Kelsey may not have had the courage to tell Peter the truth, but lord knows she had spent enough time on this very porch, listening to Michelle fall out of love. If Kelsey couldn’t push Peter away, then Michelle could. She would tell him she had met someone else: a fry cook at Burger Stand. A DJ at the Taproom. She would hang up on him, refuse to write him, whatever it took. She would make him angry, which would force him to do something she could never do: move on.

When she flicked the finished Marlboro over the wooden railing, she returned inside through her side of the porch, spraying herself with Chloe perfume to hide the smell.

She grabbed Michelle’s laptop from under the bed, slipped on a jacket, and put her bare feet into her boots.

“Where are you off to?” her mother called as she passed her in the living room.

“Fresh air,” Kelsey replied.

She walked the two blocks to Central Park, named haphazardly by the city of Lawrence after the park in New York City, but twenty times less its size. When she arrived, she sat on a bench near the community center, where she could pick up Wi-Fi, and opened the laptop. There she waited, hoping the battery would keep until Peter saw her online. He had told her on their last night in Paris that he was supposed to return from a mission today.

When his Skype icon turned green, Kelsey wasted no time.

“Hi, Peter,” she said when he answered her call. His video was still loading. “Are you there?”

“I’m here,” he replied, but when his image appeared, he didn’t look like the Peter she knew in Paris. Dark circles had returned to his eyes, which were bloodshot, the clear blue clouded over.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can’t tell you,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“You have to tell me,” Kelsey said, swallowing. She was finding it difficult to be as numb as she had been determined to be. She was finding it difficult not to cry herself at the sight of his distress. He had become her best friend after all.

Peter looked behind him, making sure no one had followed. Then he grabbed a notebook and pen, scribbled something on the paper, paused, and scribbled more.

Our company lost 2 men on the way back from a mission, the paper read, and when Kelsey saw the name written underneath, she held a hand to her head, pulling her hair until it hurt.

Sam.

“No.”

Peter nodded. He looked away to compose himself.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, but she knew it wasn’t enough.

She wished she could tell him she knew how it felt to lose someone so close, and nothing anyone says can change the stripped, punched-in-the-gut feeling. She was stabbed by guilt, knowing Sam had died keeping her secret.

“His truck hit a mine,” Peter said, his voice low. “Right in front of ours.”

At that, he put his head in his hands, and let out a string of curses. Words she had never heard Peter use before, unintelligible, a broken language.

“Hey,” she said gently.

He looked up. “He wasn’t my best friend, but he was a good man. A better soldier than me, that’s for sure. We were partners, you know? He had my back, I had his.” Peter looked around again, twitching at the sound of a door closing. No one interrupted, so he continued, breathing through his nostrils, trying to calm himself. “I met his mother at the airport in Maine. What is she going to do now?”

“Oh, Peter.”

Before she realized what she was doing, Kelsey was touching the screen, brushing her fingers on his shoulders, his hands, as if he could feel her.

She lost all desire to push him away. She wished she was next to him again, as she had wished so many times since she had left him in Paris, and now, he needed a friend more than ever. He needed her. And unless she intended to mope in her room for the foreseeable future, she needed him, too.

Peter looked up, noticed her hand on the screen, and put his fingers where hers might be. After that, he simply stared at her, his shoulders straight again, his mouth hard.

Kelsey grew nervous. She was suddenly aware of her unwashed hair and potato chip–stained shirt.

“I have a lot of… feelings for you,” Peter said, and he paused, embarrassed. “And I’m sorry it took me this long to tell you. I thought I loved you from the moment I met you, but I wasn’t sure. I was worried when I went overseas. But after seeing you in Paris… the way you were. The way we were together. Your, you know, your terrible jokes. When we were at Notre Dame, the way you looked at the building, like it was the first time anybody had ever seen it. When we danced at the bar. Sorry, I’m thinking out loud here. But I know. I know now.”

He paused.

“I love you.”

As she listened, Kelsey realized he was talking about her. He wasn’t talking about Michelle, or the combination of the two of them she had made, he was talking about Kelsey. Kelsey dancing, Kelsey telling bad jokes, Kelsey as he knew her, and, for the past five months, as she knew herself.

Peter waited, poised, and the fact that he could have been taken with Sam, taken at any moment, sank into the quiet.

She heard herself say it before she knew the words were out. “I love you, too.”

Immediately, she realized it was true.

And she knew she would have to do what she set out to do, but she would have to do it as herself.

She would have to let go of Michelle for good, and she would have to trust that their love could survive it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Kelsey, on her way through the University of Kansas campus, was trying not to skip. She passed students on the narrow sidewalk, grass now erupting on either side of the cement, though she could still see her breath in the air. Kansas weather had a reputation for being a bit schizophrenic. Kelsey fit right in.

She caught the students’ eyes, smiling at engineering majors bent under their backpacks, nodding hello to the football players who loitered outside the union, gliding past gaggles of bleached-blonde girls who shivered in short skirts, desperate for the state’s first bit of sun.

They all stared back. Maybe they were curious about the spring in Kelsey’s step, her unfettered air of joy, or maybe they were just looking at her pajamas. It was the day after she had spoken to Peter, but Kelsey still hadn’t changed out of her barbecue dust–streaked tank top and sweatpants.

She didn’t care. She was in love.

Kelsey climbed the streets of Mount Oread to Delta Sigma, where Davis was waiting for her on the front porch, comfortably lounging in a wicker chair between the white columns, like an old Southern gentleman.

As she approached him on the green lawn, Kelsey took a moment to appreciate his long, thin legs splayed out, wearing loafers and no socks, eyes behind Ray-Bans. He took a hand from around a bottle of Gatorade to wave.

She would miss him.

“I thought you’d never come,” he said, enfolding her in a hug and kissing the top of her head. “I thought you might have gone to Boca Raton by now, dancing on tables with your girlfriends.”

Kelsey let out a “ha!” at the ridiculous image. “I wouldn’t get on top of a table right now if somebody paid me.”

“Oh, you,” Davis said as they sat down on the porch steps. “Still on your parents’ dime. Fraternity dues are expensive. Baby, I’d grind on a church altar if someone paid me.”

Kelsey rolled her eyes. “No one would pay you to grind on anything.”

Davis laughed, draining the last of his drink. They sat in familiar silence, except for the distant sound of two of Davis’s frat brothers screaming at each other about a video game. On the lawn of a neighboring frat, two guys in pinnies threw a Frisbee back and forth, trying to avoid beer cans scattered everywhere. What a cartoon world.