“I’m sorry!” I said. “It’s your last night in Bali, so we can talk later!”

“No,” Abby insisted. “This is major, and Dane’s cool with it, aren’t you, babe?”

Dane, who’d enjoyed more than three cocktails sipped through huge straws from guavas, gave Abby and me two thumbs up. As he entered the villa, Abby sat on the front steps. “So?” she asked. “Did he say it?”

Abby and I had invented Abby Alerts years ago, while she was sick. We’d sworn an oath, that whenever a guy said that he loved either one of us, we’d report back as quickly as possible. When Callum had said it, I’d called Abby from outside a Fire Island dance club, and while we’d both cheered, Abby mentioned that she’d just seen Callum, who was playing a divorced dad with a great dog, say “I love you” to a young widow with two adorable kids in a Lifetime movie. “So just remember,” she’d warned me, “he’s good at it.” When Dane had told Abby he loved her, after a Central Park softball game, she’d been wonderfully discombobulated, telling me, “I mean, I knew he loved me, we’ve been going out for a year, but with straight guys it’s so cute, because they have no idea how to say it, so Dane sounded like a little kid, blurting it out, as if he was going to punch me on the shoulder. But then he kissed me and he’s really good at that.”

So this was a necessary, sacred call. I described exactly where and how Edgar had made his declaration. Abby got very quiet.

“Whoa,” she finally said. “So he was basically covered with your puke and then he said ‘I love you.’ Which is both the most disgusting and the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. Oh, Carter. Now just blank everything else out, the barf and the Internet and who Edgar is, and just tell me: when he said ‘I love you,’ what was the first thing you thought?”

“I thought—that I’d heard him wrong. That he’d said something else, like ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘There’s something on your chin’ and that my idiot brain had turned it into ‘I love you.’ And then it hit me that he’d really said it, and I froze and I thought, ‘I am in so much trouble.’”

“You’re in trouble? Why?”