I checked the time on my phone. “I have two hours and fifteen minutes. Take your time.”

He smiled at the sand.

“What would happen if you were late?” he asked. “With Francine. Versus other people.”

“Don’t know. Never been.”

“Never? Your whole life?”

“Not being perfect is for people who have families; you can screw up and they still keep you.”

He moved so his shoulder was touching mine beside him on the rocks, warm and strong. “Perfect how?”

“Just—I am never late. I have never been rude or disrespectful to a parent out loud, never been drunk, no bad grades. Like that.”

“Your whole life?”

I drew circles in the sand with my toes. “Soon as I figured it out, yeah.”

“Did you want…I mean, were you being perfect for them so they would want you?”

“No. It was for me. Muir couldn’t stop moving. He tried so hard to want to stay and be a guy living in a house tending a farm and be married and raising kids, but he just kept…leaving. He missed being in the world. I had to keep leaving houses because sometimes they wanted me to stay.”

He moved my hair out of my eyes. “You left?” he asked.

“I did.”

“How many?”

“In my life?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t get freaked out.”

“I won’t.”

“And this is counting, like, five in the first year because hospitals and such.”

“How many.”

“Francine is twenty.”

He moved my hair onto one shoulder, fingertips along my neck. I was getting dizzy. “Can you stay here?” he said. “For the year at least?”

“I’m trying,” I said.

“Try hard.”

Skinny-legged plovers ran through the wet sand to a nook in the rocks and grass. The moon was rising fast in the darkening sky. He pressed the back of my hand into the cool sand and traced the lines of my palm. “Have you ever wanted to stay?”

I wished I hadn’t given the gold chain to Kira. I wished I had it now. “Sometimes,” I whispered without thinking. I barely admitted that to myself; what was I doing saying it out loud to this person? To this person? Tears blurred my vision. “Sometimes.”

He held my hand.

“You must be exhausted,” he said.

Oh, my heart.

I rested my head on his shoulder until I turned to kiss him.

The moon on the water was bright white and high when we moved to sit in the seagrass and he kissed me back, safe from the night wind, time flying.

—

“I was half a minute from calling Joellen. Thirty seconds.” Francine stood in the blazing kitchen, every light on, so wrong at nearly midnight.