But it had happened. The old, trace memory was alive in the soap and cedarwood smell that I’d caught earlier, when I hugged him. Marshall and I were never huggy or touchy with each other. Perhaps that kiss was why.

It had happened on a long weekend when Bets and I came home to do our laundry in her mom’s big washer, free. She asked if I would go over to Marshall’s house and check on him. The idea made me uncomfortable, but he was my friend, and I could see how much it mattered to her. She was still in love with him, I thought, which made me wonder what the hell she was doing, going wild at Georgia State. It wasn’t like she’d traded a boyfriend for an education; she almost never went to class.

I agreed, on the condition that Bets would use her fake ID and get me some wine coolers. I couldn’t imagine being dead sober and asking stoic Marshall how his broken heart was mending.

He was a mess, of course. He tried his quiet, tough-guy thing on me, but I’d never seen such sad eyes.

We ended up hanging out, watching game shows, drinking until we both had a good buzz on. He made me promise to tell Betsy he was fine. I agreed, even though I knew I wouldn’t lie to Bets. When I got back, I told her he’d been a complete wreck. I think it was a relief for her to hear that. It meant that he still loved her, too. She left Georgia State a couple of months later, mid–second semester, instead of getting every penny’s worth of adventure by waiting to officially fail out.

Her time at college had been like an acting job, I thought when it was over and she was packing cheerfully for home. Maybe college was that way for a lot of people. A chance to try on different selves. I’d done my experimenting with fresh identities from the safety of a stage, but Bets had had to do it in real time. For months I’d watched her try on a hundred girls, one after another, like slip dresses. And yes, some of those girls were selfish or rash or thoughtless. Pleasure seekers. Rule breakers. They had also been her best performances; she had a spark and a sizzle in life that didn’t translate to the stage.

In the end she remembered herself. I could almost see her stepping away from a pile of discarded costumes. She hugged me tight good-bye, and it was my old Betsy in my arms. Herself, but grown. Done playing. Ready for something real.

But on that long laundry weekend when she sent me to check on Marshall, he didn’t know that within three months he’d have her back. He was so sad that I kept patting him, squeezing his hand, leaning into his shoulder as we watched TV.

When the wine coolers were gone, I got up and said I needed to get home. He thanked me for coming, then got up, too, and pulled me into a real hug. It was strange to feel his tall, muscular body shaking, so weak. I wondered if he was actually crying. I’d grown up in the rural South with no father, no brothers. I’d never seen a grown-up male person cry. I pulled back far enough to see his eyes, and yes, they were wet. I was moved by this, and our faces were so close that I could smell wine coolers on his breath, sweet and tangy. I think we leaned in at the same time.

It wasn’t much of a kiss. Lip on lip, our mouths only slightly open. Our tongues brushed, just barely, but I learned the blackberry taste of him.

Then we jerked apart.

“Too much to drink,” he said, and shook himself like a bear. “You can’t drive home just yet. You’ll kill a deer or a tree or a pedestrian.”

He grabbed my hand and toted me along to the kitchen, as if I were a Thanksgiving parade balloon. I felt like one. Light and bobbing along. He made me a sandwich that was crazy good. He buttered the bread and put it facedown to toast in the same pan where he’d cooked onions and some paper-thin steaks his mom kept in the freezer. I’d described that sandwich to a dozen people over the years. Never the kiss.

I did not tell Betsy, and I knew without asking that Marshall hadn’t either. It was a moment born of alcohol and youth and his compelling sorrow. Telling would have hurt her for no reason. I’d been ashamed and sorry, but I’d learned from that moment, piling good decisions on top of it until I was no longer the girl who had kissed him. Until I was a woman who would not, in the same situation, make that same mistake.

I understood then that Trey’s story was a larger, darker version of my own. He hadn’t lied or worked hard to hide this. It was a thing of his past that had pushed him to become the man he was. It had changed him, so that it was no longer his. He’d distanced himself from Spencer in the wake of it, and from the boy he’d been. He was a better man now.

He was still looking at me, his last words hanging in the air. Not a thing you tell a woman you hope to marry.

“Okay,” I said. There was a wealth of meaning in the simple word.

He heard it. His face crumpled, and then we were in each other’s arms, and he was kissing me with such relief, such pain, such awful desperation. We fell back on the sofa, and what happened between us then was quick and rough and necessary.

My body wasn’t ready. It hurt as he came into me. He heard my gasp and tried to stop, but I would not let him. I pulled him in, legs and arms tightening around him. I wanted the urgent reconnection, and I wanted the pain, too. It was like the bite of the too-tight gold bracelet I’d shoved high on my arm before I’d gone to that ill-fated party. It was a place to hide my larger pain and be with him. I forgave him with my body and my pain, and he held me so tight, moving in me.

In this way we’d made our girls, so different from each other and yet both so clearly ours. In this way we’d made Robert. I was aware of that, every second as I rocked him, his face hidden in my shoulder. I felt his tears on my neck, and then he was shuddering into me, and even as his body shook, I regretted his vasectomy. Robert’s absence emptied out the act in such strange ways.

He turned me, turned us both, still mostly dressed, until he was on his back and I lay sideways with my head resting on his chest. He had one arm around me, my leg thrown over both of his. His free hand slid between us, touching me, precisely, correctly. This was Trey, who knew me. This was a man I knew.

He always made it good for me. For sixteen years now, Trey worked to make everything in our life good for me. Part of me was thinking, Tomorrow I may lose him. Or we could lose our boy, which will break us in a thousand ways. This might be the last time I am with him. And so I let it happen. I let him make it happen. Then I cried and cried and cried, and he held me, until the crying was more of a release than the sex had been.

In the quiet dark that followed, I listened to him breathing for a while. Then I whispered, “If Marshall can’t find Lexie—”