“I don’t mean this one situation. I mean the whole thing,” he said. He’d leapt on her sentence; their voices had overlapped. He ground his teeth and turned toward the front window.

She set her mug down and kneaded the back of his neck, then got up and moved to the fan chair on the opposite side of the coffee table. It was a solid wooden chair meant for a patio, painted sherbet green with red piping. She sat down in it, and he looked at her, looked into her, and for just a moment he saw her sitting in that chair on a patio behind a house they lived in together, her hair touched with silver, her face bearing the lines of several decades.

When he pulled his focus back into the room—this room, the living room of the apartment of the woman he’d been seeing for nearly a year and had fallen in love with—his vision went blurry, his eyes turned damp, and he repeated his last three words, a simple, devastating phrase: “The whole thing.”

“Just don’t do anything impulsive,” she said again.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, whatever you do has to be thought out, and it has to be for you.”

He felt his head shaking. He made it nod yes. “I know.”

“Not for me. Not even for us. It has to be what you need.”

“I know.” He felt his face contorting, felt a wet suck of air startle the top of his throat, and then his lungs let go and the tremor carried up his throat and straight out of his mouth, and as he wept, he tilted his face down over his coffee mug.

She didn’t come over to him. She was startled, he knew. She was worried. And yet, a minute later, when the wave began to subside and he dragged the heel of his hand across his eyes and looked at her, it wasn’t panic he saw in her face. It was nothing that bore Teresa’s trademark. Leona looked worried and concerned, but for the two of them: together and individually. She would stay with him, but not under just any terms. If he remained like this, frustrated, angry, unstable, or if he brought radical change to his life for the wrong reasons and derailed himself in the process, she would let him go. He could see it in her face: she would be with him, or she wouldn’t. Either way, she was going to be all right, and he loved her for it.

“I’m going to do … whatever I do,” he intoned slowly, evenly, “for me.”

“Don’t make any major decisions when you’re like this, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Promise me,” she said.