When I crawled into my bed, my mind wouldn’t shut the hell off. My body had aged a solid ten years from being on my feet in heels all night, but the energy I felt just from being around everyone had lit me up from the inside out, at war with the fatigue in my muscles.

And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the kisses Ames had given me in the closet were part of it, too. I curled my arms around my middle as I lay awake in my big bed, thinking of how my whole body had hummed alive as he’d dropped kiss after kiss across my skin.

A light out of the corner of my eye pulled my attention away from the ceiling. My phone was lit up on the desk across the room. I turned my head to the alarm clock, reading two-forty-five in the morning.

Confused, I climbed out of bed, wondering if Jude was texting me. But I saw Ames face lit up on my screen and quickly swiped to unlock it.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I typed out my reply.

I bit my lip as I waited for his reply.

I couldn’t move across the room fast enough. The street was dark at this hour, but there was one street lamp still lit across the street, where a shadow stepped out of the darkness and smiled up at me.

Holy. Shit. My whole chest ached, and I was sure the smile that crossed my lips was wide enough to crack my face in half. I waved, and then realized I was wearing only an oversized tee. I wasn’t sure how much Ames could see, since I was on the second floor and it was dark out, but he must have realized the moment I did, because his smile grew wider and my phone buzzed in my hand.

I refused to be embarrassed, but color stained my cheeks anyway.

He looked at his phone and then back up at me as his reply came through.

I found myself stupidly charmed by that, and gripped my phone in my hand when his next reply came through.

I tried to open the window, but it was completely sealed shut.

Instead of replying, he looked up at me and nodded. I ran my hand through my hair, thinking,

And apply a little makeup, I added to myself.

Shit. I put the phone down and grabbed the closest pair of jeans, shoving my legs through them as my mind raced. I wasn’t wearing a bra, but he’d said to wear a jacket. I had to choose between the bra and running a brush through my hair, and I chose the latter, hoping my jacket would make the lack of a bra not too obvious.

It turned out that I didn’t have enough time to slick any makeup on. By the time I checked my phone, it’d been two minutes, so I grabbed it and slipped my feet into my sandals before running out into the hallway.

There was something undeniably exciting about sneaking out in the middle of the night, not letting my parents—who were in the next room—know I was even leaving. I ran as softly as I could down the hall to the bank of elevators and hurriedly pressed the button to go down.

Almost instantly, the doors slid open and Ames stood there, a smile on his face as he pulled me in with him. When the doors closed, he picked me up and pressed me against the elevator wall, kissing me.

My heart was beating a million beats a minute, from the rush of running out of my room and running right into his arms. I was out of breath when he pulled away.

“I think modern day Romeo would’ve taken the lift.” His lips quirked up and my chest ached again.

“I think you’re right.”

“Also, hi.”

“Hi.” I could barely contain the laugh in my throat. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.” He stepped back and looked me over. “Nice outfit.”

“Yeah, well you didn’t give me a lot of time to prepare.”

He played with the hem of my jacket. “All you needed were trousers.”

“That’s debatable.”

The elevator doors opened and Ames took my hand, leading me out and onto the sidewalk. “Great hotel choice, by the way. This makes it easier for me to take you to the place I want to take you.”

I had to speed up my steps to catch up with his long stride. “Is this a date?” I teased him, squeezing his hand tighter when we crossed a street.

He stopped for a second and looked down at me. “I still owe you one of those, don’t I?”

I shrugged. “Well, no. You don’t owe it to me.”

“I’ll take you on a date before…” He looked away for a moment. “I’ll take you on a date.”

I swallowed the sadness that always arose when we talked about my leaving. “I’m going to hold you to it.”

We walked for a couple more minutes before I realized where we were going. Up ahead was Westminster Bridge, much less crowded than it’d been the night we’d met. On the other side of the river, the Elizabeth Tower stood proudly in the dark, its minute hand on the fifty-three.

“I remember you saying you came here to see it.” He pulled me closer and switched to hold my hand with his other so he could wrap his arm around my shoulders. “But the bell was ringing when you fell over.”

I pressed against him. “I didn’t really fall, I was sort of pushed.”

His smile was teasing. “Same outcome, right?”

“You remember the bell chiming when I went over?”

We began walking across the bridge and stopped feet from the spot we’d first met. “I remember everything from that moment.” He unwrapped his arm to pull me back against his chest and wrapped his arms in front of me, holding me securely to him. “This time, you’re with a local, so you’re less likely to fall off the bridge.”

I dropped my head back against his chest and laughed. “So gentlemanly of you.”

The bridge was so much darker than it’d been the night we’d met. Cars passed us, and few people were actually crossing it by foot.

I rubbed the hands that were tightly wrapped around me, my finger brushing over his wedding ring. Part of me expected to feel bothered by the fact that he still wore it, but a much larger part of me understood it. So I ran my finger over the design carved into it—some chevron-style pattern.

Ames pulled his hand from me and I momentarily felt bad for touching it, but then he put his hand in front of my face. “Go on, take it off.”

I turned my head to look at him questioningly. “Take it off?”

He nodded. “It has a story.”

