Did I feel happy right then? Not exactly. When you feel happy, or joyful, it’s kind of like a brightness in your chest, and my heart was too numb for brightness.

If you think of human emotions as music, then mine were like an orchestra with no conductor. I felt a lot of different sounds, but I didn’t know quite how to read them or combine them in ways I understood. And yet there was no doubt that the instruments of my body were playing—my skin under the wind, my lungs drawing in crisp breaths, my eyes taking in the vast and brilliant sky. There was music—good music—even if it wasn’t a melody I recognized.

Given the context, it seems odd that I should have felt such good feelings right then, and I guarantee it didn’t last. My brain still knew that my entire future was ruined—that Chip’s confession marked more than just the end of our relationship: It meant the end of my life as I’d known it.

But the physical pleasure of being outside for the first time in so achingly long was too real to deny. Later, there would be fallout—moments of rage, and bleakness, and grief over everything I’d lost—as I tried to understand what Chip had done and why. But not yet. Not tonight. Ian had given me this impossible gift—a little pause from it all. An experience so viscerally alive that nothing else could compete.

It was just us, and the wind—and now, suddenly, the stars starting to appear—for a long, quiet while.

Then I heard Ian’s voice, surprisingly close to my ear, say, “Myles’ll fire me for this, for sure.”

I turned my head. There he was. Starting a conversation. Of all things. “Will he? Seriously?”

He was gazing up, an arm behind his head, and the pose was so casual, so unguarded, so friendly, it was shocking. “Maybe not. He didn’t see it with his own eyes, after all. The nurses might not rat us out.”

“But don’t the PTs take patients out all the time?”

“Sure. On educational excursions. In groups. Not up to the roof alone.”

“What does he think you’re going to do to me?”

A classic Ian-style silence followed that question—but rather than feeling uncomfortable I suddenly started thinking of all the things that Ian could potentially have been doing to me, right that very moment. The longer the silence lasted, the more vivid my thinking became. He was just inches away. He could so easily roll onto his side and put his face down alongside mine. He could so easily take one of those big hands and run it along my side. The thought took hold of my thinking. I could almost feel it happening—the weight of his hands, the roughness of the stubble on his jaw, the warmth of his mouth.

I drifted off into the fantasy of being kissed by Ian, but then his voice pulled me back out. “There are all kinds of ungentlemanly things I could do to you on this roof,” he declared at last. “And I’m sure Myles would accuse me of them all.”

It’s a little odd—and a bit embarrassing—to confess that I had a vivid, unrequited, thirty-second, highly sexy, totally unauthorized fantasy about my physical therapist not an hour after I’d thrown my engagement ring at my ex-fiancé. But it’s important to mention. Because in those seconds, something happened. I felt a swell of some very potent, very enthusiastic, very physical feelings in response to that kissing fantasy.

Which meant—and this was big news—I could feel those feelings.

Suffice it to say, my time in the hospital had not been the most erotic experience of my life. On my scale of worries that month, my future sex life rated comically low. Probably, if I’d had a choice between a future with walking and a future with sex, I’d have picked walking. But I wasn’t given that choice. That said, since all my sensation down there was, as I’d been told over and over, “spotty,” I’d known there was a good chance that I’d lost that part of my life forever. Though, even if I’d been thinking about it enough to check, I likely would have been afraid to check. Part of me didn’t want to know. Don’t go looking for trouble.

But now, suddenly, thanks to this roof, I knew.

My body could feel things. Enthusiastically.

True, my body had just felt those things about a man who—most days, anyway—didn’t even want to be in the same room with me, but I wasn’t going to quibble over details. This was great news, dammit, no matter how foolishly I’d come across it! I could feel the feelings! One of life’s greatest pleasures was still on my menu!

Did I feel joyful about it? No. “Joy” didn’t seem to be an option anymore. I wasn’t really sure I could access “happy,” either. The best I could do right then was “pleasant.” I felt pleasant about it. And—maybe more than that: relief. Relief I didn’t even know I’d been waiting for.

