Kathy nodded slowly. "I've been wondering," she confessed. "Sometimes I worried that it was just because I was, like, Anders' plus-one. Most times I figured it was what we had in high school with a title. Not because I ever felt like you didn't care but..."

Her bottom lip flared with pain and she realized she'd been chewing on it a lot this conversation, enough to make it sensitive. "When I died, you were pretty anti-relationship. We laughed at the idea of going out on a date. I came back, things were hard and then we were good and then we were dating. And it's not that I didn't want that--I'm so ridiculously, stupidly happy being with you two, even with all this shit in my head--but I just missed how it happened. How you went from 'never' to 'yeah, her specifically.'"