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“Because Dave and I had a good marriage, I started thinking that was what a good marriage was supposed to look like. Not just mine. Any good one. Quiet. Steady. Comfortable. Two people who move through life in more or less the same direction at more or less the same speed.”

“You don’t think that anymore?”

“I think it was one way to have a good marriage.” I glance over at him. “Lately I’ve been thinking it wasn’t the only way.”

We reach the footbridge and keep walking. Below us, the creek narrows between two banks crowded with trees, the water moving faster where it squeezes around a cluster of rocks.

“For weeks, every time you did something Dave wouldn’t have done, I noticed it,” I say. “You left cabinets open. You got obsessed with painting and forgot everything else existed. You wanted music louder than any reasonable person needs it. You argued with me because agreement seems to bore you.”

“It can be boring.”

I give him a look. Kell smiles. “Keep going.”

“I treated all of those things like evidence that we were wrong for each other because you didn’t fit the pattern I already understood.”

“And now?”

“Now I think I was asking the wrong question. I kept asking whether we made sense on paper. I should’ve been asking whether I liked who you actually are.”

Kell goes quiet beside me, but he doesn’t interrupt.

“I do,” I say. “More than I was brave enough to tell you.”

We walk another few yards in silence. “What do you like about me?” The question comes out careful enough that I can hear how much the answer matters.

“You’ve got this enormous appetite for life.”

His eyebrows rise. “Enormous?”

“Completely. You want everything. Music. Paint. Food. Sex. People. Some idea you had thirty seconds ago that suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world.”

“That sounds accurate.”

“You don’t seem embarrassed by being interested in anything. You try things. You want things. You throw yourself into them, and if something doesn’t work, you find something else to throw yourself into.” Kell is smiling now, but he’s paying too much attention for me to mistake it for teasing.

“Sometimes it makes me crazy.”

“I’ve noticed.”

I give him a sideways look, but I’m smiling. “Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”

“I am pleased with myself.”

“Try to contain yourself. I’m saying nice things about you.”

“I’m listening.”

I bump his arm lightly with mine before I can think better of it. The contact is brief, but neither of us moves farther away afterward.

“You’ve got an exuberance I didn’t expect to like as much as I do,” I say. “Yeah, that’s the word. Exuberance. You make everything seem worth trying.”

Kell considers that.

“I spent so much time noticing how different we were that I stopped noticing how much I liked it,” I add

He doesn’t answer right away, and I let the thought sit between us for a few steps.

“There’s something else,” I say.