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his face, pinched and troubled, as he said, “When you and I first met, I said I needed some time before we really started dating because of my parents breaking up. That was true . . . but not the whole truth.”
    The other part was that he was still seeing Chloe, his girlfriend in the suburbs.
    Even before he’d moved back to Chicago with his mom, his feelings for Chloe were changing—“fading,” as Max said—and then he met me again. “And that was it,” he said. “The whole ‘love at first sight’ thing . . . what does Doug call it in movies, the ‘world slows down’ moment? It wasn’t like that.” He shrugged. “But there was love in it, right from the start.” He held my gaze even as the hint of a blush touched at his neck. “And then there was more and more, and here we are.”
    About a month after we met, he tried to end it with Chloe, but she’d gotten upset, made disturbing noises about hurting herself, and he backed off. “I should’ve gotten it over with, but to be honest, it was easier to let it linger,” he said. “The divorce, getting used to Chicago and a new school . . . Chloe was one more thing to deal with, and I didn’t. Instead I got closer to you and called her less and less. And then she ate a bunch of pills. I just . . . I didn’t think she was serious.” Luckily she recovered, and when the crisis was over, Max told her about me. Therapy helped Chloe move on, but now and then she started a text conversation, asking about Max’s life, talking about the past. He held the phone out. “Here, read the whole conversation. Call her if you want and ask about it. She’s sort of stalkerish but Chloe’s a good person. She won’t lie.”
    I pushed it back. “Would you have told me if I hadn’t seen the text?”
    He was quiet a moment. “No. Probably not.”
    It was a disturbingly honest answer that made me sad and a little angry, but mostly curious. “Why?” I asked.
    “Because I didn’t want you to think I was an asshole for stringing her along. I mean, I was, I admit that.” He sighed. “But not telling you about it doesn’t make it less true. Some things are just over, you know? They don’t have anything to do with now.”
    I couldn’t have agreed less.
    I’d learned the hard way that events of the past led directly to the present, and I was about to say so when Max spoke first. He touched my hand and I let him. “If anything existed between me and Chloe, if I was holding back or hiding something about right now, the present, then you’d have every right to hate me and not trust me. Because I wouldn’t be the person you thought I was. But that’s not what this is.”
    That’s exactly what it was, but it wasn’t his fault.
    My whole relationship with Max was based on one long lie by omission—how could I not expect him to have secrets of his own? It was the ultimate moment to tell him everything in a way that might save him from hating me, but I paused. Max must’ve interpreted my silence as deliberation, when in fact it was cowardice. Again, he spoke first, saying, “I’m a normal person, Sara Jane, with faults like anyone else. What I did to Chloe was wrong, but it had one good effect—it made me resolve never to lie to you. I promise.”
    “I . . . I don’t know what to say,” I mumbled honestly, since I was the one who felt like a fraud. So I spoke about myself instead, adding, “Except . . . except it would be great if everything could always be up front and perfect, but it can’t be, because . . . because . . .”
    “Because we’re not little kids. And this is real life,” he said.
    I nodded slowly and stared across the lake as Max put his arm around me again. “So,” he asked, “are we okay?”
    “Yeah. We are,” I said, happy to answer in the affirmative but aware that it was more than partly wishful thinking.
    “You know I’m all in, right?” he said. “There’s no one else I want to be with. In some ways I