I Joked That My Neighbor Should Kiss Me For Luck… But She Smirked And Asked, “How Much Luck Do You Need?”—And Suddenly, The Harmless Joke Between Us Turned Into A Moment Neither Of Us Could Take Back

Part 2

“My ex-wife walked into my garage wearing heels, perfume, and the expression of a woman who had come to collect a debt I did not owe.”

The Mustang was up on jack stands that afternoon.

Margo sat in her usual chair by the workbench, legs crossed, iPad balanced on her knee. She was sketching the curve of the Mustang’s front fender while I adjusted the timing.

We had not talked about the kiss.

That sounds strange, but it was how we were.

Margo still brought coffee.

I still left the chair unfolded.

The gate between our yards stayed open more often than closed.

Some things do not need a name right away.

Then Delaney appeared in my driveway like a bad check.

Her black SUV was parked behind my truck.

Her heels clicked across the concrete.

Her sunglasses were too large. Her blouse was too white for a garage. Her smile had the same sharp edge I remembered from every argument she had ever tried to win.

“Oh,” she said, looking from Margo to me. “You replaced me with the girl next door. That’s almost adorable.”

Margo looked up.

She did not snap back.

She did not defend herself.

She simply closed her iPad, stood, and said, “I’ll give you privacy.”

Delaney watched her walk out.

Then she sat down in Margo’s chair.

That bothered me more than anything she said.

It felt like theft.

“What do you want?” I asked.

Delaney crossed one leg over the other.

“I heard the Mustang is selling.”

I wiped my hands on a rag.

“You heard wrong.”

“Garrett.”

She said my name the way a bank says overdue.

“I know about the Atlanta collector. I know the number is around one hundred and forty thousand. Maybe more if he’s desperate enough.”

I said nothing.

She smiled wider.

“I want my share.”

For a second, I thought I had misheard her.

“Your share of what?”

“The car.”

“You mean the car I bought eleven months after our divorce was final?”

Her smile tightened.

“The restoration started during our marriage.”

“No. It didn’t.”

“My lawyer disagrees.”

Of course she had a lawyer.

Delaney always came with paper when she could not come with truth.

She opened her purse and pulled out an envelope. Inside was a letter on firm letterhead claiming she was entitled to a portion of the Mustang’s sale because marital funds, marital labor, and marital sacrifice had allegedly contributed to the project.

Marital sacrifice.

That was the phrase.

I almost laughed.

The only thing Delaney had sacrificed during our marriage was patience when she had to park near my garage.

“I bought that car after you left,” I said. “Every receipt has a date.”

“Then you won’t mind proving it.”

She leaned forward.

Her perfume cut through motor oil and gasoline like a chemical spill.

“You always think being quiet makes you right. It doesn’t. It just makes you easy to corner.”

There she was.

The woman I had divorced.

Not the polished version she showed the church ladies, the bank manager, and her brunch friends at the hotel downtown.

The real Delaney.

Cold.

Greedy.

Certain everyone else existed to fund the life she wanted.

“You’re not getting a dime,” I said.

She tapped one red nail against the arm of Margo’s chair.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

“I didn’t come here only for money.”

That was when my stomach changed.

Not dropped.

Changed.

Like an engine hearing the wrong sound before it throws a rod.

Delaney pulled out her phone and turned the screen toward me.

It was an old Instagram photo from Margo’s account.

A classic car parts shop.

The one I used in Garden City.

I knew the hand-painted sign in the window. I knew the shelves of gaskets and air filters. I knew the little wire rack beside the counter where they sold cheap keychains.

In the background of the photo, blurred but visible, stood a man at the counter.

Back turned.

Cap low.

Spark plugs in hand.

Me.

The caption read:

Found something worth the drive.

Delaney’s voice went soft.

That was always when she got cruel.

“She knew you before she moved in.”

I stared at the photo.

“She took a car maintenance class there,” Delaney said. “A full year before she rented that cute little house next door. She followed your shop account. She watched you. Then she moved beside you and pretended her faucet leaked.”

The words struck fast.

The tin star on Margo’s key ring.

The way she knew the Mustang’s year.

The black coffee she never asked about.

The wrenches arranged exactly how I liked them.

Her drawings.

Her quiet.

Her kindness.

Every small thing I had treasured suddenly looked like evidence on a courtroom table.

Delaney tilted her head.

