Page 117 of Knocked Up

"You what?"

"I've been practicing this for three weeks, on the porch at night, like a lunatic. I could feel it coming and I wanted to be good at it." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "And I had a whole thing and I cannot remember one word of it."

"That's all right."

"It was good, Beckett. It had a bit about the clinic in it."

"Tessa."

"I love you," she said. "I never stopped either. Not for a day. I've spent ten years telling myself the problem was that I stopped. I built an entire adult life on top of that and it was never true. I've loved you since I was twenty-one. I was still doing it in October when you came through my door at midnight with a dying dog in your arms and I hated you. And I've been doing it in this house every single day since December, with a red clause on my own refrigerator telling me not to."

I got up.

"Sit down," she said. "Beckett, sit."

"No," I said, and I went round the table.

She came up out of that chair before I got there. She got both hands in my collar and pulled. I went down to her, because I always do.

She was crying and laughing at the same time and doing both badly and telling me so. At one point she had her hands on either side of my face and made me say it again. Then she made me say it a third time with my eyes open.

I put her back against the edge of that counter with one hand in her hair and one arm all the way around her. I said it about nine times in a row in a low voice, against her mouth and her neck and the side of her jaw. She had to hold onto the counter behind her with both hands.

"Say it once more."

"I love you."

"Tessa."

"I'm going to make you do it about four hundred times," she said, "for ten years, so you may as well."

Willa, in the bouncer on the table, made a noise in her sleep and moved one hand.

And I stopped.

"Hang on," I said.

"Do not hang on."

"I need one thing off the table."

"Beckett."

I got the blocker.

There is a pocket in the lining where the wrist strap anchors, at the top. It is the deepest part of the thing. Everything else in there sits above it.

"There's one more," I said.

Tessa Reeves put her hand out flat on the counter beside her, which is what she does when she needs the room to stop moving.

"No, there isn't."

"It's been in here since the morning of the 2nd of May," I said. "That's the morning after the porch. I bought it at ten o'clock in the morning on Sixth Avenue and I put it in here at two in the afternoon. I haven't taken it out since. It has been in every game of that playoff run, including game six."

"You…"

"It went out there with everything else," I said. "I couldn't say any of it, so I carried all of it."