It has been the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, but he does it. Slowly, yes, but it happens. Each day he thinks about her less and less, thinks about them less and less.

At some point his mind makes the decision to stop attempting to win her back and to start letting her go, and he’s cool with that.

He tries to banish the fantasy that he had carried in his mind for the past few years, of a family with a passel of curly-haired kids that he would take camping and play football with, rowdy little boys with his sports skills and sweet little girls with Pam’s smile. This is the hard part; they not only broke up with each other, but their future family was gone in an instant, never to be.

He’s gone through the angry notion that high school sweethearts are a load of crap; he derives a bit of venomous pleasure from it but then thinks about his parents, high school sweethearts who are still happily married almost forty-three years later. Now he sees that maybe he and Pam wouldn’t have been so happy, maybe they might have outgrown each other.

One day he can finally think of her and feel nothing but a small pang of bittersweet memory, and he realizes with a jolt that this wasn’t the end of him, that he’s doing just fine, and this is the day he gets up the courage to talk to the girl at the bar who’s there with a group of work friends.

Weeks later, when he’s twined around her body and her sheets as they fall asleep, he reflects on the instant connection and the feeling that they should have known each other sooner or forever and feeling that she just knows him innately. He hugs her to him a little more tightly and now he knows what Pam had tried to express to him, he knows now what was missing.

He plants a soft kiss on her hair, and her smile is beautiful.