“You thought she was sweet. She was studying you.”

I said nothing.

Because the worst part was, I did not know what was true.

“You’re her project, Garrett,” Delaney said. “Just like these dead cars. She found a lonely man and decided to restore him.”

Then she stood, smoothed her skirt, and dropped one more sentence on the concrete.

“And when she gets bored, she’ll sell you for parts.”

She walked out.

Her heels clicked down the driveway.

Her SUV door slammed.

The garage went quiet.

Not peaceful quiet.

Dead quiet.

The kind that comes after a gunshot in a movie when everyone is waiting to see who falls.

I did not go next door that night.

Or the next.

Margo did not come over.

The folding chair stayed empty.

Her coffee stopped appearing on my workbench.

At 6 p.m., when I normally heard her back door open, there was nothing.

At 8 p.m., her kitchen light went dark.

At 10 p.m., I stood in my garage staring at the drawings on the pegboard like they might confess.

Had she watched me before I knew her?

Yes.

Had she moved next door because of me?

Maybe.

Had every kind thing been a plan?

That was the question that kept me awake.

I knew manipulation.

I had been married to it.

Delaney never gave anything without a hook hidden inside it.

A compliment became a demand.

Dinner became leverage.

A smile became a receipt.

But Margo had never asked for anything.

Not money.

Not attention.

Not promises.

She had simply shown up.

And somehow that made the doubt hurt worse.

On the fourth day, my phone rang.

It was my lawyer, Paul Brenner, a dry man in his sixties who kept peppermints in his desk and had handled my divorce with the emotional warmth of a tax audit.

“I received a filing threat from Delaney’s attorney,” he said.

“She serious?”

“She is loud. That is not always the same thing.”

I almost smiled.

Then Paul continued.

“She is also claiming you hid marital assets.”

I sat up.

“What assets?”

“The Mustang. Tools. Parts inventory. Possibly cash from off-book work.”

“That’s garbage.”

“I know. But garbage still smells until you haul it out.”

He told me to gather receipts, bank statements, title documents, auction records, insurance papers, and any communication proving the car was purchased after the divorce.

I spent the next six hours digging through file cabinets, old email confirmations, bank folders, and shoeboxes full of parts receipts.

Every date was on my side.

Every dollar was mine.

Still, I felt sick.

Not because of the lawsuit.

Because every folder I opened reminded me of Margo.

She had helped me organize the parts invoices three weeks earlier while we sat on my garage floor eating takeout from a diner on Abercorn.

She had sorted receipts by month without being asked.

She had laughed when I called the stack “divorce-proofing without a divorce.”

Now Delaney was turning even that memory into poison.

That night, I finally checked the security camera in my garage.

I had installed it two years earlier after someone stole a customer’s carburetor off the bench. Most days I forgot it existed.

The camera pointed from the back wall toward the workbench and garage door.

I scrolled back to Delaney’s visit.

There she was.

Walking in.

Sitting in Margo’s chair.

Waving the lawyer letter.

Showing me the photo.

I almost turned it off.

Then I heard her voice on the recording.

Clear as church bells on Sunday morning.

“I don’t care when you bought the damn car, Garrett. A man like you won’t spend ten grand fighting over paperwork. You’ll pay me to go away.”

I froze.

She had said that while I was turning toward the Mustang, looking at the engine bay.

I had barely registered it in the moment.

The camera had not missed it.

Then came the next line.

“I know enough people at the bank to make this ugly if I want to.”

I replayed it three times.

Delaney worked in client relations at a regional bank downtown.

Not a teller.

Not a manager.

But close enough to people’s private business to sound dangerous when she wanted to.

I sent the file to Paul.

He called back fifteen minutes later.

His voice had changed.

“Do not delete this.”

“I won’t.”

“And Garrett?”

“Yeah?”

“If she contacts you again, do not speak to her without me.”

I hung up and sat alone in the garage.

The chair beside the workbench was still empty.

Margo’s drawings looked down from the pegboard.

Delaney had given me one truth by accident.

She had not come to get justice.

She had come to take whatever peace I had left.

And she had picked the wrong garage to do it in.

The next morning, I opened the side door before sunrise.

Margo’s chair was unfolded.

On the seat sat a manila envelope.

My house key was inside.

So was a drawing.

Not the Mustang.

Not a carburetor.

The drawing was of the parts shop in Garden City.

