Sadie took a deep breath. “Yeah. I did. And I mean sometimes I used to wake up in the morning and he’d be lying there with his slack jaw drooling on the pillow and I’d think, What the hell was I thinking when I procreated with him? He wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t even perfect for me. It was hard, all the time. But I did love him. And it was worth it. While it lasted.”

“So you never thought he was your soul mate?”

“Oh, honey. Are we still believing in soul mates?”

“You don’t believe in soul mates? How can you look at Mom and Dad and not believe that two people are made for each other?”

“Jesus, they’ve really screwed up your perspective on the world, haven’t they? They thought being deceptive would protect you, but all it’s done is spoon-feed you a fantasy. They’re practically cult leaders. They’ve brainwashed you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Henry . . . sweetheart . . .”

“Why are you being such a weirdo?”

“Oh boy.” Sadie closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. “Before you were born, Mom left Dad for, like, three months,” she said quickly, her eyes still jammed shut.

I blinked a handful of times. Sadie opened her eyes slowly, one at a time.

“Mom made me promise not to tell you until after you’d graduated college. They wanted you to have a ‘stable childhood.’ But I can’t let you walk around for the next half decade looking for something that doesn’t exist. I mean, why do you think I had my twelfth birthday party in a trailer park playground?”

“I never really closely studied the photographs of your twelfth birthday party.”

“They’ve poisoned you with this ‘love is patient, love is kind’ bullshit since you were a kid. But love is scientific, man. I mean, it’s really just a chemical reaction in the brain. Sometimes that reaction lasts a lifetime, repeating itself over and over again. And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it goes supernova and then starts to fade. We’re all just chemical hearts. Does that make love any less brilliant? I don’t think so. That’s why I don’t get why people always say ‘fifty percent of marriages end in divorce’ as a justification to not get married. Just because a love ends doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. Mom and Dad were fighting all the time. I know you’ve never seen them have so much as a disagreement, but they were really going for each other. Then one night, Mom woke me up and helped me pack a bag and that was it. I didn’t get to see my bedroom again until we moved back in three months later.”

“Do you know why she left?”

“Because she’d fallen out of love with him. The chemical reaction receded. That’s why. That’s all. Love is never perfect, Henry.”

“Why’d they get back together?”

“Mom found out she was pregnant.”

“She came back because of me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. They love each other unconditionally and they’re best friends, but they’re not in love anymore. They haven’t been for a long time. So you can’t go around thinking that every person you fall for is ‘The One.’ People don’t have soul mates. People make their soul mates.”

“I know that. I do know that. It’s just . . . I can’t imagine ever wanting to put that much effort into another human being again. So much time and energy. So much of myself. How do you start over with someone new?”

“How does a novelist start a new book when the last one is finished? How does an injured athlete start training again from the beginning?”

“God. Why does anyone do this more than once?”

“Fall in love?”

I nodded.

Sadie chuckled. “Biologically speaking? For the continuation of the human race. Logically speaking? Because the journey is beautiful in the beginning. And no one can see the bend in the train tracks until it’s already too late to stop. And when you board the train—”

“Really chugging along with this train metaphor, huh?”

“Shh, it’s too late to get off the tracks now. When you board the train, you hope that this will be the one that doesn’t crash. Even though it might be, even though it probably will be, it’s worth getting on anyway, just to find out.”

“Why can’t I stay at the station?”

“You could. But then you’d never get anywhere.”

“Oh wow. That’s deep.”

“I should have been a philosopher.”

“I want her back, Sadie.”

“I know you want her back, kid. And I know that people saying things like ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’ is only going to make you hurt more. And I could tell you all about the science of what your brain is going through right now. How it’s processing a pain as intense as hitting a nerve in your tooth, but it can’t find a source for that pain, so you kind of feel it everywhere. I could tell you that when you fall for someone, the bits of your brain that light up are the same as when you’re hungry or thirsty. And I could tell you that when the person you love leaves you, you starve for them, you crave them, you have withdrawals from them, like an addict would from a drug. And I know this all sounds very poetic, or exaggerated, or dramatic, but it’s not. Heartbreak is a science, like love. So trust me when I say this: you’re wounded right now, but you’ll heal.”

“Damn, Suds. You’re bringing out the big guns today.”

Sadie tilted her head back and fluttered her eyelids. “You’re making me cry, you rascal. Listen to me, spouting all this good advice. Have you ever really been happy with her? Because from the outside, this has looked like a struggle from day one. The dead boyfriend, the disappearing. Is there a full month or week or day that you can look back on where you’re like, ‘Yep, that’s it for me. That’s what I want my life to be like. Take me back to those good old days.’ Do you have that with her?”