What he did not understand yet was that I had been trained to expect exactly that plan, had half looked for it for months, and felt, hearing it confessed, not betrayal but an enormous tenderness for a boy whose only strategy for surviving love was to destroy it before it could destroy him.”

“But you never did any of it,” I said.

“I know.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

“I messed up my own plan.

I couldn’t make myself do it.

I kept waiting for the right moment to start being terrible, and it kept not coming, because — because I started loving you.

I started actually liking it here.

I’d catch myself being happy and then panic, because being happy here meant the plan was failing, and if the plan failed, then —”