We had dinner at the open air restaurant on the beach because we were both hungry and neither of us wanted to eat alone in a room where the bed had been turned down with a single hibiscus flower, as though the universe had a sense of humor.

Over dinner, he told me about Jessica.

They had been together for 2 years. He had proposed on a Tuesday evening in their kitchen, not because it was a grand occasion, but because he’d looked at her making coffee and thought, “I want to look at this person making coffee for the rest of my life.”

She had said yes, and then apparently spent the following four months saying yes to other things as well.

I told him about Derek, the anniversary, the receipt, the 55 minutes of nothing at gate 14.

Nathan listened the way people listen when they are genuinely paying attention, not waiting for their turn to speak.

“Three times,” he said when I finished.

“Three times.”

“Why?”

I turned my wine glass in my hands.

“Because every time he had an explanation, and every time the explanation was just believable enough that saying I didn’t believe it felt like my problem, like I was the one being unreasonable.”

I paused.

“I think I was afraid that if I said out loud that I didn’t trust him, I’d have to admit I’d wasted 3 years.”

Nathan was quiet.

“You didn’t waste them. You just spent them on the wrong person.”

It was such a simple thing to say.

I had to look away at the ocean for a moment.

We stayed in Cancun for 4 days.

We did not fall in love in Cancun.

I want to be honest about that because the story is not about falling in love in 4 days. The story is about what happened when we got back.

We exchanged numbers at the airport before our separate flights home.

He flew back to Columbus. I flew back to Chicago.

I moved the rest of Derek’s things out of the apartment the same evening I landed while my best friend Maya sat on the couch eating chips and providing moral support.

When Derek called 3 days later with an explanation, his phone had died. There had been an emergency with his brother. He was so sorry. He could explain everything.

I listened to the whole thing.

And then I said, “I know you believe that explanation, but I don’t, and it doesn’t matter anymore.”

And I hung up.

It was the clearest I had felt in years.

Nathan texted 2 weeks later. He was going to be in Chicago for a project. Would I want to get coffee?

I said, “Yes.”

We got coffee and then walked along the lakefront for 2 hours, and then got dinner because neither of us was ready to stop talking.

He drove back to Columbus at 11:00 at night and texted me when he got home to say he’d arrived safely, which was the kind of small, considerate thing I had stopped expecting from people.

We saw each other six more times over the next 3 months. Chicago to Columbus, Columbus to Chicago.

On the seventh visit, standing in my kitchen, and I noticed this later, the kitchen detail, the mirror of what he had told me about the proposal to Jessica, he looked at me and said, “I think I’m in love with you. I think I have been since you sat down next to me at the airport and said, ‘She’s not coming either.’”