“We forgot to eat the pizza,” Jesse says as he gets up and walks to pick it up off the table by the door. He puts it on the dining table. I get dressed, eager now to be covered. Jesse opens the box.

I stare right at the pepperoni and pineapple pizza. If I eat it as is, my stomach is going to hurt. But if I pull the cheese off, I’ll just be eating gummy tomato bread.

“You know what?” I say. “You go for it. I’m not feeling pizza at the moment.”

“No?”

“I don’t really eat cheese anymore. It doesn’t sit well with me.”

“Oh,” he says.

It occurs to me that there are a few more things he should know, things I should be clear about.

“I changed my name back to Emma Blair because Blair Books is my store. I love it. And I’ve built a life around it. I am a Blair.”

“OK,” he says. A noncommittal word, said noncommittally.

“And I know I used to be the sort of person who always wanted to bounce around from place to place but . . . I’m happy being settled in Massachusetts. I want to run the store until I retire—maybe even hand it over to my own children one day.”

Jesse looks at me but doesn’t say anything. The two of us look at each other. An impasse.

“Let’s go to bed,” Jesse says. “Let’s not worry about pizza and last names and the bookstore. I want to just lie down next to you, hold you.”

“Sure,” I say. “Yeah.”

Jesse leaves the pizza behind as he leads me up the stairs to the bed. He lies down and holds the blanket open for me. I back into him, my thighs and butt nestled into the curve of his legs. He puts his chin in the crook of my neck, his lips by my ear. The wind is howling now. I can see, through the top of the window, that it is starting to snow.

“Everything is going to be OK,” he says to me before I fall asleep.

But I’m not sure I believe him anymore.

I wake well after the sun has come up. The snow has stopped falling. The wind has retreated. For a moment after I open my eyes, everything seems peaceful and quiet.

“Not sure if you can tell from the view out the window but I think we’re snowed in,” Jesse says. He is standing in the doorway of the bedroom in a T-shirt and sweatpants. He is smiling. “You look adorable,” he adds. “I guess those are the big highlights of the morning. We’re snowed in, you’re as cute as ever.”

I smile. “How snowed in is snowed in?”

“We’re as snowed in as you are adorable.”

“Oh, God,” I say, slowly sitting up and gathering myself. “We’ll be stuck here for years, then.”

Jesse moves toward the bed and gets in next to me. “Worse fates.”

I lean into him and quickly realize that both of us could stand to bathe.

“I think I might hop in the shower,” I say.

“Great idea. My parents told me they put in a walk-in sauna in the master. Last one there has to make breakfast.” And off we go.

The water is warm but the air is damp and humid. The steam fogs the glass doors. There are more showerheads than I care to count, two coming from the ceiling and a number of jets coming from the walls of the shower. It is hot and muggy in here. My hair is flattened and smoothed back across my head. I can feel Jesse just behind me, lathering soap in his hand.

“I wanted to ask you . . .” Jesse says. “Why did you leave LA?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean, I just assumed you’d still be out there. Why did you come back?”

“I like it here,” I say.

“You liked it there, though,” he says. “We both did. It was our home.”

He’s right. I loved my life in California, where it never snowed and the sun was always shining.

Now, my favorite day of the year is when daylight savings begins. It’s usually when the air starts to thaw and the only precipitation you can be threatened with is a little rain. You’re tired in the morning because you’ve lost an hour of sleep. But by seven o’clock at night, the sun is still out. And it’s warmer than it was yesterday at that time. It feels like the world is opening up, like the worst is over, and flowers are coming.

They don’t have that in Los Angeles. The flowers never leave.

“I just knew I needed to come home to my family.”

“When did you move back?”

“Hm?”

“How long after . . . how long was it before you moved back to Acton?”

“I guess soon,” I say, turning away from him and into the water. “Maybe two months.”

“Two months?” Jesse says, stunned.

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” he says. “I just . . . all these years I always pictured you there. I never . . . I never really pictured you here.”

“Oh,” I say, finding myself unsure how to respond or what to say next. “Do you see the shampoo anywhere?” I say finally. But I’m not paying attention to the answer. My mind is already lost in the life that Jesse never pictured.

Me and Blair Books and my cats and Sam.

I close my eyes and breathe in.

It’s a good life, the one he never imagined for me.

It’s a great life.

I miss it.

Sam knows I can’t eat cheese. And he knows that I never want to change my last name from Blair again. He knows how important the store is to me. He likes to read. He likes to talk about books and he has interesting thoughts about them. He never drives without a license. He never attracts police officers. He drives safely in bad weather. Sam knows me, the real me. And he has loved me exactly as I am, always, especially as the person I am today.

“Em?” Jesse says. “Did you want the shampoo?”

“Oh,” I say, snapping out of it. “Yeah, thanks.”

Jesse hands me the bottle and I squeeze it into my palm. I lather it through my hair.

And suddenly, it takes everything I have not to dissolve into a puddle of tears and go down the drain with the soapy water.

I miss Sam.

And I’m scared I’ve pushed him away forever.

Jesse notices. I try to hide it. I smile even though the smile doesn’t live anywhere beyond my lips. Jesse stands behind me, putting his arms around me, his chest against my back. He nestles his chin into my shoulder and he says, “How are you?”

There is nothing like a well-timed “How are you?” to reduce you to weeping.

I have no words. I just close my eyes and give myself permission to cry. I let Jesse hold me. I lean into him, collapse onto him. Neither of us says anything. The air grows so hot and oppressive that eventually breathing takes more effort than it should. Jesse turns off the steam, turns down the temperature of the faucets, and lets the lukewarm water run over us.

“It’s Sam, right? That’s his name?”

I had split my world into two, but by simply uttering Sam’s name, Jesse has just sewn the halves back together.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “Sam Kemper.” I want to pull away from Jesse right now. I want him to go stand on the other side of the shower. I want to use the water and the soap to clean my body and I want to go home.

But I don’t do any of that. Instead, I freeze in place—in some way hoping that by standing still I can stop the world from spinning for just a moment, that I can put off what I know is eventually going to happen.

I watch as Jesse places the name.

“Sam Kemper?” he asks. “From high school?”

I nod.

“The guy that used to work at your parents’ store?”

There’s no reason for Jesse to dislike Sam other than the fact that I love Sam. But I watch as Jesse’s face grows to show contempt. I should never have said Sam’s full name. It was better when Sam was an abstract. I’ve done a stupid thing by giving him a face to match. I might as well have stabbed Jesse in the ribs. He bristles and then gets hold of himself. “You love him?” Jesse asks.

I nod but what I want to do is tell him about what Marie said, that she told me this isn’t about who I love but rather who I am. I want to tell him that I’ve been asking myself that question over and over and it’s starting to seem glaringly obvious that I am different from the person Jesse loves.