“Food,” he tells me once I’m wearing my—his—hoodie and a pair of socks that won’t stay up on my calves. His smile is handsome, self-deprecating. “I have these elaborate daydreams that I’m feeding you a five-course meal I hunted, field-dressed, and prepared all by myself,” he says with a kiss on my forehead.

“Why?”

He gives me an arch look. “Don’t ask why, like it’s a rational impulse. So, what do you want?”

“What can you make?”

“Nothing.” He shrugs at my startled laugh, then throws me over his shoulder to take me downstairs. I feel like a sparkly drink. “I’ll learn. It’s a new obsession for me.”

I can’t remember the last time I giggled this much.

The five-course meal turns out to be slightly burned grilled cheese with boxed tomato soup. I sit on my stool at the island, and he eats his own standing across from me. It’s simultaneously the most ordinary and the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

On my phone there is a text from Cece, time stamp 9:23 a.m.

CECE: “I’ll never spend the night at Jack’s,” she said. “I’m destined to die alone, strangled by the tumble of cobwebs that have overtaken my vulva due to sexual inactivity,” she said.

I laugh, and Jack smiles just because of that, which is a little unlike him and also stupid. He’s stupid. I’m stupid. We’re stupid. Or maybe we’re just sixteen. Jack Smith, Jack Smith-Turner, Jonathan Smith-Turner and I have had sex. More than once. More than more than once. And now we’re having breakfast at one p.m. This is not my timeline, but I’ll claim it anyway.

I tell him about the science of grilled cheese, the negative surface charge of the lipid molecules, stress and strain, the optimal pH, which should always be somewhere around 5.5. (“Manchego, then,” he says. “Or mild cheddar. Gouda, too.”) My heart is spinning dizzily at the thought of this man who knows the pH of different cheese types off the top of his head, when my phone beeps.

A reminder to change my insulin pod. I consider putting it off till I’m home, then look at Jack and think, Honesty. This day, this not-too-good soup, this man with a black-hole tattoo peeping out of his T-shirt sleeve, they are too good to not spend some honesty on.

“I’m going to need a few minutes upstairs,” I say, hopping off the stool. “But I’ll be back.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just need to change my insulin pod.” I rummage in my purse and then hold my kit up triumphantly—a pale yellow bag with little hedgehogs Cece got me years ago. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to be there. I know people get squeamish. I’ll do it in your bedroom—”

“Show me how you do it.”

He puts down what’s left of his sandwich. Washes his hands.

I laugh. “Why?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Why would you—oh my God. You want to put high-fructose corn syrup in my insulin. Was this a long con to murder me?”

He smiles and shakes his head. “I’m starting to be partial to the way you bypass all rational explanations for everything I say, and dash straight to me being an unhinged serial killer.”

“I think it’s our thing.”

His biceps bunch up when he leans his palms against the table. “Show me how it works,” he repeats. It sounds like a soft order, and I answer with a soft question:

“Why?”

“Because I want to know these things.”

There’s something unsaid in this. Because I want to know your life, maybe, or Because I want to know you. My eyes fall on the kit, and I picture myself using words like reservoir and expiration advisory and ketoacidosis. Explaining how each component works. I’ve never said some of those words out loud. They live exclusively in my head, together with the rest of my problems.

Even Cece knows only the basics. But this is Jack. So I swallow. “Do you have any disinfectant?”

The dimple is back. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Less than an hour later, I settle between his long legs on the couch, toes brushing against his calves, his hand splayed on my stomach under the hoodie. He refuses to watch the end of Twilight (“I think I’ve seen enough”) but agrees with me that New Moon is the best in the series (“Relativistically”), curls around me for a two-hour nap during Eclipse (“You smell like me—you should always smell like me”), and then wakes up as the afternoon stretches into evening, just in time for Bella’s unexpected pregnancy.

“This is atrocious,” he says, laughing at every single thing the characters do.

“Shut up.”

He laughs harder against my nape.

“Shut up—she could die!”

More laughter.

“It’s about the hardships and sorrows of the universal human experience, Jonathan.”

He nibbles on my ear a little too hard. “Still better than 2001, Elsie.”

“Obviously.” Something occurs to me. “By the way, is Millicent okay?”

“Yup. Why do you ask?”

“It’s Sunday. Shouldn’t she be calling you with a vital emergency? Isn’t the newspaper boy tossing the Times into her rosebushes or something?”

“Pretty sure newspaper delivery hasn’t worked like that since the early 2000s. And she did her weekend routine yesterday. Sent a photo of an alligator coming out of a toilet in a Florida gas station. Claimed it was happening in her en suite.”

“She knows how to send pictures?”

“Impressive, right?” He drums his fingers against my stomach. “I stopped by for lunch. Gave her the novel. Got scolded for not taking you.”

“Oh.” I flush. With . . . pleasure?

“Can’t remember the last time she liked someone. Not that she’d admit to liking you.”

I laugh. Then, after a few seconds, I hazard, “She told me she liked your mom.”

There is a change in Jack, but not for the worse. He doesn’t stiffen, just seems less relaxed, a little more on guard when he says, “I think so.”

I’m encouraged. “She was a physicist, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Theoretical?”

He lets out a deep, overacted sigh that lifts me up and down. “Unfortunately.” I pinch his forearm in retaliation. Rudely, he doesn’t notice.

I’m tempted to bring up the article. Find out how he could do something like that to his mother—to all of us—and demand that he take ownership of its consequences. But I also don’t want to disrupt this . . . fragile, new, radiant thing we have. And after a bit of arm wrestling, the latter pull wins, and what I ask is “Do you have memories of her?”

I feel him shake his head. “She died too early.”

“Did she”—I roll around till I’m facedown on top of him—“look like you?”

“There aren’t many pictures. My family mostly scrubbed the house clean of them.”

If he’s bitter about it, I cannot tell. “When did you take her last name?”

He laughs softly. “That was Millicent’s decision, actually. She had me legally change it when I was ten. I think she felt uncharacteristically guilty.” He pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. “I do know that she was Swedish. Blond. Her eyes had the same weird . . .”

“Heterochromia?”

“Yeah. She was taller than my father. And kept some detailed diaries about her work. Millicent gave them to me when I started becoming obsessed with physics.”

“Did she have any publications?”

His jaw works. “Just two. She got married halfway through her doctorate and didn’t go back to work after she had me. Her diagnosis came quickly after.” His tone is wary, like he’s choosing his words carefully.

“Why didn’t she go back?”

He exhales. “There were . . . issues. With the lead researcher of her group.”

“Why?”

“They had some . . . disagreement over their joint research. He was intensely controlling. She refused to abide. You can imagine the rest.” His face is blank. “Her diaries are . . . She wasn’t well when she found out that she wouldn’t be allowed back.”

“That’s bullshit. How dare he cut her out of her own research group?”