“You’ve got to elaborate, Hollywood,” she says, her tone hard and her eyes fierce. “Because I’m kind of catastrophizing over here. Did he...did he break up with you because you’re bi?”

“No.” I squeeze her hand. “No. The opposite, actually.”

“He...he dated you because you’re bi?”

I laugh. “No.”

“You broke up with him because you’re bi.”

I flop onto my back. “He said...he asked...well, first, I said, that I didn’t want anything to change between us but that I just wanted him to know, I guess. It felt like something important to me. I was scared to know this about myself but also proud. To suddenly realize straight girls didn’t think about other girls like I did. To finally give a name to what all those feelings were. I wanted to share it and I wanted...” I shake my head. “In the moment, I wanted to hear him say he believed me, that it was important to him, too. But he asked me to keep it a secret. Like if I didn’t want to break up or open our relationship, there was no point in taking it public. Why did I deem it important to tell him?”

She sucks in a breath. Her lips press against my temple, soaking up a silly, hot tear.

“He apologized the next day,” I say. “But...” I bite my lip. “I’m a forgiving person. Not in my kitchen,” I say quickly when she snorts. “In my personal life, I forgive and forgive and sometimes it’s bitten me in the ass to give people so many chances. But this thing. This one little thing. I couldn’t forgive.”

“This one little thing of affirming your identity,” she says flatly.

“I know I’m making excuses for him. But honestly, once the hurt wore off, I kind of felt...”

I squeeze my eyes shut. After the first few days, once the hurt and the shock of what I’d done had worn off, all that was left was relief. Relief because we’d gotten together so fast and were hurtling toward marriage and I’d done it again, jumped into something without really thinking it through. There were two paths for my life that bisected that night: on one path I stayed with a man I had truly loved, and we got married. I’d be a bi woman married to a straight man and I’d have been happy.

On the other path I was alone, but I got to explore who I was on my own terms, at my own pace. And neither path was the wrong one. I just know that the relief I felt meant that I chose the right path for me.

“That I had made the right decision,” I say slowly.

Amy talks about wanting me not to burn out on her but what I think she’s really saying is that she doesn’t want me to use her for sex and then move on. That’s something a flighty person would do. Something a person who, say, runs headlong into relationships, into business partnerships, who throws their savings into the pot to save a business, might do.