“Then I saw your car parked at the motel. And I knew. This thing was on.”

“On?”

“Or did I read you all wrong?”

If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling.

“Why did you come back?” he said. “Why are you here?” He waited, his sharp, dark eyes on mine. “You came back for me. You’re here for me.”

“Why would I do that? That’s crazy. That would be crazy.”

He smiled a little, sympathetically. “Yep. But that’s what people do.”

We sat in silence. I wondered if I was misunderstanding. He reached across the table and touched the back of his hand to the back of mine, ever so gently. There weren’t very many ways to take that. Just one, really. [...]