“I want that too,” she said in the tiniest voice, full of so much vulnerability.

He cupped her cheeks, holding her face in his hands, looking at her. At the woman he loved madly. Deeply. Truly. Without any regrets, without any reservations. “I’m going to tell you over and over how I feel. Because I need you to know. I always ask you to give yourself to me, and you do, and have in every way. And I want to give myself to you,” he said, and she was trembling under his touch. Her shoulders shook and her lips were parted. “If you’ll still have me.”

“Oh Jack, you know I will. You know I love you. You know I’m crazy in love with you. You’re not a work in progress,” she said, her voice breaking.

“I kind of am, but I want to be a work in progress with you.”

“We can be that for each other,” she said, tilting her chin up.

“You want me to kiss you, don’t you?” he said, their playfulness coming back.

“Always.”

“I will always want to,” he said, and kissed her in the garden, on the bridge, the weeping willow the witness to his deep and abiding love for this woman who’d challenged him, who’d changed him, and who’d healed him simply by loving him. That was what had truly washed away the regret. Yes, her words, her insight, her kind understanding of his past had helped him see all that he was clutching unnecessarily. But ultimately, he’d been letting go already. Letting go because she loved him.

They had a very late lunch at a cafe in town, laughing, talking, touching.

She hadn’t expected him to show up. She’d resigned herself to her own hotel room, to a few more lonely days in Paris, and then to a long string of empty nights back in Manhattan, as she immersed herself in another 10K, in more Spanish lessons, in bowling, in whatever she had to do to rid this man from her mind.

She had no doubt the process of erasing Jack would have been even harder than erasing Clay had been.

But she didn’t have to, because there was no longer an arrangement or an end. There was only this new beginning.

At lunch, his phone rang. He glanced at the screen, then hit ignore, then silent. “Just a customer. I’ll call him later. I will regret it more if I miss this lunch right now,” he said, then laced his fingers through hers.

After they ate, they wandered through Giverny, getting lost in the shops, and getting found again. Instead of calling the call service, they simply caught a train back to Paris. Because the train was what they needed and wanted. The last one, and they were all alone in their car. The conductor took their tickets, and then the overhead lights dimmed. She gazed out the window as the train rattled through the countryside at night. The hum of the wheels and the din of the engine made for a relaxing soundtrack at the end of the day.