“Wow,” I said.

I didn’t mind that he was mansplaining the Milky Way to me, since I didn’t know anything about it. Also, I was a little bit drunk from the wine—we were on our second bottle—and it turned out he cooked a really good steak . . . just the right amount of salt and pepper, and no other seasonings—and a decent baked potato. He’d kept a little cooler himself, and there was cold butter for the potatoes as well.

Of course, there was also the fact that I was falling in love with him. Or that I’d maybe already fallen in love with him. Who knew when? It had probably happened the moment he’d stepped up and saved Socks from Rick Chance.

Or maybe it had happened before that . . . that day Leighanne had thrown that saltshaker at him, and he’d responded by doing exactly nothing. Who knew?

Daniella was going to be so disappointed in me when she found out. You weren’t supposed to fall in love with the guys you slept with, especially the first guy you slept with after a bad breakup, and especially guys who lived on Little Bridge Island. They were just supposed to be guys you messed around with for fun. You never fell in love with them, and you certainly never entertained ideas about changing all of your life plans (such as mine were) for them.

I’d broken all the rules, and now I was sitting here, like an idiot, by the light of the Milky Way, eating the guy’s steaks with his happy, well-fed dogs pressed all around me, listening to him talk.

God. I had it bad.

“One summer,” Drew was going on, “my dad took me out in our boat at night to fish for hogfish—this was back in the days when it was still legal to catch hogfish; they’re considered overfished in this area now so Fish and Wildlife have them on the protected list—and we dropped anchor out at that mangrove by the old train trestle. And we were just sitting there, you know, in the dark, when all of a sudden, I saw this blue glow coming from beneath the boat. I swear I thought it was a spaceship coming up from beneath the deep. But do you know what it really was?”

I grinned at him soppily. “I have no idea.”

“Bioluminescence. Living lights. They’re single-celled organisms called dinoflagellates that live in warm marine water. You can only see them at night in certain areas, and only when you disturb the water’s surface. Sometimes they’re floating there so thick, you can write your name in them on the top of the water with the tip of your finger. So that’s what my dad and I did. I mean, it doesn’t last long, but it’s pretty cool. I’ll take you out in my boat and show you sometime.”

“Wow,” I said, hugging my knees with pleasure. He was going to show me sometime. I was going to stick around in Little Bridge long enough for him to show me that. “I’d love that. That’s a great story.”

“So when are you going to tell me your story?” His eyes were very bright in the candlelight.

I was too drunk on love and wine to be startled, but I was a little confused. “What story?”

“About what really brought you to Little Bridge.”

“I already did. I told you, I needed a break.”

“Yeah, you did say that. You said you were taking a break to work through some things. What kind of things? I know you dropped out of law school. Why?”

Suddenly my happy little cloud of endorphin-induced joy burst. It was bound to happen, of course.

I just hadn’t thought it would be this soon.

“There were a lot of reasons,” I said, slowly. “My dad passed away from cancer this past Christmas . . . I told you that. After that, I just sort of realized my heart wasn’t in it. School, I mean. I was still going to class, but not as often as I should have, and my grades started to slip—”

“That’s natural.” Drew’s blue eyes had narrowed with concern for me. “You’d just been through the death of someone close to you.”

“Yeah. And I probably should have asked for the semester off. But I didn’t think of it. No one in my family has ever asked for time off for anything except our annual family vacation here—to Little Bridge—so it just never occurred to me . . . until things got to be too much.”

Tears filled my eyes. I knew what was coming next, and I absolutely did not want to go there.

But I also knew I had to. He’d been honest with me, so I knew I owed him the same.

“What about that guy you were talking to on the phone the other day—Caleb, I think you called him?” he asked. “The one who wanted to fly in a private jet to come get you? Is he one of the things that got to be too much?”

I exhaled shakily.

“Yeah,” I said, staring down at my empty plate. It was easier to look at my plate than at Drew’s face, even though I knew I had nothing to feel ashamed of. None of it had been my fault. I don’t know why it was still so hard for me to talk about it. “Well, Cal and his best friend, Kyle. See, what happened was . . . we were all in law school together. The two of them graduated last spring, but since I wasn’t going to class so much anymore after my dad died, we were still hanging out together all the time, especially me and Cal. I had my own place, but it was in the law school dorm—you remember what I told you, about my mom and her Mean World Syndrome. She was totally paranoid about me having my own place. And it turned out she was right . . . except that the person I ended up needing to be afraid of wasn’t some rando from the street, it was Cal’s best friend, Kyle.”

Drew’s spine straightened so abruptly that I heard a cracking sound. I gave him a wan smile. “It’s okay. Nothing happened. I mean, something happened, but nothing prosecutable. Because I wasn’t actually physically harmed, only psychologically. I just had trouble sleeping for a while. I had to get up a million times a night to make sure my bedroom door was locked. But really, the worst part of it was, that afterward, no one believed me. Or at least, no one believed me about how upsetting it was, because it was Kyle who did it, and Kyle was always doing stupid things when he was drunk. And what he did this time was, the night of the Super Bowl, he got so wasted that he ended up spending the night on Cal’s couch. I was sleeping over, too, but in Cal’s room. Cal went out the next morning to get bagels and juice and stuff for breakfast while I was still asleep. He’d only been gone for about five minutes and I’d fallen back asleep, before Kyle came stumbling into our room, still drunk, I think, and completely naked, and jumped onto me—”

Drew leaned forward and enunciated each word with staccato precision. “Just tell me where this guy lives, and I will go up there and kill him.”

Now I was laughing. It was nice to laugh about something that had, for so many months, been such a source of anxiety and fear. “It’s crazy, right? Like we lived in a frat house, or something. I was like, ‘Get off of me, you perv,’ and all of that, only he wouldn’t. I could barely move, because he’s about six foot three and weighs a ton, and I was all tangled up beneath the sheets. I couldn’t so much as raise a fist to punch him. Even when I told him if he didn’t get off, I’d scream, and the neighbors would call the police, he just laughed, because of course Cal’s apartment is completely soundproofed. Also, like I said, he was still drunk from the night before, trying to kiss me and get under the covers with me. So finally I did the only thing I could think of, which was say that if he got off me, I’d go out with him. Don’t ask me why, but that’s what finally sank into his alcohol-soaked brain, and why he finally got up and left—because I promised I’d sleep with him if he took me on a proper date, and that a quickie while my boyfriend, his best friend, was gone wasn’t the best way for us to start the new, beautiful relationship he apparently thought we were going to have.”