“Huh. Well, when you lay it all out like that...yeah. You fucked up.”

I shove Cohen into the elevator. It’s early; I was barely awake when I got Tim’s call for Cohen and me to meet him at the Acre. This is the absolute last place I want to be right now, on my way to talk to the last person I feel like facing, but I thought it might be okay, having my brother with me.

I thought.

“Look,” he says seriously, “I got to know Mara pretty well when Juliet still lived with her, and I don’t think she’s half as tough as she likes to pretend.”

“No, she is.” My smile catches me off-guard. “It’s more like, she’s not as tough as she lets people assume. She’ll tell you about herself and answer questions if you ask, you know?”

Cohen looks at me carefully. “Actually, no.”

“Oh.” I try to check my surprise. “Well—”

“And you know me, I ask questions all the time. She was a closed book.”

I wave this off. “You were the roommate’s boyfriend. I mean, of course she wouldn’t tell you her life story or whatever.”

“She didn’t even tell Juliet the deal with the scar for, like, a year,” he stresses. “And that was just a highlight reel. From what you mentioned, it sounds like she gave you the full director’s cut.”

“Maybe,” I say, after a minute. I didn’t tell Cohen much beyond the fact Mara isn’t close to her dad, and about the run-in at the festival. For one thing, I’d assumed she’d told him and Juliet everything and more already, and for another, it wasn’t my story to tell.

She only told me. The thought would make me smile, if I could make any sense of it.

“So.” Cohen leans back against the doors, performing a flawless pivot when they open to the second floor of the Acre. “What do you think Tim’s got in store for us?”

“No idea. Probably signing over the train station so Jeannie can’t get it in the divorce.”

Cohen halts in the middle of the hallway. “Who said they’re getting a divorce?”

“Come on, man.” I turn in front of him and put my hands into the pockets of my sports jacket. “You don’t really think they’re staying together after this, do you?”

“I don’t know,” he confesses. “I wouldn’t jump to ‘divorce’ right out of the gate, though. They have problems, yeah, but—”

“Some problems can’t be fixed.” I start walking again. “They’ve been living a lie for years, now. She cheated, he cheated. It’s all fake.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Cohen grabs my elbow, but I keep going. He doubles his pace. “So now having problems means it’s all fake?” He searches my face, like he’s looking for the seam to pull off my mask and see who I really am. “Cheating isn’t okay, ever—I’m totally with you on that. But that doesn’t mean Tim and Jeannie don’t love each other, or that the entire marriage was a lie. That’s pretty cynical.”

“Do you think Lindsay loved me?”

“Yes.” Cohen’s certainty when he answers makes me stagger, but he keeps talking. “Not anywhere near the way she should have, but yeah—I think she loved you, even after she stopped being in love with you.”

“Semantics.” We reach the office. I lift my hand to knock, but he stops me.

“I’m not saying you should still be with her. I’m saying...if you still care about the other person, even a little, and they care about you, then trying to fix things is usually a good idea. But both people have to want to try, or else it doesn’t work. And...I guess that’s where things fell apart, with you and her. She didn’t really want to try.”

I nod bitterly. She’d given up on me long before I gave up on her.

“Jeannie and Tim aren’t going to work things out, though,” I counter, “whether they want to or not. Trust me. You can’t move past something like this.” Even though the door to Tim’s office is virtually soundproof, I keep my voice low. “If they stay together, it’ll be because it’s easier than leaving. Maybe it wasn’t fake before—but it will be, now.”

“So it ends,” he says, “or it’s fake. Those are the only options?”

“Basically. That’s how they all end.”

“Relationships with cheating?” he asks. He tilts his head into my vision when I shift my eyes past him, instead of looking him in the eye. He knows me too well. “Or all relationships?”

The hall suddenly feels like a sauna. I wish I’d left my jacket in the truck.

“All,” I answer. Then I shrug, the way Mara would, as if to say: you might not like it, but that’s how it is. Deal with it.

“Wow.” His jaw sets. “So me and Juliet, or Mom and Patch—you think everyone’s just faking it, waiting till they die or can’t stand pretending anymore, whichever comes first. Is that it?”

I think back to the night Mara told me her beliefs on relationships. Then I think of our night at Maison. When, out of nowhere, I believed it too.

At the time, it felt like a relief: I didn’t have to feel sad or shocked about Tim, about losing everything I’d modeled my life after. I didn’t have to feel anything.

Now, with Cohen staring at me, the flash of his wedding band under the sconces catching my eye, I do feel something: emptiness. It’s like the vacant space in the middle of a room, the whole thing feeling not quite right. And you can’t figure out what, until someone else points it out.

“Do you remember,” he says, quieter now, as he turns and leans against the wall, “when Al got sick?”

Slowly, like a kid getting chastised, I nod. Alvin and Trixie were like grandparents to us; they helped our mom out countless times during our days at the nudist farm. While I chose Tim as my role model for manhood, Cohen chose Al. We both learned from each of them, though—so I lean on the wall on the other side of the door and stare straight ahead, readying myself for Cohen’s story.

“He could barely talk,” he says softly, but stoically. In addition to picking his battles, Cohen’s a master at emotional control. Another trait of his I envy, even if I plan on taking that fact to my grave. “He didn’t remember who Trixie was, by the end of it.

“But she didn’t even cry about it. She just...accepted it for what it was. I heard her tell Mom, ‘If he—’”

“‘—if he doesn’t remember me,’” I finish, “‘then I’ll just go reintroduce myself. Make him fall for me all over again.’” Through the sting in my sinuses, I smile. Trixie showed up at the hospital that afternoon with a stack of photo albums as big as she was, piled on her scrapbooking supply cart, the wheels squealing their way down the corridors of the ICU. She spent hours showing Al pictures of the two of them in their younger days. She read him the poetry he’d written her during his Navy hitches. One by one, she put the pressed flower petals from the bouquets he’d sent into his palm.

Slowly, Al forgot everyone else. But he remembered Trixie, as the days passed. And he never forgot her again.

“I think about that every time Juliet and I get in some stupid fight,” Cohen says. “That if Trixie and Al could still make it work when he had so little time left, and didn’t even remember her...then Juliet and me?” He smiles, a little sad and sideways. “We can make it through anything.”

“See, but that’s—”

“I know.” He holds up his hand. “Cheating isn’t in the vows the way ‘in sickness and health’ is. It violates the entire idea of marriage, so I get it when people can’t or don’t want to make things work after something like that.”

“Then I’m sorry,” I say, pushing off from the wall, “but I don’t see your point.”

“My point,” he says, “is there’s no way Al and Trix were pretending.” Cohen stares at me so hard, I have to look away again. “If that was fake, then nothing in this world is real.”

My protests catch on my tongue. I’m silent.

“And as for the other option,” he continues, “all relationships either being fake, or ending? They lasted right through ‘till death do us part.’ Hell, they lasted even longer than that—Trixie didn’t suddenly stop loving him, when he was gone.”

He gets quiet again, but only for a moment. “That’s the kind of love that makes you believe...you know, there’s got to be an afterlife. Because there’s just no way something like that wouldn’t last forever.”

Cohen ends his story with a firm knock on the office door, an excellent strategy: I’ve got no time to argue with him before the buzzer sounds and we’re clicked inside. He’s also great at getting the last word. It never fails to annoy the shit out of me.

Only this time, I’m not sure I’d have anything to say, even if I had the chance.