The sunset was completely gone now, replaced by a deep blue night sky full of stars. I tried to sit up then, but lost my balance partway, and Ian lost no time helping. He sat up, too, and cradled me into a sitting position. “You okay?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“You look a little nauseous.”

Reading that so wrong. “I’m fine.”

“Do you want to go back?”

I turned and met his eyes. “I never want to go back.”

He gave a little shrug and then said, “Okay.”

“Tell me about your nebbishy boss,” I said then, as we watched the lights of the city skyline. “What’s going on there?”

“Only if you put on my sweatshirt.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Put it on.”

“Bossy,” I said. But I put it on, and as I did, I got a great waft of that delicious Ian smell. It was so overpowering in that moment, it was all I could do not to press my face into it and gulp down a big breath. But I covered well. I pretended like the zipper was stuck. Then I looked at Ian to prove that I was waiting for him to start talking.

When he didn’t, I prompted: “So? You think Myles would fire you for taking me up here.”

“Myles would definitely fire me for taking you up here.”

“Even though you don’t like me like that.” It was the kind of statement girls sometimes make in honor of the one percent chance that the guy might contradict it.

Ian did not contradict it. He kept his gaze straight out on the horizon. “No. I don’t like you like that.”

“So you’re safe.”

He looked off. “I am far from safe.”

“What’s Myles’s deal with you, anyway?”

“That’s a long story.”

The wind kept blowing one lock of my hair into my face. I tried to tuck it behind my ear, but it was too short. “I truly have nothing but time.”

Ian sighed. “I used to work here before. That’s why I moved to Texas, in fact—to take a job at this hospital. I started young and worked my way to manager of the PT gym. Myles came about when I did, but I got promoted over him again and again.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a rule-obsessed wanker, and a petty tyrant.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Anyway, then a female PT got hired to work in the therapy gym. Her name was Kayla. We hit it off right away, and we started seeing each other.”

It was pushing, but I couldn’t help it: “What was she like?”

He gave a little shrug. “Lovely. Feisty. She had no patience for foolishness. She could be so mean.” He said it with great admiration.

I watched him think about her. After a bit, I said, “What does this have to do with Myles?”

Ian let out a long breath. “Myles liked her, too. He would say that he saw her first—and I stole her away.”

“Did you?”

“He might have seen her first,” Ian said, shrugging. “But she never liked him. I couldn’t steal something that was never his.”

“Of course not.”

“But that fact was not—still is not—relevant to Myles. He liked her, and that was all that mattered.”

“That’s why he hates you?”

Ian nodded. “That’s why he hates me. I ruined his life, and now he is determined to ruin mine.”

“But she wasn’t into him!”

“He feels, very strongly, that he could have won her over.”

“But you’re not still with her?” I asked, to confirm.

“No.”

“You broke up?”

Ian seemed to hold his breath. “In a way.”

“So what’s his problem?”

“I’ve wondered about that a lot. I think Myles is the kind of guy who needs an enemy. He needs an enemy to fight so that he can feel like a hero.”

“But he’s not a hero!”

Ian looked over and gave a little shrug. “I might be a villain, though.”

I waited.

“I wasn’t very nice to him. I gloated a bit when I won her. I wish I could go back and change that. It wasn’t kind of me.”

“Okay,” I said, “but Myles is totally the kind of person who makes you want to gloat.”

“Maybe,” Ian said. “But I should have been the bigger man.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I knew all about regrets.

Ian went on. “Kayla and I had been together about a year when I had this idea to strike out on my own from the hospital. I wanted to start a rehab gym for people who are beyond the critical phase, but who still want to work to get better—people who insurance won’t cover. There’s all kinds of great research out there about ways to stimulate the nervous system, get the brain and spinal cord to rewire and communicate with the body in new ways. I wanted to make use of that research.”