I'd Give Anything(65)

“The thing is I like you,” he said. “I’m maybe an inch away from total, point-of-no-return in love with you. But I am finished with that question. And I just don’t know if I could be with someone who felt the need to ask it one more time.”

“Yikes. Dodged a bullet there, I guess.”

Then, he shook his head and laughed. “Okay, I would’ve wanted to be with you anyway. But I am still glad you didn’t ask.”

Regarding him across the table, his lean face and his smile lines and his inky eyelashes, I wondered how I’d seen him in the dog park for all those months without realizing he was the handsomest man to ever breathe air.

“So—an inch away? Really?” I said. “Because the word inch sounds tiny, but inches are bigger than people think.”

“Maybe a centimeter.”

“I was right about dog beds in every room of your house, wasn’t I?”

“Does a walk-in closet count as a room?”

I laughed.

He said, seriously, “You know it won’t be easy. I saw the way your brother looked at me. I’m thinking that some of your friends would look at me the same way.”

I considered this. “I’ll convince them it wasn’t you.”

“What if you can’t?”

“Then shame on them. Their loss. But I will.”

“All these years and no one ever figured out who set that fire,” he said.

“I guess probably they never will now.”

“Sometimes, I wonder how hard they actually looked,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Remember what I said about drunk kids looking for a bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t totally hypothetical. The line for the restroom was crazy long, even after halftime had been over for a while, and I had the brilliant idea that I might go find one inside the school. So I went walking around the perimeter of the building, searching for a way in, when I saw this girl running out of a door at the back of the school.”

“A girl? What did she look like?”

“I didn’t see her face. She had her hood up, and it was dark. But she was thin and wearing white pants. It spooked me, seeing her. So I went back to the stadium and got in line for the restroom. I told the police about her when they questioned me.”

“I never heard about a girl. I was pretty depressed and out of it once I thought Trevor had done it. But I think I would’ve remembered hearing that the cops were looking for a girl.”

“No, you’re right. I never heard anything about it, either. My dad even called them a while later to see if they’d found out anything about her, but they blew him off. Said that lead went nowhere. But he didn’t get the sense that they’d taken me seriously.”

A thought struck me. “Oh no.”

“What?”

“After Trevor told my mom, I’m sure she did what she always did: made his problem disappear. I wonder if she heard about that lead and convinced someone to let it go. Trevor’s not a girl, obviously, but it would’ve been like her not to have wanted to take any chances that it might have been Trev you’d seen.”

“Well, I guess we’ll never know whether she did that or not. But it doesn’t matter now.”

Before I left, I kissed Daniel and said, “I’ll make sure everyone I care about knows you didn’t set that fire.”

“Even if you can’t convince them, it’s nice of you to try. Thank you.”

I turned around to open the front door, then turned back.

“Oh, listen,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“I almost love you, too. In case you were wondering.”

“Me? Are you kidding?” he said. “Why would I wonder about that?”

Daniel grinned and I kissed his grin and leaned down and planted a kiss on the warm, blond curve of Mose’s head and left.



If it is possible to walk on air while driving a car, that’s what I did all the way home from Daniel’s house. I’d made light of the task of convincing my friends and family that Daniel had not—could not have, for love or money or rage or sorrow—set the Lucretia Mott school fire or any other, but I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Still, I had kept faith with a person who deserved it; I had trusted my own instincts; and I was one slender centimeter away from true love, so it seemed like a good afternoon to give myself over to joy. And then, just as I pulled into my driveway, Gray called. He hadn’t waited a week or a year. I’d talked to him at ten that morning, and it was two thirty in the afternoon. I held my phone in my hand and listened to it ring, and for a few trills, I pondered whether it was a good sign or a terrible sign that it had taken Gray less than five hours to absorb all I’d told him and call me back, and then I decided to just answer.

“Hey, Gray,” I said.

“It’s crazy how your voice sounds just like your voice.”

“Yours, too,” I said. “Which is also crazy.”

“I talked to Kirsten and CJ.”

“You did?”

“And we were hoping you would come to my house for dinner tonight.”

“Oh!” It came out as a squeak.

“Unless—I know it’s last minute, so we can also do it—”