“Thank you,” I say when I’m more in control. I turn to my side, and my right cheek brushes against the pillow. “This was . . . Thank you.”

He scans my face, unconvinced. “Are you feeling better?”

“A little. Thank you for not freaking out.”

He shakes his head, holding my eyes, and I take more deep breaths.

Seems like a good idea. “Want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

He nods and does what he did weeks ago, after saving me from the almost-pancaking: he puts his warm hand on my brow and pushes my hair back. It might be the best thing I’ve felt in months. Years. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No.”

He nods again and makes to stand. The dread in the pit of my stomach is back with a vengeance. “Can you—” I realize that I slid my finger through one of the belt loops in his jeans and immediately flush and let go. Still, all the embarrassment in the world isn’t enough to keep me from continuing.

“Can you stay? Please? I know you’d probably rather be—”

“Nowhere else,” he says, without skipping a beat. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.” We stay like that, in the Hostile Companionable Silence™

that’s as much a part of our relationship as BLINK, and peanut-butter energy balls, and arguing about Félicette’s existence. After a minute, or maybe thirty, he asks, “What happened, Bee?” and if he sounded pushy, or accusing, or embarrassed, it would be so easy to shut him down. But there’s only pure, naked concern in his eyes, and I don’t just want to tell him. I need to.

“Annie and I had a falling out in our last year of grad school. We haven’t talked since.”

He closes his eyes. “I’m a fucking asshole.”

“No.” I close my fingers around his wrist. “Levi, you—”

“I fucking pointed her out to you—”

“You couldn’t have known.” I sniffle. “I mean, you are an asshole, but for other reasons.” I smile. I must look ridiculous, my cheeks glistening with sweat and tears and smudged mascara. He doesn’t seem to mind, at least judging from the way he cups my face, his thumb warm on my skin. It’s a lot of touching for two nemeses, but I’ll allow it. I might even welcome it.

“Annie’s at Vanderbilt,” he says with the tone of someone who’s talking to himself. “With Schreiber.”

“You do remember her, then.”

“Seeing you like this definitely jostled my memory. Other things, too.”

He doesn’t move his hand, which is totally fine by me. “Is that why you’re not working with Schreiber? Why you’re with that idiot, Trevor Slate?”

“Trevor is not an idiot,” I correct him. “He’s a sexist, imbecile dickhead.

But, yeah. We were supposed to do our postdocs together. We even timed our graduations so we’d move to Nashville at the same time. And then . . .”

I shrug as best as I can. “Then that mess happened, and I couldn’t go anymore. I couldn’t be with her and Tim.”

He frowns. “Tim?”

“All three of us were supposed to work with Schreiber.”

“But what does Tim have to do with this?”

This is the hard bit. The part I’ve only said out loud twice. Once to Reike, and later to my therapist. I tell myself to breathe. Deeply. In and out. “It was over Tim, the falling out Annie and I had.”

Levi tenses. His hand moves lower, to cup the back of my neck. Somehow it’s exactly what I need. “Bee.”

“I think you know how Tim was. Because everyone knew how Tim was.”

I smile. The tears are flowing again, quietly unstoppable. “Well, except for me. I just . . . I met him in my freshman year of college, you know? And he liked me. And that winter I had nowhere to go, and he asked if I wanted to spend it with his family. Which, of course, I did. It was amazing. God, I miss his family. His mother would knit me socks—isn’t it the loveliest thing, knitting something warm for someone? I still wear them when it’s cold.” I wipe my cheeks with my wrists. “My therapist said that I didn’t want to see.

To admit how Tim truly was, because I overinvested in our relationship.

Because if I acknowledged that he was a jerk, then I’d have to give up on the rest of his family, too. Maybe she’s right, but I think I just wanted to trust him, you know? We were together for years. He asked me to marry him. He

invited me into his life when no one else ever had. You trust a person like that, don’t you?”

“Bee.” Levi’s looking at me in a way that I cannot comprehend. Because no one has ever looked at me like that.

“So, there were all these other girls. Women. I never blamed them—it wasn’t their job to look after my relationship. I only ever blamed Tim.” My lips taste like salt and too much water. “We’d been engaged for three years when I found out. I confronted him and took off my engagement ring and told him that we were done, that he’d betrayed me, that I hoped he got gonorrhea and his dick fell off—I don’t even know what I told him. I was so mad I wasn’t even crying. But he said that it didn’t mean anything. That he didn’t think I’d be so upset about it, and that he’d stop. That if I’d been . . .”

I can’t even bring myself to repeat it, the way he twisted everything to make it my fault. If you fucked me a little more frequently, he’d said. If you were better. If you knew how to enjoy it and make it enjoyable. You could at least put in some effort. “We’d been together for seven years. No one else had been in my life that long before, so I took him back. And I tried harder.

I put more effort in . . . in our relationship. In making him happy. I’m not a victim—I made an informed choice. Figured that if getting married, if stability was what I wanted, then I shouldn’t give up on Tim too quickly. You reap what you sow.” I let out a shuddering sigh. “And then he and Annie—”

My voice breaks, but Levi can imagine the rest. He knows enough already, probably more than he ever cared to. He doesn’t need it spelled out, that I was such a needy, pitiful doormat that not only did I take back my cheater of a fiancé, but I also never realized that he kept cheating on me. With my closest friend. In the lab where I was working every day. I don’t think about Annie too often, because the pain of losing her, I never quite learned how to manage. “I don’t know why she did it. But I couldn’t go with them to Vanderbilt. It was career suicide, but I just couldn’t.”

“You . . .” Levi’s hand tightens on my nape. “You didn’t marry him. You never married him.”

I smile, rueful. “The worst thing is, I tried to forgive him for a long time.

But then I couldn’t, and . . .” I shake my head.

Levi is blinking, a dumbfounded expression on his face. “You’re not married,” he repeats, and I sit up as his shock finally penetrates my brain.

“You—you thought I was?” He nods, and I let out a wet laugh. “I was sure you knew, since you and Tim collaborate. And I let Guy believe it, because I thought you were trying to give me an out, but”—I lift my left hand—“this is my grandmother’s ring. I’m not married. Tim and I haven’t spoken in years.”

Levi mouths something I cannot make out and pulls his hand back, as though all of a sudden my skin is scorching him. He stands and walks to the window, staring outside as he runs a hand through his hair. Is he angry?

“Levi?”

No reply. He rubs his mouth with his fingers, as if deep in thought, as if coming to terms with some seismic event.

“Levi, I know you and Tim collaborate. If this puts you in a weird position, you can—”

“We don’t.” He finally turns around. Whatever just happened, he seems to have collected himself. The green of his eyes, though, is brighter than before. Brighter than ever. “Collaborate, that is.”

I sit up, legs dangling over the mattress. “You and Tim don’t collaborate anymore?”