“So you just… let her go?” he said.

I groaned, then reached for the bottle and poured myself another glug of whiskey.

“Well, what the hell was I supposed to do?” I said.

My brother Max gave a low chuckle and held out his glass for a refill, which I obliged him.

“I don’t know… you could have run after her and thrown yourself at her feet? Begged for a second chance and promised you’d spend the rest of your life trying to earn it?”

“Jesus.”

“What? Didn’t you just tell me how you regretted the whole thing?”

“Well, yeah,” I said and swallowed down a sip of burning amber liquid. It went down like gasoline lit on fire. I was never one for drinking, but something about having a literal wolf-bite and a refused marriage proposal in quick succession was making me feel like drinking something manly. And wincing about it.

“You fucked up,” he said.

“I fucked up,” I repeated, grateful at least he’d brought the booze with him, and not just some big brother home truths about love and life and whatever the fuck else I was in for. Still, he’d come out to fetch me in the middle of nowhere. The least I could do was concede that he was right.

“Show it to me,” he said.

“Show what to you?”

“The ring, bozo.”

I gestured limply to the little grass circle on the table. The one she had recoiled from, tears in her eyes.

“Wait, that?” he said and held it up for inspection.

I shrugged.

“Fuck, I don’t know, Max. It’s charming. Isn’t it? I made it when we were out in the forest. It’s the thought that counts…”

“Jesus.”

“I fucked up?”

“You fucked up.”

“I thought women liked romantic gestures…”

He sighed and flicked the ring away and it went bouncing silently onto the rug.

“Women don’t want gestures, buddy. They want the real deal. Why’d you propose when you did? Before even getting a proper ring?”

I chewed on my lip. The couches were comfortable at least. And something about knowing that we were squatting in some stranger’s home made it better somehow.

“Why? Well, obviously. If I didn’t, she’d run off and leave me.”

“Exactly. Did you think about what she wanted?”

“What do you mean?”

He took his own swig of whiskey and gave me a hard look. People often asked me if it was weird seeing my own face on somebody else all the time. Yep, Max was my identical twin, down to the tiniest detail. But the truth was that I thought of all that as his face… and when I saw myself in the mirror I was surprised that I looked like him, not that he looked like me. My big bro. The only one who’d come out here and pull me back together, even though I was the last person in the world who deserved it.

“Think about it. Before you guys broke off your engagement, what did she tell you about the kind of wedding she wanted?”

I put my head in my hands and tried to think.

“She wanted a pink dress,” I said a little sheepishly.

“And?”

“I don’t know, man. She wanted a big thing. You know Becky. She’s over the top. She wanted a bunch of people and a big ol’ cake and the whole deal.”

“So what kind of a ring would she have wanted then? What kind of a proposal?”

I chewed some more on my lip and took another sip.

“Okay, fine, I get your point.”

He nodded.

“That’s one thing Kate has taught me. Empathy. Women care about …intentions. Maybe you just proposed because you were afraid to lose her. But put yourself in her shoes. Women aren’t idiots.”

“Yeah, I know what women are like. Sheesh. We really are in a crazy parallel universe when you’re the one giving me the love life advice.”

He laughed.

“Yeah, well you’re good at getting women to sleep with you, I’ll give you that. But you’re a total amateur when it comes to all the shit that comes afterwards…”

I briefly thought about rolling my eyes at him, but he was right. Besides, I didn’t want him to think I didn’t appreciate him coming out here, even though he hadn’t gone easy on me since the second he arrived.

“I don’t know what to do now though,” I said. We both stared at the handful of deflating balloons in the corner. There had been a time when the thought of having Becky permanently in my life scared me. And now I was scared at the thought that she may never be in it again. Was that this thing that everyone called ‘maturity’? This awful, tight feeling in my chest?

“Okay, listen to me. I’m going to give you something now, and so help me if you mess this up mom’s going to have my head.”

“Wait… mom? Why’d you have to go and tell—”

“Just promise me you’ll take this seriously.”

I nodded.

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a velvety ring box.

“What’s…?”

“I told mom about Becky, that you guys were back in touch again. You know how much she loved Becky…”

I took the box from him and opened it to find a softly blinking diamond ring.

“Wait, is this…?”

“Grandma’s engagement ring. Yup. The hand-me-down. Look, it wasn’t my idea. She asked me to give it to you. If you needed it, that is.”

“But… didn’t you want it? For Kate or…?”

“Oh, I think I got that covered,” he said with a warm smile.

I couldn’t help but give him a big bear hug. Max always pulled through for me. He did it when we were kids, he did it during our training, and on all the missions we shared. And he was doing it now.

“Are you really sure…”

“Just take it. Mom’s happy for you to have it. Seriously. I could say I told you so but I don’t know, that hole in your arm is making me feel pretty sorry for you,” he said with a cheesy grin.

“Thanks man…”

“Sure. Just hold onto it. Becky’s amazing. You know I always said she was the one for you.”

I snapped the box closed and stared down at it in my hand, then frowned.

