“I don’t know if I’m the same person I was two years ago. I don’t know if I’m the same person I was two months ago,” I say, trying to explain myself but feeling like I’m coming up short. “I know being a Similar doesn’t define me. But now, with my dad gone… I’m really alone.”

“And so are they.” He doesn’t say, and so is Levi, but I know he’s thinking it. We both are. Ollie is and always will be my past. But Levi is my future. Not because I’m a Similar and can’t be with Ollie because he’s not. But because Levi was always the one. And Ollie will always be my best friend.

“Maude and Pippa and the others, they told me about a lot of what I missed senior year. But so much of it—it feels like someone else’s life. Like some other girl lived it. Which is, I guess, what happened. To both of us,” I add, remembering that Ollie and Levi’s lives were hijacked too.

“There’s only one thing I regret from this year,” Ollie says, his gray eyes shining so bright I want to live in them indefinitely and bottle up that “usness” that’s so precious and only ours.

“What’s that?” I ask breathily.

“That the Emma I kissed wasn’t you.”

Those words set every atom of my being on fire. I know I’m not in love with Ollie, not like I am with Levi. But still, I do love him, in a way that’s only mine and his. And in that moment I feel so much for him—for all the pain we’ve both suffered—that I don’t respond. I simply let him pull me close. He needs this—this one kiss—and maybe I do too.

His hands cupping my face, Ollie gently leans toward me and presses his lips to mine. It is tender and sweet and sends tingles up my spine. It doesn’t mean what it could, in some other life, a parallel world where we got to be together. Maybe Ollie wants it to; I don’t know. For me, it’s a kiss that means something singular, in this moment. It means we are Emma and Ollie, solidified in space and time, and no one can ever take that away from us again. In a way, this kiss is its own sort of goodbye, to what might have been between us. To the road we won’t ever take.