"See you," he says, nodding.

She is back Wednesday, at about four-thirty, and she comes with a slice of cake in a little box.

"Are you still on drugs?" she asks, offering him the cake, and a fork.

"It's not as good as yours."

"Nah," he agrees easily, "but it's cake and it's tasty and you're nice and I love you."

"I'm glad we never actually settled on a bet about whether you'd go on saying that. I've known you for like a month."

"Are those two statements related?"

"Somewhat. It's awfully fast to be proclaiming that you love me, particularly since in the course of the month in question we haven't done anything like, oh, go out at all."

"Yeah," he says, "so? I've never gone out with Freddie Mercury and I love him."

"Are you claiming to love me in the same sense that one loves celebrity musicians? Because that might actually be weirder."

"I dunno. I love you, I love Freddie, I love Ethan. I don't think any of those are that much like each other," he says thoughtfully.

"What is it like, then?" she asks, leaning her chin on her hands.

"I dunno," he repeats. "I think it's sweet how you have, like, moral impulses, I don't see a lot of that. And I don't really get you, but I feel like I could. And you came to visit me in the hospital. And you brought me cake."

"How does that list of things add up to loving me?"

"I dunno. But it does. I mean, they're not what it feels like, but they're kind of what it's about."

"I don't get it."

"Do you want to?" he inquires.

"Yes."

He shrugs. "Okay. So what don't you get, exactly?"

"No one outside my family who wasn't obviously using agape as a rhetorical device has claimed to love me before," shrugs Bella, "and this is not at all the way the I had been led to expect it to go by the apparently underinformed mainstream media. I want to know - what could have led me to expect it. And what to expect next."

"Agape?"

Bella waves her hand. "I think it's Greek. It's sometimes called 'Christian love'? Divine unconditional love for one's fellow human beings."