“Daniel isn’t dumb.”

“I didn’t say he was. He’s just not . . .” She smiled. “One of a kind, the way you are.”

“Ha-ha.”

“I’m being serious here. You never could take a compliment.”

I shrugged, but she was right. I don’t know why, but they always seemed suspect.

“You know what the real telling point was for me?” I said. She shook her head.

“I never told him how I’m damaged goods.”

“Oh, please. You met him in intensive care. He was there when you were brought in. There’s probably nothing he doesn’t know about what the accident did to you.”

“I mean, from before,” I said. “When I was a kid. All the trouble I got into, living on the streets and all.”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Just topped our glasses and set the wine bottle back down on the worktable.

“That is telling,” she finally said.

I knew what she was thinking.

“I was going to bring it up a bunch of times,” I said, “back when I realized that we were getting serious, but then I got uneasy because he’d never talk about himself.”

“It doesn’t mean he was a bad guy,” she said.

“I know.”

“It’s just . . . some people don’t have interesting lives.”

“I could have done without a lot of my own interesting bits.”

“You know what I mean. Some people don’t have a story. They just drift through their lives.”

“Everybody’s got a story.”

Mona nodded. “But the point I’m trying to make is that they’re not necessarily interesting—not even to themselves. So they latch onto somebody whose life is more interesting, or appears more interesting, because that adds some luster to their own.”

“I suppose.”

I didn’t want to feel that way about Daniel. Not because it’d make my staying with him for a couple of years even more pathetic, but because of what it said about him. Except it seemed to be true. Unless he had some dark past like I did that he’d wanted to keep from me the way I’d kept mine from him.

It’s a weird thing, and it all happened so long ago that sometimes I just like to pretend I can forget. And really, when is it the right time to tell someone how you were abused as a kid, shuffled from foster home to foster home, became a junkie, sold your body . . .

“So, what are you going to do now?” Mona asked.

I raised my eyebrows. “Well, I’m not going to get involved with another guy any time soon. It just never seems to work out for me.”

She nodded. “Yeah, it’s weird how this kind of thing leaves you feeling so vulnerable, even when you’re not the dumpee.”