“I wasn't in love with them. I was in love with the version of us that kept almost happening.”

The evidence for that version was real. There were nights that looked exactly like it. The trouble is that a handful of accurate glimpses will sustain a picture indefinitely, because each one arrives feeling like confirmation rather than repetition.

I could describe the relationship we were about to have in enormous detail and could not describe the one we were in without using the word complicated. That gap is worth noticing early. Potential is the only part of a relationship nobody ever has to deliver, and it is the part that is easiest to fall for.