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So I tell her straight, because she’s not a person you dress things up for.

“Her name was Kayla. We were engaged.” I keep my hands moving on the seal, because it’s easier to say with something to do. “Young, both of us. She had a hard road before me. Pills, mostly, then worse. But she was fighting it, and I loved her, and I thought love was going to be enough to hold the line.” A breath. “Then she got pregnant. We weren’t married yet.”

Olivia doesn’t say anything. She listens.

“And she got clean. Stayed clean the whole nine months. I have never watched anybody fight that hard for anything. Every appointment, every meeting, every day. I thought we’d made it.” I twist the fitting back into place. “Bo came. Six pounds, screaming, perfect. Four days later I woke up and she was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Note on the counter. Said she couldn’t do it. That she was sorry, and he’d be better off without her.” I hand the flashlight back so I don’t have to hold her eyes for this part. “She wasn’t wrong about the last part. Took me a long time to be able to say that out loud.”

For a second the only sound is a tap dripping somewhere I haven’t gotten to yet.

“I looked for her. Couple years, on and off. No family to speak of, no friends who stuck through the worst of it. Every so often she’d surface and I’d try to help and it never held.” I shake my head, still under the sink. “And one day I’m standing at the window with a two-year-old on my hip, watching the street for a car that isn’t coming, and I realize I’m teaching my son to wait for somebody instead of teaching him he’s already got everything he needs. So I stopped. Gave her to God, because I’d run out of anywhere else to put her, and I let her go.”

“I’m sorry,” Olivia says. And she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t reach for the pity face, doesn’t tell me it was for the best or that everything happens for a reason. She just means it, and lets it be sad, which is somehow the kindest thing anyone’s done with that story in years.

“Don’t be. Bo’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Wouldn’t give back a single day.” I slide out far enough to look at her. “It’s been just me and him. Ten years.”

She goes still. I watch her do the math.

“Ten years,” she says.

“Yep.”

“Luke.” Her voice drops. “You haven’t dated in ten years?”

“Nope.”

She sits with that, and I let her. I can see her therapist brain turning it over, working out what it means that a man who hasn’t let a soul near him or his kid in a decade is lying on her kitchen floor telling her the one story he never tells.

“Wow,” she says finally.

“Yeah.” I duck back under the sink, because if I keep looking at her like this I’m going to do something I can’t take back. “Wow about covers it.”

I finish the fix for real this time. Tighten every connection twice, because I am not making the same mistake I made ten minutes ago, when I was too busy watching her breathe.

“Alright. Try it now.”

She reaches up and turns the tap. I flip the switch, and the disposal roars to life, clean and even, chews through nothing like it just came out of the box.

“You fixed it,” she says, and there’s a note in her voice, surprise, or something softer, that makes me want to spend the rest of my life fixing things for this woman.

“Told you.” I go to sit up to check the seal one last time, misjudge the cabinet completely, and crack the top of my head against the frame hard enough to see white. “Ah man.”

“Oh my gosh.” And then she’s down on the floor with me, laughing and worried at once, both hands coming up. “Come here, let me see.”

“It’s fine.”

“You hit it so hard.” Her fingers slide into my hair, gentle, tilting my head toward the light so she can look, and just like that we are very, very close. Her knees against mine. Her hands on me. Her face inches from mine, brow furrowed, examining me like I’m something worth taking care of.

The kitchen goes silent.

Her eyes come down from my hairline, slow, and land on mine. Stop there.

Mine drop to her mouth.

Here we go, I think. Here we finally, finally go.