own capacity for faith and patience. He didn’t know everything she’d done in that year. It didn’t matter. He’d simply waited through it, like a seed over a long winter.

He wondered if Bree ever thought about that long-ago kiss that didn’t happen. Remembering it now, the shine of her eyes, the way her dark hair had smelled of roses even then, though some sweeter, simpler version, he understood the truth: This was not some silly crush.

He was in love with her.

He knew Bree better than he knew anyone on earth, except for Cara. He knew her, and he loved her for all the reasons Betsy had loved her. The big ones, like her loyalty and that fierce fight under her quiet, but also a host of tiny, intimate things. The way her nose got little wrinkles on the sides when she grinned or how she saved the bits of cookie dough in her ice cream to eat at the end.

No one else alive knew him and his history the way Bree did, because hers was all entwined in it. No other woman looked at Cara and recognized and cherished every bit of Betsy that was alive inside her only daughter.

Ironic. If he’d kissed Bree those many years ago, he’d have lost Betsy forever. Now that situation had completely reversed. Of all the women he could bring into his daughter’s life, Bree might be the only one that Betsy would fully approve.

He ran a hand across his hair. No wonder he was hell-bent on this course, though it was dangerous, illegal, and in a flaming moral red zone. Not to mention this was the wrong time to realize he loved her. There was never going to be a good time, but this was the actual worst.

Once this was over—if this was ever over—he would have to get some distance. He would buy Jenna-from-the-lab her shrimp dinner, maybe get back on Match, definitely take himself off snack-mom rotation.