“A story? It’s a wedding ring.”

“Not really.”

Confused, I stared at it before I began to cautiously twist it until it was loose enough to slide off his hand. It was heavier than I expected, much heavier than any ring I’d ever worn. Heavier than I thought most men’s wedding rings were. My nail traced over the pattern.

“It’s an ‘M’ repeated.”

“It’s heavy.” I held it in my palm and lifted my hand up and down to mimic a scale.

“It is. Twenty-one grams, in fact.”

It seemed odd that he’d know its exact weight. “Is that significant?”

“It is.” He took the ring from me and held it up between us. “Over a hundred years ago, there was this physician named Duncan MacDougall. He made it his mission to see if he could determine the weight of a soul.”

“How can you weigh a soul?”

“By measuring the mass lost at the moment when a person dies.”

“That doesn’t sound like it’d be easy to do.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t suppose it was. But he was determined. He had six patients who were in the process of dying from tuberculosis, so it was easy to tell when death was knocking at the door. When they were in the final stages, he placed their bed on a giant industrial scale and measured the weights of his subjects at the moment of their deaths.”

“And?”

“Well, when his first patient passed, the scale dropped twenty-one grams. His other patients lost varying degrees of weight, but he stuck with the theory that when the soul departed the body at the moment of death, it weighed twenty-one grams.”

“And your ring weighs twenty-one grams.”

“When Mahlon died, I had our rings fused together. There was a little bit of metal left from her ring once it’d hit twenty-one grams, so I had it made into a charm for Lotte.”

“So, you believe the weight of a soul is twenty-one grams?”

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “Not necessarily. But it’s a notion that fascinated Mahlon. She wrote a paper on MacDougall’s studies, defended him and questioned his practices—even going so far as to explain the twenty-one-gram loss. She found it romantic, the belief in the weight of life. And when she died, I wanted to honor her presence, her life, in some way.” He slid the ring back on his finger. “So now, I carry her with me.”

I couldn’t blame Mahlon for romanticizing the ethically questionable practices of the doctor and his subsequent hypothesis. The idea that life wasn’t weightless wasn’t something I’d ever considered, but it made me feel a little more whole—thinking that a soul was something that could be measured.

I leaned against Ames and his arms wrapped around me again. “I’m sorry,” I told him.

“Don’t be sorry.” His lips pressed into my hair. “I was lucky. I am lucky.”

The melody from the bell began, silencing anything else we would’ve said. I listened to its song and waited for its three chimes, and closed my eyes, imagining that this—whatever this was—didn’t have an expiration date. That in two weeks, I wouldn’t be going home.

My chest heaved a deep sigh and I relaxed more fully into him.

When the bell had rung its last chime, I turned to face Ames. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

“Better experience this time? Standing on the bridge rather than hanging over it?”

I playfully punched his chest. “Slightly better—despite the company.”

“Yes,” he put his hands in his pockets. “The company is a disappointment. Good on you for enduring it anyway.”

Laughing, I pressed my face against his chest and his arms came around me again. “I’m used to it.” I thought of my family. “Of disappointing company. So, on the scale of disappointing company, yours hardly measures.”

“Lucky me.” He rubbed my back, warming me against the chill in the air. “I’m guessing your parents are the base for this scale.”

“You’re right.” My hands made circles over his back and I settled more and more against him, feeling comforted for the first time in a long, long time. There was something so supremely serene about just touching another human, feeling their heart beat against yours, the rise and fall of their chests in time with your breaths. “Sorry my mom wasn’t on her best behavior. I’d blame it on the long flight, but she’s just always like that.”

“It’s okay. You haven’t met my parents—and I hate to compete against you, but let’s just say I’d totally win the sourest parent award.”

“You sound so confident.”

“I haven’t spoken to my mum in five years. She lives in the south of France with whichever old guy she’s suckered into taking care of her.”

“You don’t get along?”

“We don’t have anything in common—so we’re hardly in the same place long enough to not get along.”

“And your dad?”

“Passed away when I was young.”

“Now I really feel awful. At least I have parents who travel halfway around the world to see me.”

He squeezed me tightly and then pulled back, holding his hand out to take mine. “Is that why they came?”

He was astute, I had to give him that. “Actually, they came because Jude was coming.”

“Right. And have they gone out of their way to spend any meaningful time with you.”

“It’s only been one day,” I reminded him, but I knew he was right. They already had plans to do some sightseeing tomorrow—had even purchased tickets—and I hadn’t been invited. “My relationship with them is complicated.”

“All relationships are. I think that ‘complicated’ is in the very definition of relationship. But tell me what’s different about yours.”

“The walk isn’t long enough to get into it,” I joked.

“I’m good with bullet points.”

Sighing, I said, “Okay. Well, I was the healthy child—meaning I didn’t ‘need’ them like Jude did. And before you say anything—I do not begrudge him for his heart condition. I don’t blame him for taking up our parents’ attention. They had a choice in how they raised us and they chose to put Jude on a pedestal to measure my faults against. I was too risky, too selfish, too … too much of everything that didn’t suit them. And the fact that I could never narrow my focus on any particular thing: a career, a hobby, a goal, a place to live … well, that was horror personified. They wanted me to be really good at just one thing—the way Jude is really good at so many things—and I think I subconsciously defied them by taking on so many things and being relatively mediocre at them all.” Realizing I was just verbally vomiting my feelings, I gave him an embarrassed smile. “I don’t think that was bullet points.”

