He parks and we walk on a crushed stone path along a creek. I hear the rush of water from the falls long before we see it. The creek is close to dry and the water that’s left is almost completely frozen. When we get closer to the falls the boulders in the creekbed are glazed with ice, thick and white like frozen milk. None of it looks real. The cliffs are so high and it’s hard to tell what’s frozen and what’s moving water. I blink and think maybe when I open my eyes I’ll just be looking at a plain old creek in plain old woods, but the falls are still there, like someone painted a huge picture and left it for us. My eyelashes are heavy with snowy droplets, and everything looks blurry and bright and misty. My teeth chatter.

“It’s too soon, isn’t it?” Adam says as he wraps me in his arms. Somehow he’s still so very warm. I hug him back. “But…” He wipes mist off my cheek. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

He kisses me before I can say anything, which is good, because I don’t know what I should say.

We stop at Wegmans just outside of town and buy food for dinner. Not the quick kind of dinners we usually have. Adam buys tiny round steaks that get wrapped up in paper at the meat counter, asparagus, big fat egg noodles, and real garlic, not the chopped stuff in the jar Dale used at Margo’s.

Adam stops at the liquor store on the way home and leaves the car running for me while he goes in to buy a bottle of wine. And I’m nervous because I know something is different about this, but I’ll never be different enough to not have lied to him.