“And after, when it was bedtime, I would sing, “We love you, Conrad, oh yes we do. We love you, Conrad, and we’ll be true” into the bathroom mirror with a mouthful of toothpaste. I would sing my eight-nine-ten-year-old heart out. But I wasn’t singing to Conrad Birdie. I was singing to my Conrad. Conrad Beck Fisher, the boy of my preteen dreams.”

“I never once cheated on you. I never even looked at another girl when we were together.”Conrad Fisher”

“Is it so impossible that Conrad Fisher would like me?”

“Taylor wanted me to forget about Conrad, to just erase him from my mind and memory. She kept saying things like, “everybody has to get over a first love, it’s a rite of passage.” But Conrad wasn’t just my first love. He wasn’t some rite of passage. He was so much more than that. He and Jeremiah and Susannah were my family. In my memory, the three of them would always be entwined, forever linked. There couldn’t be one without the others. If I forgot Conrad, if I evicted him from my heart, pretended like he was never there, it would be like doing those tings to Susannah. And that, I couldn’t do.”

“We are married. We are infinite. Me and Conrad. The first boy I ever slow danced with, ever cried over. Ever loved”

“It’s a known fact that in life, you can’t have everything. In my heart I knew I loved them both, as much as possible to love two people at the same time. Conrad and I were linked, we would always be linked. That wasn’t something I could do away with. I knew that now—that love wasn’t something you could erase, no matter how hard you tried.”