Through the front window, a man stood at the counter with his back turned, spark plugs in his hand.

Me.

At the bottom, in Margo’s careful handwriting, were nine words.

This is where it started. I’m sorry I waited.

I stood there holding the truth in my hands.

And for the first time in five days, I knew exactly where I had to go.

Part 3

“Five mornings after Delaney tried to poison my life, Margo returned my house key like she was handing me the right to leave her.”

I walked across the wet grass between our houses with the envelope in one hand and the key in the other.

The gate was open.

Neither of us had closed it all week.

That detail almost broke me.

Her porch light was still on, even though the sun was coming up. A small American flag hung from the bracket near her front steps, damp from the night air. Her flowerpots needed watering. Her welcome mat was crooked.

Ordinary things.

That is what hurts the most when your life is coming apart.

The world keeps leaving coffee cups in sinks and newspapers in driveways like nothing has happened.

I knocked once.

Margo opened the door so fast I knew she had been waiting on the other side.

She looked tired.

Not dramatic.

Not fragile.

Just worn down in that honest way people look when they have slept badly and decided to face the consequences anyway.

Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She wore jeans, a white sweater, and no makeup. Her eyes moved from my face to the envelope in my hand.

“I can explain,” she said.

“I know.”

That stopped her.

I stepped inside.

Her house smelled like coffee, pencil shavings, and the cinnamon candle she always forgot to blow out until it tunneled down the middle.

We sat at her kitchen table.

Not the couch.

Not the porch.

The kitchen table, where serious things happen in American houses.

Bills get opened there.

Custody papers get signed there.

Doctors’ calls get taken there.

Families break.

Families repair.

I placed the key and the drawing between us.

Margo looked at the key first.

“That was yours,” she said.

“I gave it to you.”

“You trusted me with it.”

“I still did.”

She swallowed.

Then she told me everything.

A year and a half before she moved next door, she had gone to Garden City Auto Supply to buy a birthday present for her father.

Her father, Ray Hale, had been a school bus mechanic for thirty-two years in a small town outside Macon. He loved classic cars but never owned one that ran right. There was always a medical bill, a mortgage payment, a graduation gift for Margo, a church roof fundraiser, something more urgent than his dream.

“He wanted a Mustang,” she said. “Not a perfect one. Just one he could fix with his hands.”

She looked down at her coffee.

“He died before he got the chance.”

Hospital pneumonia after knee surgery.

One infection.

Three days.

Gone.

She said it flat, but I could hear the weight under it.

After the funeral, she had driven to Savannah because she could not sit in her apartment in Atlanta surrounded by sympathy casseroles and silence.

She walked into the parts shop because it smelled like her father’s garage.

Oil.

Dust.

Old rubber.

Metal.

A smell people either hate or understand.

I had been at the counter talking to the owner about rebuilding a carburetor. I did not remember the day. To me, it was just another errand.

To her, it was something else.

“You were explaining it like it mattered,” she said. “Not showing off. Not trying to sound smart. Just patient. Careful. Like broken things deserved respect.”

I did not speak.

She continued.

“I stood behind a shelf pretending to look at fuel filters for fifteen minutes. I kept waiting for you to say something arrogant or rude or impatient. You didn’t.”

She gave a tired little laugh.

“That sounds insane when I say it out loud.”

“Keep going.”

“When I left, I bought the tin star keychain by the register. It was hanging right beside where you had been standing. I don’t know why. I just wanted proof that the moment happened.”

She turned her keys over in her hand.

There it was.

The dull little star I had noticed a hundred times.

“I followed the shop account later,” she said. “Then your garage account showed up because you tagged them. I saw the cars. The work. The porch. The life.”

“The life?”

She looked at me then.

“Yes, Garrett. The life.”

Her voice sharpened, not at me, but at the shame she heard in my question.

“You think your life is small because Delaney told you it was. It isn’t. It’s honest. It’s yours. That mattered to me.”

I looked away.

Because sometimes praise hurts more than insult when you are not used to believing it.

She told me she had not known my address at first. Then months later, she saw the rental listing for the bungalow next door while searching for cheaper places outside Atlanta.

She recognized my garage in one of the listing photos.

The open bay.

The pegboard.

The porch light.

“And you rented it because of me,” I said.

“Yes.”

No excuse.

No performance.

Just yes.

