I laughed at him and linked my arm through his. We were the exact same height, and his arm fit well in mine.

We walked slowly out to the parking lot, where Will’s car was parked. I was mindful of Will’s health, but also it was probably the nicest hour of the nicest day of the year. Seventy-three degrees, and the sun was just going down, and the air was thick with grass and a hint of sunblock and something in the distance, something sweet and delicious that I couldn’t quite identify yet.

I don’t remember who it was, but one of us finally said to the other, “Isn’t it funny that all those months ago we flipped a coin so that we wouldn’t have to take this very same walk?”

One or the other of us replied, “And now I wouldn’t mind if it were even farther, if we could just go on like this forever.”

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn’t mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song.

The kind that you hum without even knowing what it is or why you’re humming it.

The kind that you’ve always known.

acknowledgments

I am thankful:

For books and those who publish and champion them. (Especially my own books, of course—many thanks to Sarah Odedina, Jonathan Pecarsky, Dorian Karchmar, Janine O’Malley, and the good men and women of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

For readers and their teachers.

For my parents, who censored nothing, and for Hans Canosa, who is, among other things, the best reader a gal writer could want.

I tell you, this is a good life.