That is what I did with the valley land, and with everything after, and look where it led us.

I love you.

But you need to fix your own life, and I cannot fix it for you, because fixing it for you is the very thing that broke you.” It was, Alvin understood, the boundary his father should have set five years and a hundred and seventy thousand dollars earlier, the no that would have been a truer love than all the yeses that came before it.

And Derek, to his credit, accepted it without argument.