“I followed it just fine.” He didn’t make me feel bad for spewing my thoughts, and he didn’t try to reassure me with absolutes that I didn’t need. “But I disagree with you.”

“Why?”

“I could use many words to describe you, but mediocre wouldn’t make the list.”

I shrugged, secretly interested in what words he would use, but too embarrassed to ask. “I don’t think I’m mediocre.”

“Well, now you’re just lying.”

I looked up at him, but it was harder to see his face with it in the shadows now that we were far from the bridge. “I’m not lying.”

“The night you came to Free Refills, when you were already drunk? Maybe you don’t remember the things you said, but I do.”

I groaned. “I’m scared to think about the things I said.”

“One of the more interesting things was what you said about Jennie. You complimented her talent with pouring drinks. And then you flipped the compliment and compared yourself to it. If I remember correctly, you said, ‘I’m not good at anything.’”

“How embarrassing.” I cringed and wished I could erase that night from his memory like it’d been erased from mine. “But she is—she flips bottles and cups and manages to hold a conversation as she’s pouring without even looking. And she never spills.”

“Don’t tell her this, you’ll inflate her ego to a size where it’ll be impossible to work with her. But you’re plenty good at a lot of things, Mila. Like accents.”

I huffed. “Fat lot of good that’s doing me. I haven’t had a voice gig in a while.”

“You’re good at being a people-person.”

I pulled away to look at him. “Are you being serious?”

“Completely. Look—what you did tonight at the Free Refills? That’s not easy. People liked you and more than that, they wanted to keep talking to you. I don’t have that. Jennie doesn’t even have that. I think she scares people, to be honest, which is half the reason I keep her employed. But you—people look forward to talking to you. That’s not something that can be learned.”

“Anything can be learned.” I kicked a pebble out of my path.

“And dancing—you’re a good dancer.”

I laughed and shoved at him. “You’ve never even seen me dance. You’re listing these things on my verbal resume without really knowing them.”

“Lotte says you’re good.”

That gave me pause. “Lotte is really good. Great, actually.” It surprised me that she’d call me good at dancing, given her level of skill and my very rudimentary knowledge of dance. “And okay, I don’t mean to sound all doom and gloom—but I’m just illustrating one of my many conflicts with my parents.”

“And I’m just explaining why they’re wrong.”

When we reached the hotel, I kept pulling on his hand, leading him to the elevator and up in it, and didn’t let go until I reached my hotel room door.

Part of me expected him to grab for me the second we were inside the door, but he didn’t. He walked around the room, taking in the various things I had laid about for work. He picked up a piece of paper and chuckled.

“What?” I peered over his shoulder. He was holding the paper I’d written on during my first phone call with Jude about Free Refills.

“‘Free Refills in Camden. Good Sangria.’” He raised an eyebrow. “Best damn TripAdvisor review I’ve ever read.”

I took the paper from his hand and swatted him gently with it. “Shut up,” I said on a laugh. “I wrote that down so I wouldn’t forget the name and place.”

“Because you wanted to go back?”

I nodded, and looped my arm around his as he looked at the rest of my notes. It was oddly intimate, but not uncomfortable, to have him looking over my notes, reading things I’d written. “You’ve been busy the last few days.”

I’d hit up a bunch of tourist spots and off-the-beaten path places on the days Ames and I didn’t spend together. “I’ve slacked off a bit recently.” I squeezed his arm. “Been distracted.”

“Hm.” He kissed the top of my head and turned to the bed. “Tired?”

As much as the cold air had roused me, being back in my warm hotel room, my muscles tired and my mind at rest, I knew I could fall asleep in a heartbeat if I laid down. I looked longingly at my bed for a moment, before looking back at Ames. In the darkened room, with just the light of the moon coming in the window, I had the most overwhelming desire just to hold him.

So I did.

In the second before I was in his arms, he opened his—expecting me. When his arms wrapped around me, I sank even more into that cozy feeling. He rocked us back and forth. “Lie down. You’re tired.”

I gripped onto his forearms. “Lie with me?”

I felt his nod against my head, so I peeled back the comforter and shrugged out of my jacket. I briefly debated leaving my jeans on, but knew I’d sleep horribly with them, so I dropped them too and then climbed into the covers, curled up on my side with my back to him. After a moment, the bed dipped behind me and he scooted in and curled his arm over my stomach. Gently, he pulled me back so I was flush to his chest.

He dropped a kiss on my neck and made a sound of contentment in the back of his throat as he curled against me.

Even though he was wrapped around me, it felt like he wasn’t close enough. I took his hand on my chest and guided it under my shirt, over my stomach and breasts until it was pressed against the skin just below my neck. My heart thumped and Ames kissed my neck again and within seconds, I was asleep.