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I consider how honest to be about it. Decide, the way I usually do with her, that honest is the only setting I have left. “Nobody’s met her before. Not like this.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody.” I keep my eyes on the road. “The guys have met her over the years — Cash, Beau, Wyatt, all of them, at some point or another. She’s come up for a game before. But nobody’s ever come home with me because I wanted them there. Not once. In three years.”

Margo’s quiet for a second, processing that, and when she speaks again her voice has gone careful in the way it does when she understands she’s being handed something fragile. “Why me?”

I glance at her, quick, then back at the road. “Because you’re the first person I’ve wanted her to actually know. Not hear about. Know.”

She doesn’t say anything right away. When I look over again there’s something bright and a little overwhelmed in her eyes, the specific look she gets when I hand her something too big to respond to immediately.

“I’m not going to mess this up,” she says, finally. “I promise you that.”

“I know you won’t.”

“You don’t know that. You’re taking a leap.”

“I know you,” I tell her. Simple. Certain. “That’s enough of a guarantee for me.”

She reaches over and laces her fingers through mine on the console between us. We drive the rest of the way mostly quiet, her thumb moving slow against the back of my hand. The highway opening up ahead of us, the morning light coming in low and gold through the windshield.

I glance over at her once, merging onto the last stretch before the exit, and she catches me looking and smiles — easy, certain, present in the specific way she’s learned to be present for the things that matter to me.

“Ready?” she asks.

“No,” I tell her. Honest. “But let’s go anyway.”

She laughs, and the sound of it fills the cab of my truck. I drive us toward Boston with the sun coming up over the highway and the girl I love beside me. Heading somewhere I’ve never taken anyone, for reasons I’m still only half examining but trust completely anyway.

The exit sign for Boston comes up on the right. I take it.

Chapter 27

Margo

Dorchester looks like a place that works for a living.

I notice this without meaning to compare it to anything, though the comparison happens anyway. It always does, when I’m somewhere that isn’t Charleston. Narrow streets. Triple-deckers packed close together. A corner store with a faded awning. A church spire two blocks over. There’s a specific texture to it that Sullivan’s Island doesn’t have and never will — the sense of a neighborhood built by people who worked for every square foot of it, held together by decades of the same families staying put through everything, rather than a place assembled to look like it’s always been beautiful.

I like it more than I expected to. I don’t say that out loud yet, because I don’t want it to sound like I’m performing open-mindedness for an audience of one nervous boyfriend. But it’s true. There’s something honest about a neighborhood that isn’t trying to be anything other than what it is.

Theo’s quiet as he drives, both hands on the wheel. I watch him instead of the neighborhood. I’ve learned that watching Theo tells me more about a place than the place itself ever could.

He’s tense in a way I haven’t seen since Charleston. Not the game-day tense, not the draft tense. Something smaller and more specific — the particular nervousness of a person about to let someone see something he’s spent years keeping separate from everything else.

“You okay?” I ask, as he pulls onto a narrow street lined with parked cars.

“Yeah.” A beat. “Nervous.”

“You’ve never once been nervous in front of me.”

“This isn’t in front of you.” He glances over, quick, something almost like a smile. “This is in front of both of you at the same time. Different category.”

He parks in front of a modest two-story house. White siding gone slightly gray with age. A small front porch with two mismatched chairs I recognize immediately from the way he described them — the specific detail that told me everything about what this house actually holds. There’s a window on the second floor with a crack in the frame. The one that sticks. I look at it longer than I need to, because it’s the first physical piece of a story I’ve only had in fragments until now.

“This is it,” Theo says. Unnecessary. Obvious. He says it anyway, like he needs to hear himself confirm it.

“It’s lovely,” I tell him. And I mean it completely — not performed, not managed for the occasion, just true. There’s something about a house that’s been lived in this hard, this long, by two people who loved each other fiercely with very little to spare. It reads as more beautiful to me than anything with a piazza ever has.