I didn’t say it back that night, not because I didn’t feel it, but because I had learned, finally, to be sure before I spoke.

I told him 2 days later over the phone.

He was quiet for a long moment, and then he said, “Okay, good. What do we do now?”

What we did was this.

We took our time.

We did not rush because the beginning had been strange. If anything, the strange beginning made us more careful, more deliberate, more honest than I think either of us would have been otherwise.

We had both already seen what happened when you believed what you wanted to believe instead of what was true.

We were not going to do that to each other.

His mother, Patricia, found out about the airport when Nathan told his parents we were together.

She called me, actually called me, not texted, and said, “I want to hear the whole story from you directly.”

I told her.

She laughed so hard she had to put the phone down.

When she came back, she said, “Honey, I have been praying for years that my son would stop being so sensible about everything and do one genuinely stupid thing. I’m so glad it was you.”

I loved her immediately.

My own mother’s reaction was more complicated.

She had liked Derek. She had already mentally planned the wedding.

When I told her we had broken up at the airport and I had flown to Cancun with a stranger, she went very quiet and then said, “Melissa Anne Hartley, I raised you better than two.”

“I’m happy, Mom,” I said. “For the first time in a long time, I’m actually happy.”

Another silence.

“Is he kind?”

“He ordered me a ginger ale on the plane without asking because he could tell my stomach was upset,” I said. “He listens when I talk. He drove 4 hours to see me and then drove 4 hours back the same night because I had an early patient the next morning. He told me the truth about himself before he had any reason to believe I’d be safe with it.”

My mother was quiet again.

“Bring him to Thanksgiving,” she finally said.

He came to Thanksgiving.

He helped my father do the dishes.

He talked to my grandmother for 45 minutes about her garden.

My younger sister pulled me into the pantry and whispered, “Please do not mess this up.”

I didn’t mess it up.

There is a moment I come back to, though.

About 8 months into our relationship, I was going through an old bag and I found the garland, the little silk flower garland my maid of honor had tied on my wrist the morning of what was supposed to be my wedding day.

I had stuffed it in my bag at the airport and forgotten it.

The silk was a little crushed, but it was still intact.

I showed it to Nathan that night.

He turned it over in his hands.

“Do you know what I was thinking when you walked over to me?” he said.

“What?”

“I was thinking that I needed to stop sitting there feeling sorry for myself and just go home. Except that it was over and go home.”

He looked at the garland.

“And then you sat down next to me and said the truest thing anyone had said to me in months, and I thought, well, maybe not yet.”

I have thought about Carol a lot.

The gate agent with the reading glasses and the tired patience and the one off-hand comment that she almost certainly forgot the moment we walked down that jetway.