“We’re nonexclusive.”

I’d grown up spending long weekends and summers at this little fishing cottage, scampering around the yard, swimming for endless hours, only breaking for lunch and dinner, and exploring the lake in the rowboat. I’d spent my childhood there, never even imagining—of course—that I’d end up like this. The idea of facing any normal thing now, with my life so changed—even the grocery store or a movie theater—seemed heartbreaking. But a place so happy? A place so densely layered with memories of my other life? A place where the future had always been something to look forward to?

It broke my heart to even consider it.

And yet. It was all arranged. I did want to get out of here. I did love that lake. The cottage was only a hundred feet or so back from the shore, and when you woke, the first thing you saw was morning sunlight glittering on the water. I did want to see that. I longed to be someplace beautiful.

Kit went on, “We’re going to eat camp food and make s’mores.”

My stomach felt like it was filled with pebbles. I wanted to go exactly as much as I wanted not to go.

But I didn’t know how to refuse. It was happening. Plus, Kit wasn’t wrong: I did believe in fun when Ian was around.

*

IAN AND I had become quite the ninja rehab team since he’d become my tutor. I stayed motivated and focused, and Ian finally caught on to the notion that people do better when you encourage them. We worked every day in the gym, and then we worked again after dinner.

In fact, he was the only person I’d told about my morning toe-wiggling attempts, which had become quite a ritual for me. I never started a day without giving my toes a little pep talk and then trying to rev them up.

“What do you say to them?” he asked, when I told him about it.

“To my toes?”

He nodded. “In the pep talks.”

In the name of healthcare, I told the truth. “I say, ‘Come on, little guys. You’re a lot stronger than you think you are.’”

“What do they say back?”

I gave him a look. “They say, ‘Right back atcha, lady.’”

Some nights, I was tired, and he just hung out in the room with Kit and me, working my lower legs in a low-key way, with texture therapy, or stretching, or massage, and talking in a far more relaxed way than I ever saw in the gym. In the gym, with Myles never far off, Ian was always all business. He scowled less now, maybe, but he still scowled a lot.

But after-hours Ian was different.

First of all, he was jazzed about our activities. In the rehab gym, he had a going-through-the-motions vibe, but on his own, he was full of energy and surprises. When I wasn’t too tired, we went to the pool, where he had a whole array of inflatables to cheer the place up—surfboards and noodles and blow-up unicorns. Other times, he’d show up with an acupuncturist friend, and do acupuncture right there in my room while Kitty ate sesame chicken and looked on. Now and again, he brought a reflexologist who also dabbled in aromatherapy. Once, he had a chiropractor friend in tow—which was a little alarming because I did not want her even touching, must less adjusting, my back—but she just used a handheld ultrasound machine to stimulate my calves and feet.

Was it helping? Who knows? It wasn’t hurting.

The rehab gym was all work, but tutoring became play.

Some nights, we played Pop-A-Shot outside the rehab gym until bedtime. The first time we ever tried it, after I explained in detail how much I sucked at basketball, I beat Ian’s score by thirteen points. He wasn’t thrilled about that. After that, I beat him every time we played. I’d sit in front of the basket as Ian handed me basketballs, and I’d make swish after swish after swish until the timer went off. Then Ian would take a turn. Sometimes he made baskets, sometimes he didn’t. I’m sure he was fine at it. But, to everyone’s surprise, I was remarkable. I never missed. And this drove Ian crazy—especially since I had never even seen a Pop-A-Shot game before now.

I liked driving him crazy.

The first night he’d showed up for tutoring, he’d stood the entire time, like an at-ease officer, and waited for Kit and me to eat. Now, he’d long since given in, and he and Kit sat in visitor chairs on either side of me, the bed lowered to table height, dinner spread out all over it, wedging containers between my ankles or up against my knees.

Maybe it was the food, or the easy rapport between me and Kit, or just being far enough from Myles—but sometimes Ian seemed like a different guy entirely. An easygoing, smiley, likable guy. The more we saw that guy, the more we wanted to see him. It became a game.