“I should have told you before I knocked on your door,” she said. “I know that. Every day I knew that. But then your faucet really did have the same shutoff valve as mine, and my Civic really was dying, and the storm really did flood my porch. I didn’t invent problems, Garrett. I just chose to bring them to you.”

The refrigerator hummed.

A lawn mower started somewhere down the block.

Life being rude again.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

Her hands flattened on the table.

“Because when I met you, you looked like a man who had been chosen badly.”

That sentence hit harder than Delaney’s accusation.

Margo’s eyes stayed on mine.

“I didn’t want to be one more person making decisions around you before you understood them. I wanted you to know me first. The real me. The awkward neighbor. The woman who ruins pancakes. The designer who forgets laundry in the dryer. The person who knows your coffee order because she pays attention, not because she’s building a trap.”

She took a breath.

“I wanted you to choose me back without feeling cornered.”

For a long time, neither of us moved.

Then I asked the ugliest question.

“Was any of it planned?”

Her answer came fast.

“No.”

Then slower.

“Only the courage to knock.”

I believed her.

Not because I was desperate to.

Because the truth has a different sound than strategy.

Delaney explained things like she was building a legal defense.

Margo explained them like she was handing me a knife and trusting me not to use it.

I picked up the house key.

Her face changed.

I held it out.

“Keep it.”

She stared at my hand.

“Garrett.”

“Keep it,” I said again. “My plants are terrible witnesses. They need supervision.”

For the first time in five days, she smiled.

Small.

Shaken.

Real.

She reached for the key, but I did not let go right away.

“I need honesty from here,” I said.

“You’ll have it.”

“All of it.”

“All of it.”

“And Delaney?”

Margo’s smile disappeared.

“She’s not done, is she?”

“No.”

I told her about the lawyer letter.

The claim.

The bank threat.

The garage camera.

When I mentioned the recording, Margo’s eyes narrowed.

Not scared.

Focused.

“Your camera caught that?”

“Yeah.”

“Then she’s in trouble.”

“She’ll say she was angry.”

“Maybe. But if she threatened to use bank connections to make your life ugly, that’s not just angry. That’s stupid.”

That was when I saw a different Margo.

Not the quiet woman in the garage chair.

Not the neighbor with coffee.

A grown woman who had survived grief, bills, clients who did not pay on time, and the kind of life where softness only survives if it learns where to hide the steel.

She stood up.

“Do you still have every receipt?”

“Most.”

“Most isn’t enough.”

For the next four hours, Margo helped me build the cleanest paper trail any lawyer in Savannah had ever seen.

Receipts by date.

Auction record.

Title transfer.

Insurance policy.

Bank statement.

Parts invoices.

Email confirmations.

Text messages with the Atlanta collector.

Photos of the Mustang from the day I bought it, still rusted through the floorboards.

Margo scanned everything at her desk.

She labeled folders.

She made a timeline.

She even found a missing invoice in an old glove box under a stack of shop rags.

I watched her work and realized something that made my chest ache.

Delaney had looked at my garage and seen money.

Margo looked at the same garage and saw proof.

At 6 p.m., Paul Brenner called.

I put him on speaker.

“Margo found the auction receipt,” I said.

“Good,” Paul replied. “Send it.”

“She also found the bank transfer, the insurance start date, and the first restoration photo.”

A pause.

“Who is Margo?”

Margo leaned toward the phone.

“The neighbor Delaney tried to weaponize.”

Paul cleared his throat.

“I like her already.”

Then he gave us the next twist.

Delaney’s attorney had submitted a sworn statement claiming she had contributed “substantial personal funds” to the Mustang restoration before the divorce.

I almost knocked over the coffee.

“She did what?”

“She signed it,” Paul said. “Under penalty.”

Margo went still.

“Can we prove that’s false?”

Paul said, “With your records? Very likely.”

Then he added the sentence that changed everything.

“And with that recording, she may have created problems far larger than a car dispute.”

Margo looked at me across the kitchen table.

Delaney wanted a fight.

Now she was going to get one.

But not the kind she knew how to win.

Part 4

“Delaney smiled in mediation until my lawyer hit Play.”

The conference room was on the third floor of a downtown Savannah law office with cold air-conditioning, polished wood, and a view of a church steeple across the street.

Delaney sat opposite me in a cream blazer like she had dressed for a courtroom drama she expected to star in.

