He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I wish I’d handled it differently. I fucked up.”

“You did.”

“I’m sorry.” He bowed his head. “I didn’t know how you’d feel once you weren’t obligated to be with me.”

That pulled her up short. “River, I never felt obligated to be with you. Not the way that we were together by the end.”

He took a step closer, growling, “Stop calling it the end.”

“I don’t understand what you think is happening here! You don’t get to drop off the face of the earth for a week and then act confused.”

“Do you remember what you said to me the last time we saw each other?” he asked, closing the distance between them. “You said, ‘Statistics can’t tell us what will happen, they can only tell us what might happen.’ And you were right. A Diamond Match is so rare that two random people are ten thousand times more likely to find their soulmate with a Base Match than they are to ever score above a ninety with someone else.”

“I could have told you that,” Jess said quietly, adding with a reluctant smile, “And I bet you didn’t even use the right analysis to calculate it.”

He laughed dryly. “I guess I needed to see it for myself.”

Jess couldn’t help but give him an exasperated look.

Tentatively, he smiled. But it ebbed away in the face of her stony silence. “Do you really want to break up?”

Jess had no idea what to say to that. She hadn’t expected to be given the option. She’d thought it was a done deal. “I didn’t, but, I mean—”

“It’s a yes or no,” he said, but gently, reaching forward to take her hand. “And for me the answer is a no. I love you. I love Juno. I needed to get my head on straight, but once I did, the first person I wanted to talk to was you.”

“About a week ago,” Jess said, “my mom called. She was drunk at a friend’s house in Vista. I had to drive up to get her on a school night, walk into a house full of fucked-up people with my seven-year-old, and give my mother ten thousand dollars so she could avoid being arrested for stealing a huge amount of merchandise.”

River paled. “What?”

“I told her that if I gave her the money, she was never to contact me or Juno again. When I came home to get my head on straight, the first person I wanted to talk to was you. But I didn’t have that option.”

To his credit, River didn’t wince or frown or tense his jaw defensively. He just swallowed, nodded once, and absorbed it. “I should have been here. I hate that I wasn’t.”

“How do I know you’ll be here the next time?” she asked. “I get that this was terrible for you. I can absolutely imagine how you don’t even look up when you’re in a work panic. But I really, truly wanted to be the person you turned to during all of this. And you said it yourself to me once: Bad things happen all the time. That’s life. So, if something huge happens at work, and you don’t know how to process it, do I have to worry that you’re going to retreat into yourself and not speak to me for eight days?”

“No. I’m going to work on that. I promise.”

Jess stared up at him. Dark eyes, thick lashes, full mouth. That smooth neck she fantasized about licking and biting her way down to the world’s most perfectly muscled collarbones. Inside that cranium was a genius-level brain, and—when he let himself out of the lab for a breath—River Peña had the emotional depth of a man who’d already lived an entire lifetime. He talked stats with her, and the little heart that watched stories with his abuela still beat in his chest. He loves me, and he loves my kid.

“I don’t want to break up, either,” Jess admitted.

He bowed his head, exhaling slowly. “Oh my God. I really wasn’t sure which way that was going to go.” Reaching forward, he cupped the back of her neck and gently guided her forward, into his arms. “Holy shit, about your mom. I … this is a bigger conversation, I know.”

“Later,” Jess said, pulling back and resting her hand on his chest. “Is the company going under?”

He shook his head. “In the end, they only fabricated our score. Everything else reproduced within the standard margin of error.”

The next question Jess had rose shakily to the surface. “Did you ever run our samples together?”

“I did.” Reaching into his blazer pocket, he pulled out a small sealed envelope. “For you.”

A potent mixture of dread and excitement streaked through her. “Do you know what the answer is?”

He shrugged, smiling.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

Nodding once, River admitted, “I do. I didn’t trust anyone else to run it, but I worried someone would, eventually, out of curiosity.”

Chewing on her lip, she fought the internal battle. Should she look? Should she not? Voice tight, Jess told him, “I don’t care what our score is. I never have.”

He laughed. “So don’t look.”

“Do you care what our score is?”

River slowly shook his head. “No.”

“It’s easy for you to say that because you’ve seen it.” She paused. “Does that mean it’s bad?”

Again he shook his head. “No.”

“Is it something wild? Like the ninety-eight was actually right?” He paused, chewed his lip, and then slowly shook his head a third time. Jess blew out a frustrated breath. “Do you feel better about it now?”

“Jess,” he said gently, “all you have to do is open the envelope to know.”

She squeezed her eyes closed. “I don’t want to. I understand that you needed to see the data, but I hate that you needed to see it to choose me.”

He quickly reacted, shooting an arm around her waist. “I don’t. I’m telling you; this score doesn’t matter to me. I love you because I love you, whether or not I’m supposed to.”

Jess squinted up at him, picking these words apart. “Okay, I’m going to assume that we’re a Base Match.”

He nodded, satisfied, and put the envelope away. “Sounds good.”

“Are we?”

River grinned, saying, “No,” and she growled.

His expression softened, and he glanced at her mouth and then back up to her eyes. “Do you want me to tell you or not?”