I look at Eric and wonder what he’s thinking, but don’t ask. When we first started dating, I’d ask him all the time, and finally he told me to please stop. “I’m an open book,” he said. “What you see is what you get.” He was that way, too, when I first found out about the woman he’d been seeing a few years ago, a client of his: after I confronted him, he had nodded and said, in just as straightforward a manner, that they had slept together twice and he was very sorry. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” he’d said matter-of-factly, as though describing something that hadn’t actually involved him.

Outside, the rain starts coming down hard and fast. “We should maybe find a place to pull over,” he says. It’s a narrow two-lane highway, not forgiving for skids. He told me once that his grandmother’s parents had both died in separate car crashes, and so he’s always been a careful driver, ever since he was a teenager. It’s one of the things I like about him, his caution on roads, the safety that comes with him behind the wheel. I tried explaining that to Jessica once, how happy I feel with him when we’re together in the car.

“Sure,” she said. “It’s the feeling that you’re moving forward.”

I put Eric’s hand in mine and study it, and he curls it around my fingers in a warm grip. I have known this man longer than I have known most people, I think. We have shared countless meals and car rides and our toothbrushes have hung side by side for almost a decade. He is weak, I think, but also kind, and tenderhearted, and in moments like these, I tell myself that’s enough.