“Maybe I used to think there’d be a perfect time or place. But now I think, if you really want to be with someone, you don’t wait for things to be perfect.”

“Love means constantly saying you’re sorry, and then doing better.”

shirt rippling to show off slices of his low back and

breathing hard in the cold. “I think I love you, Harriet,” he says. Love, I think. That’s new. And I’ll never be happy without it again.

The feeling of being so grateful to have something worth missing.

you were naked in the painting,” he clarifies. “I just forgot it might be weird to tell someone they look exactly the same as they do in a painting where they’re not wearing clothes.” “This is going really well,”

I understood, then, the immense honor it is to hurt like she does. To have loved someone so much that the taste of maple syrup can make you cry and laugh at the same time.

But a deeper part of me, a voice that’s always been there, tells me it was always going to end this way. That I’ve known since that first trip to Indiana that I would never be enough to make him happy, that I couldn’t give him the kind of love his parents had when my only education on the subject had been the one my parents had. Two days after our

Like we had nowhere to be, nothing to do but be together.”