I wanted to act cool in front of my friends and my brother. That impulse never changes. But I needed support. “Do you guys really think I should go for it with Amelia?”

“She tried to have your baby, man,” Spence said. “If you’re waiting for a sign, I think that was it.”

Spence’s wife, Christina, stepped out of the gazebo, and their toddler daughter wriggled out of her mom’s arms and ran down the brick sidewalk, squealing, “Daddy!” as he lifted her up into the air.

Watson was saying, “You’ve got to get back out there.”

Watching one of my oldest, best buddies hold his daughter, I realized that Amelia wasn’t all I wanted. I wanted to be a dad; I wanted to be a family.

“You’re just getting started,” Spence chimed in.

Walking down the brick sidewalk with two of my oldest, best buddies and my brother in the town that raised me, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Spence was right.

Amelia WISTFUL AND ROMANTIC

“I PROMISE YOU THAT THEY’LL teach you,” I lied for the millionth time.

“But what if I throw up? What if we have a huge fish, and I’m trying to reel it in and I lose it, and then they lose the tournament because of me?”

Harris and I were watching fishing videos on YouTube, and I truly couldn’t decide if I was doing the right thing. I mean, yeah, I was feeding Harris to the wolves. In 2045, I would be hearing about the time they had to take that pretty city boy on the boat and he nearly drowned or some other hyperbolized account of how unmanly Harris was. I had never seen him the least bit vulnerable, and it made me like him even more. I felt such an outpouring of compassion for him in that moment that I leaned over and kissed him.

He smiled. “Are you going to tell your parents we’re moving in together?”

I grimaced. “I think I’ll just keep paying for the apartment indefinitely and pretend I live there.”

He laughed. “You’re not honestly telling me that they are going to be scandalized by their thirty-five-year-old daughter living with her boyfriend?”

I didn’t say anything, but he had no idea. My mother would not care that her friends’ children had all lived with significant others before marriage. She would not care that I was old enough to make my own decisions, that I liked Harris and I loved the agreement about our lives that we—as grown-ups—had reached. She would only care that she had not raised me to live with a man I wasn’t married to and that I was directly defying those orders. “Maybe we should tell them at Christmas?” I smiled encouragingly.

He laughed. “Amelia, that’s, like, six months away.”

“Oh! Oh!” I said. “Maybe we could make up an elaborate story about something horrible that happened at my apartment and you are sacrificing and lovingly taking me in, as a friend, and letting me live in your guest room.”