There was no good way to bring it up. When she paused at the end of a sentence, I said, “Will tells me you’re leaving New York.”

She stopped, holding a glass in her hand. The guilty expression on her face told me everything I needed to know.

I said, “Were you planning on telling me?”

“Alex,” she said.

I wasn’t finished. “Or was it going to be a surprise? One day you’re here, and the next—”

“It isn’t like that,” she said. She set the glass on the counter and wrapped her arms around her waist, the way she always did when she was feeling defensive. “I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you. I just… forgot to mention it.”

“You forgot,” I said flatly.

“Look, everything’s happened so fast,” she said. “I promised my sister—but then I didn’t know how to tell Yolanda, but then after you—and I just—” She stopped, a stricken look on her face.

“Why don’t we sit down,” I said, “and you can start from the beginning.”

And so we sat together on the sofa while she told me the whole story: the conversation with her sister that led to her accepting my offer; her dreams of buying her mother a new house; her increasingly mixed feelings about moving. “It just didn’t seem real to me at first, you know? I didn’t even tell Yolanda until that night you yelled at me at the club, when you found me with Altman. My lease is up at the beginning of September, so I guess she talked to Will about it. I didn’t think he would say anything to you.”

“I’m glad he did,” I said, “because otherwise I would still be in the dark.”

“Don’t be angry,” she pleaded. “I promise I really didn’t mean to lie to you. Everything seemed so straightforward, but then you were—then I started—well, it was easier to just avoid thinking about it. It’s really stupid, but I was sort of hoping the problem would just go away if I ignored it. Like, the universe would make the decision for me so that I wouldn’t have to.” She sighed. “I promised Cece that I would come home. But now…”

“Now,” I prompted, when she didn’t continue.

She looked at me with her gray eyes so full of longing and sorrow that if she had asked me, in that moment, to lie down and die, I would have done it for her. “Now I’m not so sure I want to.”

“Oh, Sasha,” I said, and gave in to the urge to hold her. She fit in my arms like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I couldn’t imagine living the rest of my life without her.

“There was nothing keeping me in New York, before,” she said. “But now… But I can’t stay. My mom needs me. I promised Cece. My brothers are growing up, and I’ve already missed so much of their lives.”

“Sasha, I will keep you here if I have to lock you in my bathroom and bring you water twice a day,” I said, and felt her shoulders shake with silent laughter. “Sweetheart, listen. I won’t say that I’m in love with you, not yet, because that would be crazy. That would be over-the-top, sixteen-year-old, first-romance, Will levels of crazy. I’ve only known you for a month. But I will be in love with you pretty soon. I don’t want you to leave. Stay here with me.”

She clung to me, her face buried against my neck. She shook her head mutely.

“I know you promised your sister,” I said. “But plans change. Be selfish, for once.”

She drew in a deep breath, and then let it out all at once and relaxed against me. She turned her head to the side and looked up at me. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay?” I asked, not sure I had heard her correctly.

“I’ll stay,” she said. “For now. For a few more months. No guarantees.”

“Sure,” I said, and grinned, my heart opening from its tight, terrified knot. A few months was better than nothing. Sasha was stubborn, but I was more stubborn yet.

I had faith that I could turn for now into for good.

Epilogue

One Year Later

“That’s the last of it,” Alex said.

I looked up, raising my right arm to wipe my forehead on the sleeve of my t-shirt. We had picked the wrong weekend to move: the air conditioning was broken, and thanks to an end-of-summer heat wave, it was at least a million degrees in the apartment. Maybe ten million. Hotter than Satan’s asshole, my dad would have said, although he never could explain why he had any knowledge about the devil’s nether regions.

Alex stood in the bathroom doorway, holding a lampshade and a reusable grocery bag with two pillows sticking out the top. He looked about as sweaty as I felt. “What are you doing?” he asked me.

“Scrubbing the grout,” I said. “Don’t you ever clean? It looks like you’ve been peeing on the floor for fifteen years without ever picking up a mop.”

He snorted. “You’re disgusting. Trust me, sweetheart, I mop on a regular basis. That’s just what it looks like.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said. There was nothing wrong with the floor that a little elbow grease couldn’t fix. I dumped the scrub brush back in the bucket and stood up, wiping my hands on my shorts.

Alex bent to give me a kiss, slow and lingering. “Care to explain to me why you shoved two pillows in a totebag?”

“I’m sure there was a reason,” I said. I took the bag from him and stuck my hand in it, searching. My fingers encountered a hard edge, a corner, and then glass. I smiled. “It’s my diploma. I didn’t want it to get broken.” After months of studying, I had taken the GED last month and passed on the first try. I was thinking about enrolling for a two-year degree, and then maybe transferring somewhere to finish my Bachelor’s, and from there—who knew? Maybe med school.

He curled his hand around the back of my neck and planted a kiss on my forehead. “We’ll hang it in the living room.”

“Nah,” I said, “I want it in your office, right next to your MBA. We’ll have our very own trophy wall. I’m going to have more diplomas than you by the time I’m done.”

“Is that right?” he asked. “Will I have to call you Dr. Sasha?”

“That’s Dr. Kilgore to you, asshole,” I said, and he laughed and kissed my face again before he let me go.