She didn’t say anything for a moment, and I was certain she was going to give me the old heave-ho. Why wouldn’t she? She was bright, beautiful, and full of life. Why would she want to be with a broken guy like me?

“Is your body giving out on you your way of dealing with loss?” she asked. “As in, it gives you a reason to push people away and protect yourself from more loss?”

I stared at her. Shocked. “How did you figure out in a matter of weeks what I’ve been trying to figure out for months?”

“I understand loss,” she said. “It makes you do crazy things when you’re trying to cope, you know, like marry anyone who asks.”

I smiled at her self-deprecation. “Yeah, well, my crazy thing was to have my body give out so I could hide in my house for months.” My voice was bitter with self-disgust.

She shook her head. “You weren’t hiding. You were regrouping. In a way, you could look at it as your anxiety protecting you by giving you the solitude you needed to heal.”

I blinked. I had never considered it from that angle before.

“Besides, who am I to judge?” she asked. “You’ve made me do some thinking, too.”

“I have?” My heart thumped in my chest. Oh god, please don’t let it be that she was better off without me.

“You were right about me, too,” she said. “I was trying to manage you. I was trying to make you dependent upon me, by being the bridge between you and your sister, so that you would never leave me. That’s my damage, and it took you refusing to put up with it for me to see it.”

“So what you’re saying is I’m good for you?” I asked, only partly kidding.

“Yeah.” She laughed.

I glanced up at the night sky. It was a vast expanse of darkness with just a few pinpricks of light. No shooting stars. Pity. I really needed some celestial magic at the moment.

“Now that we’ve acknowledged how good we are for each other.” I cleared my throat. “Does this mean you’re willing to give us another go?”

“Yes,” she said. Just like that. No hesitation. No second-guessing. My god, I loved her.

Before she’d even finished saying the word, I kissed her. Her mouth fit perfectly under mine, and I wasn’t sure how I had survived without this for two whole weeks. I kept my hands on her hips as I pulled her in tight and plundered her lips with mine. As I’d told her before, I didn’t need any shooting stars in the sky because she made me see them every time she kissed me.