Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(25)

“I’ve told you,” she says, grinding the heels of her hands against her eyes, already feeling defeated by an argument she’s never going to win. “I don’t want to say it unless it’s—”

“True?” he asks. “Real?”

She shakes her head, frustrated. “Unless it’s forever.”

“Right,” he says, looking hurt. “And this isn’t. Message received.”

They’re both silent after that, and Clare closes her eyes. She’d give just about anything not to be talking about this. Not tonight. Not when they only have so many hours left. Especially since she knows the only thing she can say to make it better is the one thing she still can’t bring herself to voice.

For a long time, Aidan hadn’t seemed to mind. Shortly after he’d first said it—right here at the bowling alley—they’d spent an afternoon at an art museum downtown. There was a special Picasso exhibition, and Clare had stopped to study a painting of a child holding a white dove.

“Looks like true dove to me,” Aidan had joked, coming up behind her.

“Definitely dove at first sight.”

“You know what I dove? Paintings of doves.”

She smiled. “Oh, yeah?”

“And actual doves,” he said as she turned, slipping her arms around his neck. “Who doesn’t dove doves, right?”

“I dove you,” she’d said, rising onto her tiptoes to kiss him.

And for a while, that had been enough.

I dove you, Clare had said a week later, the words bubbling up inside her as she watched him scramble around on the floor of the grocery store after his bag of apples had split open. I dove you, she’d shouted above the noise, after he’d kissed her in the wild, celebratory aftermath of a lacrosse win, and she’d said it again during the quiet moment just before they parted on an ordinary Tuesday night in her driveway.

I dove you, I dove you, I dove you.

It was just one letter off, but to Clare, it came from the same place. Swapping out a D for an L shouldn’t have mattered—not when all the right feelings were there—but for some reason, it did. It felt safer, somehow, less permanent. Because love wasn’t something you could take back. It was like a magic spell: Once you said the words, they were simply out there, shifting and changing everything that had once been true.

All her life, Clare has watched her parents pass the word back and forth as if it weren’t a fragile object, as if it were the sturdiest thing in the world. They’ve never been content to say it just once. “I love love love you,” her dad calls to her mom each morning as he walks out the door, and she always yells it back to him the same way: “I love love love you.”

Clare had asked them about it once, when she was little, and they’d just smiled and said it was because they loved each other three times as much as anyone else.

But later, when she was old enough for the story—nine years old and starting to ask questions—they sat her down to explain the truth about their history, about how they’d each been married once before.

“But why?” Clare had asked at the time, trying to absorb the idea that not only had her parents had lives before her, but that they’d also had lives before each other. It was mind-boggling to try to imagine a time when they hadn’t been a family, when there weren’t pancakes on the table every Sunday morning, when their names weren’t written in the sidewalk out front, when their shoes weren’t strewn beside the back door.

“Why…” she’d asked, blinking back tears, feeling like the whole world had gone sideways. “Why didn’t you just wait for each other?”

“We were young,” her mom had explained gently, stroking Clare’s hair. “We thought we’d both found real love. But really, it was just first love.”

“Things change when you get older,” her dad said. “But we were lucky. For us, second love turned out to be the best kind.” He reached out and took her mom’s hand. “Which is why I don’t just love your mom. I love love love her.”

“Why three then?” Clare asked. “If it’s only the second?”

“Because two isn’t nearly enough,” her dad said with a smile. “But if I said it a thousand times, I’d be late to work.”

Clare is aware that her parents aren’t normal—not because they’re both divorced, but because they’re so bizarrely happy now. What she doesn’t know is whether that’s because they’re just lucky—because they’ve been fortunate enough to find each other in spite of making a mistake the first time around—or whether what they say is true: that second love is the best kind.

But either way, something about this has made her overly cautious when it comes to love. There’s too much uncertainty, too many chances to make mistakes.

And she doesn’t ever want Aidan to be a mistake.

So no matter how strong her feelings for him, she refuses to rush the words. They’re too significant, too definite, too lasting. When she finally says them, she wants it to be to the first, last, and only person. She wants it to count.

“Yeah, but you actually say it all the time,” Aidan once pointed out as they stood at the sink, washing some vegetables they’d brought home from the farmer’s market in town. “You say it to your parents. And to Bingo.”