“Well, it was supposed to be my plate eventually,” she said, dumping the pieces into the trash beneath the sink. “Although she’ll probably be so mad at me, she’ll decide Blair and Griffin should have the set.”

As if on cue, Darlene Dempsey appeared in the kitchen doorway in her robe, cold cream all over her face. I’d have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so serious. She glanced at the remains of the plate on the floor and put a hand over her heart. “Don’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. It just slipped out of my hands,” said Cheyenne. “I’ll replace it.”

“You can’t replace it. They don’t even make this pattern anymore.” She shook her head. “How could you be so careless, Cheyenne?”

“I’m sorry,” Cheyenne repeated. “It just . . . slipped.”

“It was my fault, Mrs. Dempsey,” I said. “I knocked it off the counter.”

Darlene folded her arms over her chest and regarded us both with narrowed eyes, as if we’d just gotten caught sneaking in after curfew. She tapped her slippered foot. “Well, which is it? Who broke the plate?”

“I did,” we both answered at once. Then we glared at each other and whispered, “I did.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Darlene took a deep breath, gathering herself up. “Well, accidents happen. But when you have something precious in your hands, you need to hold on tight. Understand?”

“Yes,” Cheyenne said quietly, while I nodded.

Darlene put a hand to her ear. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Yes,” we both answered loudly.

After a heavy sigh, she looked back and forth between us. “Can I trust you two to finish the rest without breaking anything else?”

“Yes,” we answered together again.

“Good.” Darlene swept dramatically out of the kitchen doorway and left us alone again.

The moment she was gone, Cheyenne and I looked at each other and started to laugh, trying hard to stay quiet so her mom wouldn’t hear us.

“Got a broom?” I asked, feeling much lighter.

Cheyenne nodded, wiping tears. “In the pantry.”

I went over to the pantry and pulled out the dustpan and broom. “Let me,” I said, when she reached for them.

“Cole, you don’t have to—”

“I know,” I said, sweeping the bits and dust into a neat pile before bending down to brush it into the dustpan. “But this is good practice for me, right? For when I have my own house.”

She watched me dump the mess into the trash, leaning back against the counter. “You think it’s bad luck?”

“That the first time I kiss you, we destroy a piece of your mother’s wedding china? Yes, that is some bad luck.” I replaced the broom and dustpan in the pantry and shut the door.

“Not that. I mean, maybe that too, but do you think it’s bad luck that I broke what was supposed to be my wedding china? Is it a sign I’m doomed to be single forever?”

I turned to see her biting one thumbnail. “No. I don’t think that at all.”

“But what if the universe is telling me something?”

“Like what?”

She shrugged helplessly. “I can’t have nice things?”

Her face was so despondent, I couldn’t resist tugging her hand, pulling her into a hug. “Hey. Come here.”

She moved forward into my embrace, wrapping her arms around my waist. Her cheek pressed against my chest, and I kissed her head before resting my chin on top of it. It felt so fucking good to hold someone like that—protectively, a little possessively, almost as if she was mine.

“You deserve all the nice things,” I told her. “What the universe was telling us tonight is that maybe going at each other while we were supposed to be washing your mother’s most fragile dishes wasn’t the best idea we’ve ever had.”

She laughed a little, the sound muffled against my shirt. “Maybe not.”

“And maybe what we should do is just . . . slow down. Make sure we know what we’re doing. Mistakes—and accidents—happen when people get careless and move too fast.”

She looked up at me. “So the universe was giving us a speeding ticket?”

“More like letting us off with a warning.”

She sighed, replacing her cheek against my chest. “You’re probably right.”

I didn’t want to let her go, so I didn’t. I kept talking, stroking her back. “I just don’t want to do something that . . . can’t be undone,” I told her. “Something that seems like a good idea in the moment, but turns out to be wrong for everyone.”

“I know. I don’t want that either.”

“I love having you in our lives, Chey. That makes this complicated. If I only had to think about what I want right this second, believe me—it would be so easy.”

She laughed a little, although it was a sad kind of laugh, tinged with regret for what couldn’t be. “Yeah.”

I stopped moving my hand and pulled her even closer. Her body was soft and warm, and I’d never wanted anyone so badly. “So fucking easy.”

In my arms, her body stilled, and she inhaled, like she needed to breathe in enough of me to last her a while. “Can I ask you something?” Her voice was quiet.

“Anything.”

Another deep breath. “Do you ever see things being different for you? I mean, do you ever see a juncture in your life where you might feel differently about . . . about letting someone in?”

I knew what she meant, and I wanted so fucking badly to be able to offer her something—anything—that would give her hope. But I couldn’t, not without sugarcoating the truth at best and lying at worst. And Cheyenne deserved so much better. Why should she hang around waiting for me to change my mind about getting involved in a serious relationship—which might never happen anyway—when she could have everything she wanted if she moved on?

I swallowed hard, and instead of answering her question, I told her a story. “When Mariah was about five, I made her a promise. She asked me if I was ever going to get married again and leave her behind, and I said no. Apparently, someone at school whose parents were divorced had been talking about their dad getting remarried and moving away to have a new family—it scared her.”

“Poor thing.”

“Anyway, I promised her that was never going to happen to us. That’s when she told me she likes that I wear my wedding ring. I think it reassures her.”

“Of course.”

“I thought she’d forgotten all about that conversation we had back then, but last year—this was when I asked you for a recommendation for a therapist—my mom was cleaning her room and found this letter she’d written to me but never showed me.”

Cheyenne tilted her head back and met my eyes. “What was in it?”

“A lot of things—questions about Trisha, about her death, wondering if she was to blame, wondering if somehow there had been a mistake and her mom wasn’t really gone.” I shook my head, my heart breaking all over again. “Again, she expressed her fear that she was going to lose me—either to an accident or another family. She described this nightmare that she has often, in which she wakes up one morning and I’m just gone. She’s alone in the house, and she realizes that everything I’ve said has been a lie—I did leave her.”