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my T-shirts while looking up at me with the most enchanting smile.
    Noelle had finished off her sandwich and wiped her face. She looked up at me with big eyes. “Those are for me?” she asked, pointing at the bag Sara had dropped off.
    “ Yeah. Rachel thought maybe it would be better than my clothes since they’re falling off you.”
    “ That was really sweet of your friend to bring them over.” Noelle swallowed the last of her milk and took the empty glass and her plate to the kitchen, loading them into the dishwasher.
    She turned around, and I had to force myself to keep my eyes on her face and not on the way her breasts made themselves known or how her long legs stretched out from underneath the hem of my T-shirt.
    She shrugged and crossed her arms, pushing her breasts up a little higher. “I don’t understand why you’re doing all of this. I mean, I know your wife died and you didn’t want to let anything like that happen to me, but this is so much more than was necessary. You could have taken me to the shelter. Most people would have done that. Or they would have just left me and let me figure it out on my own.”
    I couldn’t have done that any more than I could stop my heart from beating, but I didn’t understand it, either. I shook my head. “I guess I’m not like most people. But neither are you.”
    She didn’t let anything get to her, other than maybe trying to figure out why I felt the need to help her. Even when the world was falling apart around her, she could smile and laugh and put other people and their problems first, before her own disasters.
    I wanted to be more like her. I wanted to understand how she had come to be like this. But I had no business wanting her. None at all. She ought to be with a man so much better than me.
    “ No, I suppose I’m not,” she finally said with a shrug. “I still don’t understand, though.”
    “ I wish I could explain it.” I also wished she still had that grape jelly on her lips because there was nothing between us now, no table or anything else, to stop me from moving over to her and kissing it away. I hated that I kept thinking about kissing her. It made me feel like I was forgetting all about Liv, like I was pushing her aside and trying to replace her with some young and perfect girl I could never deserve.
    I had to stop thinking like that. All of it—kissing, beating myself up. It wasn’t doing me any good. “Babs and I have to go to practice in the morning,” I said after a minute. “We should be finished by lunchtime. I want you to stay here and wait for me, and then I can take you to buy more clothes.”
    “ I don’t have enough money to buy more clothes right now. I’ll make do with what your friend brought until I can get a job. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to pay you back for everything—”
    “ I don’t want you to pay me back,” I interrupted her. “And I never said anything about you paying for clothes. I want to buy them for you.” I wanted to do a hell of a lot more for her than just buy her some new clothes, but I had to start somewhere. “Will you let me?”
    Noelle stood there staring at me, blinking a few times, for so long it was unnerving. “I hope Liv really understood what a good man you are.”
    I didn’t feel like a good man. I felt like an asshole who’d been so focused on myself and what I wanted that I hadn’t been able to see what my wife needed. I’d taken her away from her family and her home, and she’d died alone on the side of the highway.
    I had to laugh and look away because the kindness in Noelle’s gaze was threatening to crush me beneath its weight.
    “ You are,” she said. In an instant, she’d closed the distance between us and put her palm against my cheek, turning me so I had to face her. “Maybe you can’t see it right now, but I can. I want to help you see it, too.”
    Without warning, she stretched up on the tips of her toes and kissed my chin. My breath caught in my