Page 159 of Hello Stranger

I shook my head, like,What does that mean?

“Most vets just wear scrubs. But when I started, nobody ever thought I was the vet. So I decided to cultivate a more professional look. I committed to the coat. And the contacts. And the hair.”

“You sure did.”

“There’s a psychological component to health care. People need to feel like you’re qualified before they’ll do what you tell them to. People need a lot more bossing around than you’d think.”

“So…” I said. “I only ever saw Dr. Addison in his lab coat, and I only ever saw Joe in his bowling jacket.”

“I wore other jackets sometimes,” Joe said.

But I shook my head. “Almost never. It’s how I recognized you.”

“That’s why you called me Joe?” Joe asked.

“Why else would I call you Joe?”

“I thought you were kidding. I thought you were making fun of the jacket.”

“Iwasmaking fun of the jacket. But I also thought you were a guy named Joe. Who really, really liked bowling. Enough to buy a reproduction vintage bowling jacket and have his name embroidered on it.”

“Okay,” Joe said, like now we’d gone too far, “that’s a lot of mental leaps.”

There wasn’t much to say to that.

Joe and I took a minute to stare at each other in disbelief.

How was this happening?

“You never dumped me,” Joe said in amazement as it sank in. Then, correcting: “I mean, you did dump me. But you dumped me…for me.”

“And you never ghosted me. Or—youdid,but only after I had broken up with you… without realizing it was you.”

Joe nodded. “It’s like an M.C. Escher drawing.”

I nodded, too. “It’s like a Rubik’s Cube.” Then after a pause, I added, “You must have thought I was nuts to keep calling and texting you like that.”

“I really, really wanted to respond,” Joe said, his voice more tender now. “I had to lock my phone out on the balcony.”

“I guess I should call you Oliver now,” I said, looking up into his face and trying out his name for real.

“I’ll be Joe for you, if you want.”

And then I couldn’t resist. I reached up to touch that face that had caused all this trouble, and my palm cupped his jaw. Then I ran the pads of my fingers up to touch all the pieces of it—cheekbones, nose bridge, brow—so neatly put together now, satisfying like a finished jigsaw puzzle.

He held his breath at the touch.

I could feel his stubble against my palm like sandpaper. I traced down his neck and let my hand rest on his collarbone. “So… I thought you were breaking my heart, but I was also breaking yours.”

He closed the distance between us as he nodded. “And the guy you liked… the one you dumped me for. The one I was so bitterly jealous of that I couldn’t sleep…”

“That was you.”

“That was me.”

“I liked you both a lot,” I said, “if it’s any consolation.”

“It’sallconsolation,” he said, his eyes running all over my face like he still couldn’t take everything in.

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