Joey stepped closer, farther down the pier, until she dead-ended into a chest, into arms, and something more than gravity swept her inside them.

*  *  *

“You look good, Jones.” It sounded deeper, this Leo voice, and Joey tipped her face up in curiosity. His lazy, teasing smile was so utterly the same that it took her breath away.

Leo slipped from her arms and started back down the pier toward the beach. Joey followed, dazed, beside him, the hairs of her arm sweeping the hairs of his. As they walked, Joey was struck by flashes of before—floating in the sea on their backs, staring up at an azure sky, the wind dancing in the awning at their one-year anniversary dinner. Their last Corfu night.

But then here was Leo in the flesh, now more Daniel Craig to his early-aughts Joshua Jackson. He wore a green T-shirt and gray jeans slung low, skinny and rumpled. A couple of black rope bracelets clung to his left wrist. His face bore pale scruff, sprinkled by a few silver strands, and one cavernous wrinkle bisected his forehead. Somehow, though, the wrinkle lent him wisdom, worldliness, an invitation to unearth the adventures that had shaped it.

“You got edgy, huh, Jones?”

“What?” Their arm hairs were still hugging each other.

“This.” Leo touched her left earlobe, where she had three delicate gold earrings in a row, plus two in her cartilage that had hurt like hell in the piercing.

She had fewer piercings in her right ear, only two in the lobe, for an asymmetrical vibe, not too precious or perfect. Her dad liked to call her piercings jazzy. Joey still couldn’t work out if that meant he liked them or not.

“When did you get them?”

Joey’s heartbeat thrashed in her ears. She could tell Leo about quitting her big law job, about craving a drastic change after all those years shellacked and suit-straitjacketed. About how the ear piercer had tried to talk her out of getting all five additional piercings at once, but she’d insisted. About going to Bali and meeting Grant and one of the piercings getting infected so Grant had taken her on the back of his motorbike through twisty rice paddies to get antibiotics from a clinic.

But no, Joey couldn’t tell Leo all that. That story required a thousand others to preface it. And Leo had chosen to bow out before those thousand other stories.

“I’ve always been edgy,” she said. “I’m an artist. It’s basically in the definition.” Her left hand twitched. She extended it. “One thing that did change, though, is I’m engaged. Well, you already know that, I guess. His name is Grant.”