When I talk about a deal I closed, his face opens; when I disagree with him, he leans in rather than away; my competence does not threaten him, it delights him, the way you’re delighted by a fine thing working the way it was built to work.

A year into our seeing each other, he tried to give me an expensive bracelet, and some old reflex in me flinched, braced for the transaction underneath the gift — and I declined it, and told him, honestly, that I didn’t need costly things to feel loved, half-expecting the sulk or the argument that Gavin would have given me.

Daniel just nodded, and took it back, and two days later handed me a rare out-of-print book I’d been hunting for years, a thing that cost less than twenty dollars and told me he had been listening to me for months.

I cried over that book.