Her lawyer looked expensive and bored.

Paul Brenner sat beside me with a yellow legal pad, a peppermint, and the calm expression of a man about to remove a wheel without scratching the paint.

Margo sat behind me near the wall.

Quiet.

Present.

Delaney noticed her and smirked.

“Support animal?” she asked.

Margo did not answer.

I did not answer.

That annoyed Delaney more than any insult could have.

The mediator began with the usual language.

Compromise.

Costs.

Uncertainty.

Nobody gets everything.

Delaney folded her hands on the table.

“I’m not unreasonable,” she said.

That was the first lie of the morning.

“I only want what’s fair. I supported Garrett through that marriage. I dealt with the noise, the late nights, the grease, the financial instability. That Mustang represents years of sacrifice.”

Paul looked at his notes.

“The Mustang was purchased after the divorce.”

Delaney sighed.

“Paper dates don’t tell the whole story.”

“No,” Paul said. “Bank records do.”

He slid copies across the table.

Auction purchase.

Date.

Bank transfer.

Date.

Title.

Date.

Insurance.

Date.

Parts invoices.

Every single document showed the same thing.

Delaney had not owned, funded, touched, stored, insured, or helped restore that car.

Her lawyer’s boredom began to fade.

Delaney glanced at him, then back at Paul.

“I still contributed to the tools and garage that made the restoration possible.”

Paul nodded.

“We expected that argument.”

He placed another folder down.

Tool inventory from the divorce settlement.

Photos from the marital property division.

Signed acknowledgment.

Delaney’s signature sat at the bottom of the page.

She had taken the dining room set, the bedroom furniture, the expensive espresso machine, half the savings, and the SUV.

I had kept the garage equipment.

She had signed off on it.

Her lawyer shifted in his seat.

Delaney’s smile thinned.

“That doesn’t change the emotional labor I invested.”

I almost laughed.

Paul did not.

“Ms. Sloan, you submitted a sworn statement claiming you contributed substantial personal funds to the Mustang after acquisition. We have found no evidence of that.”

Her chin lifted.

“Cash.”

Paul blinked once.

“You gave him cash?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

She hesitated.

“Several thousand.”

“When?”

“During the marriage.”

“The car did not exist in his possession during the marriage.”

“Then shortly after.”

“After the divorce?”

She looked irritated.

“I don’t remember exact dates.”

Paul leaned back.

That was when I knew the wrench had turned.

“You may want to remember before this goes before a judge.”

Delaney’s lawyer put a hand slightly over his legal pad.

“Let’s keep this productive.”

Paul reached into his briefcase and removed a small speaker.

Delaney’s eyes flicked to it.

For the first time all morning, she looked uncertain.

Paul connected his phone.

Then Delaney’s own voice filled the room.

“I don’t care when you bought the damn car, Garrett. A man like you won’t spend ten grand fighting over paperwork. You’ll pay me to go away.”

Nobody moved.

The recording continued.

“I know enough people at the bank to make this ugly if I want to.”

Paul stopped the audio.

Silence.

Not peaceful.

Not empty.

The kind of silence where people calculate damage.

Delaney’s face lost color under her makeup.

Her lawyer turned to her very slowly.

“You said this was not recorded.”

“I didn’t know there was a camera.”

Margo spoke for the first time.

“That’s usually how security cameras work.”

I nearly looked back at her, but I did not want to miss Delaney’s face.

The mediator cleared his throat.

Paul continued.

“My client is prepared to file for sanctions if this proceeds. He is also prepared to notify the appropriate parties regarding the implied misuse of banking connections and the sworn statement submitted without factual support.”

Delaney’s lawyer closed his folder.

A man knows when his client has set the kitchen on fire and handed over the match.

“We need a private caucus,” he said.

They left the room.

The door closed.

I exhaled.

Margo leaned forward and touched my shoulder once.

Not dramatic.

Just steady.

Like the night the Mustang left the driveway.

Paul unwrapped a peppermint.

“She’ll drop it,” he said.

“You sure?”

“She’s arrogant, not suicidal.”

He was right.

Forty minutes later, Delaney returned without the smile.

The claim was withdrawn.

No payment.

No share.

No lien.

She agreed in writing not to contact me directly about the Mustang or any future business.

Her attorney also agreed to cover part of my legal costs to avoid a sanctions motion.

