“I feel naked. Like I’m raw. Or like I’m . . .” The way he’s trying to find the words to describe how he feels makes him look like he wants to jump out of his skin. He’s jittery and chaotic in his movements. And then he stops. “I feel like my entire body is an open wound and I’m standing next to someone that may or may not pour salt all over me.”

You can’t capture love in a bottle. You can’t hold on to it with both hands and force it to stay with you. What has happened to us is no one’s fault—neither of us did anything wrong—but when Jesse left, life took us in opposite directions and turned us into different people. We grew apart because we were apart.

I think you forsake the people you loved before, just a little bit, when you fall in love again. But it doesn’t erase anything. It doesn’t change what you had. You don’t even leave it so far behind that you can’t instantly remember, that you can’t pick it up like a book you read a long time ago and remember how it felt then.

don’t think you’re trying to figure out if you love Sam more or Jesse more. I think you’re trying to figure out if you want to be the person you are with Jesse or you want to be the person you are with Sam.”

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” Olive said when I mentioned it at lunch. “My brother just told me about this. You don’t notice something and then you learn the name for it and suddenly it’s everywhere.”

Jesse is a different man than he was before. I am a different woman. And what has confused me ever since I found out he was alive is now crystal clear: We are two people who are madly in love with our old selves. And that is not the same as being in love.

We move to tell each other what’s in our souls, to say what words can’t. We are touching each other in an attempt to listen.

“But the problem isn’t who you love or if you love both, I don’t think. I think the problem is that you aren’t sure who you are. You’re a different person now than you were before you lost Jesse. It changed you, fundamentally.”

“We loved each other and we lost each other. And now, even though we still love each other, the pieces don’t fit like they used to.” I could make myself fit for him. He could make himself fit for me. But that’s not true love. “This is it for us,” Jesse says. “We’re over now.” I look in his eyes. “Yeah. I think we are.”