Two weeks had passed since that night on the couch with Nathan.

I still felt it sometimes — a phantom ache between my legs sometimes, or the way my stomach would flip when I heard his voice even from the other room. We hadn’t touched again. Not once. We barely even looked at each other when Brooke was around. But every time we passed in the hallway or sat at the dinner table, the air felt different. Like we were both waiting for something.

Then Nathan dropped the news one morning over breakfast.

He’d decided to adopt a boy.

His name was Ethan. Just turned eighteen. Quiet kid from the...