I blink at her. “What did you just say?”

“I said it makes me nuts.”

I just stand there for a minute.

What have I been doing, if not exactly that?

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. That’s Peter. Peter, I always liked.

“Hey!” Shelby squints. “What?”

“Nothing.” I jump on the bed with my two best girls and give them both a good long snuggle. “Nothing at all.”

* * *

It’s just first light when I reach Sawyer’s house, dawn coming up gray and dripping behind me. I stopped at the gas station to fuel up and grab last-minute provisions; Hannah’s asleep in the car seat, put out by the early hour. The radio bumbles, a low, soothing sound.

I dig a couple of pebbles out of the planters in the LeGrandes’ front yard, then cut across the cluster of coconut palms on the lawn and toss them, one by one, at his window. Barely seven A.M. but it’s already humid, the slick of damp Florida air across my skin.

Nothing happens. I hold my breath: This is a stupid gesture, way lamer than it is poetic, but it made a weird kind of sense on the way over here. I’m just about to give up when Sawyer raises the screen and looks. “That for me?” he asks. Even from a full flight down, he’s got a hell of a smile.

I smile back, big and reflexive, and heft the enormous Slurpee in my free hand in a ninety-nine-cent salute. “Looks that way.”

Sawyer nods a little, sleepy and impressed. “It’s early,” is all he says.

“I know. I didn’t want to waste any time.” I hesitate, and then I say it: “I just stopped by to find out if you felt like taking a trip.”

Even from all the way down here I can see his dark eyebrows arc. “Where you going?” he asks, leaning a little further out the window, like he’s trying to get a good look at my face.

I shrug, raise my hands a little helplessly. “Not sure,” I admit, still grinning. It feels hugely powerful to say. “But I brought a lot of notebooks.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asks, faux-casual. “Gonna do some writing?”

“Thinking about it,” I tell him, equally glib. It feels like we’re circling something here, like maybe we both know where this is headed. Like maybe we sort of always have. “Gonna start in Seattle.”

Sawyer nods his approval. “Seattle is nice,” he says mildly. His tan fingers curve around the window frame. “When are you leaving?”

“Right now.”

Sawyer doesn’t say anything for a moment, then: “Wow.” He’s looking at me like he’s known me forever. He’s looking at me like I surprise him every day. He straightens up in the window, tall and familiar; the cup is damp and heavy in my hand. “I mean. Can you wait five minutes for me to put clothes on?”

I laugh out loud and sudden, like there’s something fizzing and effervescent inside my veins. I didn’t realize until right this second that I was holding my breath, but letting it out is hugely relieving, years and years’ worth of tension draining away. “I think so,” I say, still giggling—giggling, seriously, like I haven’t done in forever. Like Allie and I used to when we were little kids playing outside. “That sounds fine.”

“Good,” Sawyer says, and starts to tug the window down. “Stay put. I’ll be right there.”

“Okay,” I tell him, then: “Hey, Sawyer?”

He stops, peers back out at me. “Yeah? What’s up?”

I stand there. I gather my courage. I take a breath so deep it feels like it comes from the ground underneath my feet, and then I jump: “I love you, you know that?”

“I—” Sawyer breaks off, grinning hard and bright and happy. He looks like a little kid himself. “I do know that, actually,” he says after a moment. “But—Jesus, Reena.” He laughs a bit, disbelieving. “It’s nice to hear.”

It’s nice to say, I want to tell him, then realize I’ve got a whole country to say it. I’ve got a whole continent. I’ve got the whole world. The sun is rising, orange, a glowing circle in the sky.

“Come on,” I call, tilting my chin up. “I’m driving this time.”