“Wrong about what?” I asked.

It was a cold evening, with autumn starting to turn into winter. My fall jacket was on the verge of not being enough to block the cruel temperature.

“Only everything,” she said.

“Are you writing me a love letter?” I asked.

“You can’t handle a love letter.”

“Ha.” I stroked the top of her head, dragging my fingers through her hair. It took more willpower than fighting through my dad’s sprinting drills to stop touching her and remember why I’d come.

“Um,” I started.

Eliza closed her notebook. “It’s okay. I know why you’re here.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “For Carter.”

Her full brown eyes met mine, neither of us blinking. “I figured you might react like this, and I get it. But before you end things,” she whispered, “and you want to break up or whatever, can you read this?”

I couldn’t look away. Not even when she crumpled up a scratchy piece of paper and placed it in my fist. “That’s what you’re scared of?” I asked. “That after all this, I’d choose Carter?”

She didn’t reply.

She didn’t need to.

She was right.

“Please read it, okay?” The tree bark cracked as she stood. “I’m going to get another jacket. I’ll be right back, and we can talk about it.”

I nodded as she stalked off. I don’t know if I can do this . . . I started to think.

“Get it together, Nick,” I whispered. Then I opened up her letter.

Eliza took her sweet time inside, because I’d had long enough to read her letter eight or nine times. The sun had disappeared below the thinning canopy of her oak tree when she finally approached. Her letter shook in my hands, from both the cooling temperature and its contents.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.” I stood. Her eyes vacillated between mine, awaiting my verdict. Thinking she already knew what I was going to say.

The note weighed in my palm. I folded it in half, like closing a book.

“You wrote that you think you know what I’m going to do,” I said.

Her loose hair floated in the breeze. She studied my sneakers.

“There’s a lot you don’t know.” I stepped towards her. “You don’t know how much I think about you. Which has been basically nonstop since forever, and especially since you came back from Australia. You don’t know you’re the only girl I think about.” I took another small step towards her. “You don’t know how nervous you make me. How that makes hanging out with you even more fun. You don’t know how much I look forward to seeing you, or how I feel like I can tell you anything.”

Eliza frowned. “Before you read that, you were going to break up with me.”

“Yeah. I was going to take the easy way out,” I admitted. “I thought if I were friends with Carter, I could still be friends with you. But I don’t wanna be friends. I want to do this thing for real.”