I had coffee with Evan a few weeks later, at a small shop near the water in Seattle. We sat by the window and talked about books and music and the places we'd been. We didn't talk about the past, not really. We didn't need to. We talked about the present, about the small ordinary things that made up a life, and it was easy, the way it had never been before.
We had coffee again a month later. And then a walk. And then dinner. And slowly, over the course of a year, we built something new. Not the old thing. Not the thing where I was the third person and he was the center. Something else. Something that belonged to both of us.
It wasn't a fairy tale. There were hard conversations, and there were moments when the past came back to haunt us, and there were days when I wondered if I was making
