“You were a realist,” I tell her. “Honey.” She laughs. “I’m a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who’s too scared to hope.”

The week Peter dumped me, it took a two-hour phone call to convince her to not cancel the five-day “backpacking journey” she had scheduled with Pam, to come nurse my broken heart. She’d spent too much of her life dropping everything for me, knowing it all fell to her.

“I want to kiss you all the time, Daphne,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just easier to find an excuse.”

“I like that it feels like I can live as many lives as I want,” I say.

that the key to being able to talk to anyone might just be curiosity.

But also because I can admit what I couldn’t before: I like Miles Nowak enough that he could really hurt me.

Life isn’t a competition, and neither is love, but I’m still the loser.

“I made my peace with how things have always been between us,” I admit. “It took me a long time to stop expecting more than he’d give me.” “That makes sense,” Miles says, tucking my hair behind my ear. I don’t want to go back to feeling unsteady. I don’t want it to hurt every time he lets me down. I already feel it again: the aching emptiness where

One of my earliest memories of joy, and one of the first times I realized I’d always come in second.