Kit and I ganged up on Ian a lot, trying to make him smile, or blush, or laugh out loud—ideally all three. Embarrassing him worked like a charm. We cursed. We talked about shocking “lady” things. We made him teach us Scottish insults. Turns out, there were plenty, and they were delightful. Both words—“clipe,” “dobber,” “scrote,” “roaster,” “numpty,” “jakey,” “walloper”—and phrases: “Shut ye geggie,” “erse like a bag o’ washin’,” and “yer bum’s oot the windae.” Not to mention “baw,” meaning “testicle,” which apparently goes with just about anything: “bawbag,” “bawface,” “bawjaws.” Plus, just words for regular things were awesome: “oxter” for armpit, “cludgie” for toilet, “blootered” for drunk, and “puggled” for out of breath.

Ian gave us the shocking news that the Scottish accent was not as universally adored in the U.K. as in the U.S.

“They’re just jealous,” Kit said.

“Should we not make fun of your accent, then?” I asked. It was one thing to make fun of an accent that was unassailably cool—and quite another to kick an accent that was down.

“You can make fun of Scottish,” he said, “if I can make fun of Texan.”

Kit and I looked at each other. “Can you make fun of Texan?”

Ian pointed at me. “You say ‘tumped’ for ‘fell over.’ You know that’s not a word, right?”

“It is a word,” I said.

Ian shook his head. “Only in Texas.”

We loved to try to copy his accent, but we were bad at it. We also gave him American words to try, especially Native American place names that Kit Googled on her phone, like the Caloosahatchee River, Lake Tangipahoa, and Quittapahilla Creek. It cracked her up to hear him try, and it mesmerized me. I’d watch his lips forming those sounds, pulling back, and pouting out, and making that classic Scottish o. Sometimes I forgot to laugh. Sometimes I got hypnotized by it.

He turned out to be remarkably game. We got started to bring him out of his stoic shell, but it always got us going, too. We laughed so hard at dinner sometimes that we couldn’t even finish our food. It was the kind of goofy, uncontrollable laughing you almost never do in grown-up life: Things weren’t just funny, they were hysterical—even things that were objectively not even funny: the noise of a scooting chair, a veggie dumpling that got dropped on the floor, a nurse coming into the room to investigate the noise.

It’s strange that I could have laughed so hard under those circumstances, during that very dark moment in my life. But I’ve decided sorrow can make things funnier. Endure enough hardship, and you start really needing a good laugh. I remember my dad and his brother, on the day of their own mother’s funeral back when I was a kid, in the car, driving to the cemetery, making fun of all their relatives and cracking each other up. They were in the front seat, and Kit and I and our mom were in the back, and I watched those two grown men, now motherless, having just lost forever a woman they both truly loved, not just chuckle a bit but howl with laughter.

I was maybe ten at the time. “What are you doing?” I demanded of my dad. “How can you be laughing?”

“Sweetheart,” my dad said, “if we don’t laugh, we’re gonna cry.”

That’s what this laughing was like. It took us over. It made our faces hurt. And it happened not despite all the sadness, but because of it.

Kit was bolder than I was. She begged him to wear a kilt to work one day.

“Wear a kilt to this building,” she said, “and I’ll give you ten thousand dollars.”

“She doesn’t have ten thousand dollars,” I whispered to Ian.

Ian smiled. “And I don’t have a kilt, so we’re even.”

Mostly, it was Kit and me egging Ian on, but one night, eating sushi, he picked up a teaspoon-sized wad of wasabi with his chopsticks, held it up so we could see it, and then said, “Do you dare me to eat this?”

I looked at him like he was crazy. “The whole thing?” One tenth of that wasabi ball would be enough to send steam out his ears.

Ian nodded.

“No,” Kit said. “I won’t dare you. Not even I am that crazy.”

“I’ll dare you,” I said—and before I could take it back, Ian had popped the whole thing in his mouth, swallowed, and thrown his arms up in victory.

Kitty and I both gaped at him.