Delaney signed so hard the pen scratched the paper.

When we stepped into the hallway, she caught up to me by the elevators.

Margo stood at my side.

Delaney looked at her.

“You must be proud,” she said. “You got your sad little mechanic.”

Margo smiled.

It was the coldest smile I had ever seen on her face.

“No,” she said. “I got the man you were too shallow to recognize.”

Delaney’s mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

That was the best part.

For once, she had no line ready.

We walked out of the building into bright Georgia sunlight.

A police cruiser rolled past on the street.

Church bells rang noon.

People carried lunch bags and coffee cups and courthouse folders like the world had not just shifted under my feet.

Two weeks later, I heard through Paul that Delaney had resigned from the bank.

Officially, it was “personal reasons.”

Unofficially, someone had forwarded the mediation issue to compliance after her attorney realized silence would not protect anyone.

She did not go to jail.

This is real life, not a movie.

But she lost the one thing she cared about most.

Access.

Status.

The polished downtown image.

Her brunch friends stopped tagging her in photos.

Her new boyfriend vanished from her social media.

And the woman who once told me I lived too small had to move back into her mother’s guest room in Macon.

I did not celebrate.

I went home.

That evening, Margo and I sat on my porch with takeout from the diner on Magnolia Street. Fried chicken for me. A salad she pretended to enjoy. Sweet tea sweating in plastic cups.

The Mustang sat in the driveway, ready for the Atlanta collector.

Margo looked at it for a long time.

“Are you sad?” she asked.

“A little.”

“You made her run again.”

“That was the point.”

“But letting go still hurts.”

I looked at her.

She knew.

Of course she knew.

Three days later, the collector arrived with a flatbed trailer and a cashier’s check for $147,000.

He walked around the Mustang twice, checked the engine bay, listened to her idle, and smiled like a man standing in front of his high school memory.

The bank verified the check.

The title transferred clean.

No liens.

No Delaney.

No poison left.

When the trailer pulled away, I stood in the empty garage bay and stared at the oil stain where the Mustang had sat for fourteen months.

The space looked wrong.

Too open.

Too quiet.

Margo came in through the side door.

She did not ask if I was okay.

People ask that when they want comfort for themselves.

She simply stood beside me and waited.

Then she reached into her jacket pocket and held out a tin star keychain.

Brand new.

Polished.

Just like hers, but brighter.

“So you have a reason to start the next one,” she said.

I took it.

My fingers brushed hers.

This time, I did not miss the moment.

That evening, under the porch light my mother had taught me to leave on, I kissed Margo without a joke.

No “kiss me for luck.”

No excuse.

No fear dressed up as humor.

I kissed her because I wanted to.

Because she had chosen me carefully.

Because I had finally chosen her back.

Her hand curled into my shirt the same way it had that first afternoon by the fence.

But this time, neither of us pretended it was about luck.

Six months later, Margo still lived next door.

We did not rush into one house because other people thought love needed a moving truck to be real.

Her key stayed in my garage.

My key stayed in her wallet.

The gate between our backyards stayed open.

Not sometimes.

Always.

I started on a 1970 Camaro with faded red paint and rust freckles across the hood. Margo sat in her chair beside the workbench, drawing something she refused to show me.

Coffee sat between us.

Crickets sang through the screen door.

My tools were arranged by size.

Some nights we talked for hours.

Some nights we barely spoke.

The difference was, the silence did not feel like loneliness anymore.

It felt like trust.

I used to think love arrived loud.

A lightning strike.

A speech.

A dramatic airport scene.

But love is not always loud.

Sometimes love is a neighbor returning your tools cleaner than she found them.

Sometimes it is black coffee on a workbench.

A drawing pinned above a socket set.

A house key nobody asks to take back.

Sometimes love is someone seeing your quiet life and not calling it small.

Delaney looked at my garage and saw grease, noise, and money she could take.

Margo looked at the same place and saw patience, work, and a man worth knowing.

That was the difference.

And that was justice enough for me.

So if you ask whether I think Margo deceived me by choosing me before I knew it, my answer is simple.

No.

Deception is hiding the truth so you can take something.

Love is waiting until someone is strong enough to receive it.

And when Margo asked how much luck I needed, I finally learned the answer.

I never needed luck.

I needed someone willing to stand close enough, quietly enough, long enough, for me to turn around and see she had been there the whole time.