He kisses me, really kisses me. He presses with enough pressure to swell my lips and we grasp for each other, sharing the same searing frustration of being apart for so many months.

There is so much we’re still figuring out, but this makes sense.

He slips his tongue between the seam of my lips, and I press my hips closer to his.

He’s the one to break it, pulling back with a gasp. “People are watching.”

“It’s Paris, the women here are freer,” I joke.

Oliver nods over to a very stern-looking old woman twirling a parasol. “I think she would disagree.”

“Fine,” I relent.

While we walk along the banks of the river, I tell him about seeing my father today, about Lena stealing the documents.

“How can I help?”

I should have expected this from him. But it is another thing entirely to experience it playing out in front of me. I have handed him all of the things I am afraid of, and he has tucked them into his pocket and asked what else he can carry.

“You don’t have to,” I reply.

He looks down at me. “But I want to.”

I stop and raise a hand to his cheek. He presses slightly against it. “I do love you.” It’s not a confession. He already knows. But it feels new in light of everything.

“I love you too, nothing could change that.”

His hand is big and warm as he takes mine in his. “Let’s go to dinner.”

The café is quiet, set off the main street, with a dark-green awning. Green was his favorite color.

Here is the main event, the true reason Oliver showed up on my doorstep today, his hands raised in a truce.

“I can’t believe he would have been twenty-two today.” I sigh. It seems like an impossible age, so grown-up. What would my brother have been like as a man? He would have been a good one, I think.

For so long we were a trio, OliverWilliamFrances, said in a single breath. Oliver and I are still getting used to it being just the two of us when there should be three. The last time we were all together I was seventeen.

Oliver and I are now nineteen and twenty, but William will forever be nineteen, even now, on what should have been his twenty-second birthday. It’s so cruel.

This mess I’m in is because of my deep, unending love for him. Was it worth it? Probably not. But I know in my heart I’d do it again.

Oliver raises a glass. “He was the best of us. Happy birthday, Will.”

“I’ll toast to that.”

We order a slice of cake after our meal, and when the waitress asks us the occasion we say simply “a birthday.”