“She’s pretty mad at me,” I said slowly.

“Yeah, I bet.”

“I don’t know if I have a chance anymore.”

“Maybe not. But is she worth it?”

I knew he could read from my expression what my answer to that question was.

“I’ll propose again. Properly this time,” I said and squeezed the box in my fist. But he shook his head.

“No man, you’re still not thinking this through.”

“I’m not?”

“Nope. Think about it. You broke her trust. She threw herself into the idea that you and her were going to be together once before, remember? And then that didn’t work out. Why would she do the exact same thing again?”

“Well… because…”

I looked at the shimmering gold liquid in my glass. “Because I’ve changed. Because out there, when I was with her, I think I understood, I finally realized—”

“Yeah, but so what? She doesn’t care about any of that. To her you’re just the same old Hugo you always were. I mean come on, you were messing around with her roommate less than a month ago…”

“Hey, how do you know about that?’

“Small town. Word gets around.”

I winced.

“Fact is, she doesn’t know that you’ve changed,” he said.

I stewed on my thoughts for a moment.

“I have to show her then.”

He smiled and refilled my glass.

“Now you’ve got it.”

“She’s… she’s the best woman I’ve ever known. The way I feel around her is… I can’t describe it.”

“Yawn.”

I stared at him wide-eyed.

“I don’t buy it, and neither will she.”

I frowned.

“I need to do something special for her. Something to make her trust me again. I just wish I could go back in time and redo everything…”

We locked eyes.

“Hey, that’s not a bad idea,” I said, mostly to myself.

Max just eyeballed me and said nothing.

“That’s what I have to do. I have to start from scratch, Max. That’s it.”

He lifted an eyebrow. I sat up in my seat, feeling the effects of the whiskey buzzing all through my head.

“Before we broke up, she gave me this… this box. She put all our memories in it, you see. Like, she wrote down all these little things from our relationship that we’d done. Stuff that I could read while I was away to remember her, and she asked me to do the same.” I was having trouble speaking slowly and clearly.

“Okay…”

“I never returned the favor. I wanted to but…”

“So…?”

“So that’s what I need to do again. Make new memories. The memory box, part two.”

My arm was beginning to throb with pain again but I ignored it.

“She went to all this trouble, Max. She color coded them, and wrote down all these little things, some things I never even gave a second thought. It must have taken her days.”

“You’re going to make her a memory box?”

“Yeah, Exactly.”

“But you guys don’t have any new memories…”

I chewed on my lip.

“The forest. We had some good moments in the forest.”

The corner of his mouth lifted a little.

“I’m serious,” I said. “That was some serious bonding, that has to count for something.”

“Okay, sure, but I don’t get how-”

“I’ll put memories in there that we skipped the first time round. And I’ll put in a few of my own memories, of what it was like to miss her while we were away…”

“And then?”

“I’ll keep going. It’ll be like seducing her, but from scratch.”

He laughed.

“I can’t help that I was an asshole in the past, right?”

“I guess not.”

“But I can control what happens from here on out. We can make new memories,” I repeated to myself quietly, picturing how it would all work out.

“It’s going to take some time to gather all that up, though, right?” he said.

“I don’t care how long it takes,” I blurted.

The look on his face wasn’t quite admiration. Max was my brother and I loved him unconditionally. But we weren’t soft with each other, not for a second. The look he gave me just then was more like… recognition. The warm acknowledgment that passed between us right at that moment would have been invisible to anyone else in the room, but I felt it immediately, and it gave me strength. Having my big brother’s approval meant more to me than I could have ever admitted out loud to him.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Hey, Hugo?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m here, whatever you need.”

I looked into his eyes, which were more or less my eyes, and smiled.

“Well, it’s been nice chatting and all, but I think I should probably get to a hospital at some point,” I said and grinned. He gave me a salute and reached out his hand to hoist me up off the sofa.

“A wolf bite? This is going make for a great story,” I said as we made for his car outside. I took one last look at the cabin. “I wonder how many hot nurses are going to be impressed by my tale of courage and daring,” I laughed.

He gave me a death glare, but I patted him on the back and walked out the front door.

“Relax, I’m kidding. I’m a new man, remember?”

We got inside his car and he turned the ignition.

“I mean it. Something happened out there, Max. Just away from everything, with time to think… I almost feel like that wolf did me a favor. Does that sound crazy?”

Max’s attention was on the gravel beneath us as we drove slowly out and made our way back to the main road.

“Nope. After our last mission, nothing sounds crazy to me anymore,” he said after a pause.

I stared out the window and said nothing. It’s funny how long things can go on being one way, and then just change, all at once. Our last mission together was like a strange black box we had both gone into, and come out different people. And now, as we drove out, the forest looked the same way to me. It became a mysterious machine in which you put your old self and then it spat out some completely new version of you.

Yes, I would seduce her again. Whatever it took. I would tell her that I had never felt this way about anyone before. I would tell her that she was beautiful. And I would tell her that she was unlike any other woman I’d ever met. Except this time, it would all be 100% true.