And this is when it hit me, the rest of our lives. I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life, not just right now, but forever. Days would go by sometimes when he was the only adult I talked to in real life, and I realized that part of why I didn’t care about the rest of the world was because he gave me what I needed. And maybe I had ruined it. But I had to do this. I had to let the story reach the end, and then I’d come back and I’d hope that I could tell other stories.

“Junie is going to be home in, like, five minutes. Bea texted a while back,” I told him.

“Don’t tell her yet,” he said.

“She wouldn’t understand one bit of it,” I said.

“I want you to act like it’s all fine,” he said. “I want you to sleep in our bed, okay? I don’t want you to go to the guest room and be dramatic and make everything worse. I said it was okay for now, so you have to be normal. You have to be good for us.”

“I wasn’t going to go sleep in the guest room,” I said.

“Well, I’m not going to sleep in the guest room.”

“It’s not a great bed,” I admitted.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“I do,” I said, without hesitation, and it was nice to answer a question that didn’t require constant adjustment to my brain. “I do, and you know I do.”

“Okay,” he said. “I believe you.” But then he paused for a few seconds and I wondered if he was doubting me. I was just about to say something when he held up his hand.

“I’m trying to remember the phrase,” he said. “I’m trying to remember the exact phrase.”

“The edge is—”

“No,” he said, “I don’t want you to say it. Just . . . okay, yeah, the edge is a sh—” and then he was just mouthing the rest of the words, nodding, like it was a spell, which it was.

He looked up at me. “You made that up?” he said.

“I did.”

“Your teenage brain did that?” he asked.

“It did,” I admitted.

And when Junie burst into the room, holding a half-full box of Milk Duds, absolutely zooted on sugar and instantly explaining the plot of the movie they just saw, I thought, Oh, thank god. The chaos of our daughter, so lovely and beautiful, I would always be grateful for it, how she required us to keep living, to keep moving forward, just so she didn’t leave us in her dust. I listened to her explain the movie, not a single word of it making the slightest bit of sense, but I listened as hard as I could, like if I tried hard enough, I would truly understand.

Fifteen