“I know you do,” he said. “That’s not what stood out. It’s the way you talked about America. You called it home.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You absolutely did,” he said, and took a sloppy bite of vanilla soft-serve.

“Huh.” I frowned at the toes of my sneakers, stretched out in front of me. “I wonder how often I do that.”

“You never talk about missing America,” Freddie said. “You never really talk about America at all.”

I pulled out a Flake and nibbled the end. I’d lived in the UK since I graduated from college, and although I thought about my parents often, I didn’t dwell too much on home (there was that word again) in my day-to-day life. There were things I missed about my country of origin—measuring things in inches and pounds and Fahrenheit, being able to watch baseball live—but I lived in a palace with a person I loved very much. Still, my heart had leapt a little bit to see the United States on the itinerary, even though we weren’t going anywhere near Iowa.

“It’s not that I don’t feel at home here.” I chewed on the Flake as some chocolate pieces crumbled onto my shirt. “But I guess I didn’t choose England so much as I chose Nick. And it was a package deal. It always felt like my home here was the person, and not the place.”

“It probably doesn’t help that everyone here thinks of you as ‘the American,’” Freddie said.

“I’m not legally an American anymore. I certainly don’t feel British. I’m…” The Flake was melting in my hand, so I popped the rest into my mouth while I searched for the words. “Kind of nothing. And people have expectations of me here that are not necessarily the expectations I imagined for myself, but I still have to live up to them, and…I don’t know. It’s hard to find myself in that sometimes.”

Freddie looked up at the canopy of leaves over our heads. “I understand how that feels, a bit,” he said.

I blew out my breath. “Wow, this really did turn into a therapy session.”

“My hourly rates are very reasonable, if you want to keep talking it out,” Freddie said, elegantly slurping the drips from the bottom of his diminishing cone. “But if you haven’t been in America for a while, it also means you haven’t left us for a while. Maybe you’ll miss bits about England in the same way.”

“Or I’ll get over there and decide all those Americans are irritating and start complaining about why there aren’t proper scones,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

“Right. About that,” he said, rubbing at his left knee. “It looks like I won’t be here.”

Flake number two chose that moment to faint gracefully out of my pooling ice cream and into my lap.