“Here’s the last part,” I said. I told them about Whitney overhearing the entire conversation, running into them last night, and the visit at the winery today. “So now I have no idea what to do. I’m terrified of fucking this up again.”

Mia sat straight up. “I know what you need to do.”

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes.” She nodded defiantly. “Listen, I get this woman. Maybe I didn’t go through everything she did, but I feel where she’s coming from. I don’t know if we’ve ever told you this, but right before I met Lucas, I was engaged to someone else who jilted me a week before the wedding. Paris was supposed to be my honeymoon, and I went by myself—the last thing I expected was to meet the love of my life tending bar in the Latin Quarter my first night there, but I did.”

I looked back and forth between them. “I never knew that.”

“Now, when I walked into that bar, I was angry, depressed, and miserable. I had the worst attitude ever.”

“The worst,” Lucas confirmed.

“But Lucas saw something in me that even I couldn’t see. He made me believe in love. He made me believe I was worth it. He made me believe that anything was possible—all I had to do was trust him.”

“But how?” I said, leaning forward, elbows on my knees.

“He refused to give up,” she said simply. “I tried to sabotage us. I broke it off in a train station, said au revoir, and walked away.” She looked at her husband. “Remember that, babe?”

He nodded. “You walked the wrong way.”

She laughed. “Yeah, that should have been a sign right there. But the point is . . .” She looked at me again. “I thought I was doing the right thing. And even better, I was taking control of it. I wasn’t going to give some half-French bartender-slash-psych professor the opportunity to abandon me—I was going to leave him first. And I did.”

“So what happened?”

“I had to go after her.” Lucas leaned forward, grabbed his wife’s arm, and tugged her onto his lap. “She forced me to. And I was a guy who didn’t believe in marriage, didn’t want kids, never thought the whole traditional family thing was for me. But she’d made me look at myself differently, and I knew I couldn’t let her get away.”

“And you can’t let Sylvia get away either, not if you love her.” Mia put her arms around Lucas’s shoulders. “It doesn’t matter that you haven’t been together for very long. What matters is the way you feel.”

“I love her,” I said adamantly. “And I know I can make her happy.”