Although she may not have expected it, at least not at that early an age, once he says it, Karen can sort of picture it. He must have been adorable, she thinks, planning romantic gestures for the childhood equivalent of girlfriends. Even when she was very young, she wasn't thinking like that. She had crushes on boys, but it always seemed to equate to settling down, and that was never something she could do.

Then as a teenager, she'd just fucked around, and wasn't in a position to think seriously about a relationship until New York. The men she knew there, she'd each loved in a different way, but it was never meant to work out. Matt had his secrets, Foggy had Marci, and Frank was a fugitive. Before John, there was never anyone she could have thought about that way. With him, she would be lying if she said she hadn't considered it on a handful of occasions, but mostly as a hypothetical thing, not wanting to make any assumptions.

If she can't help but wonder now where this might be going, if anywhere at all, well, she hardly thinks she could be blamed for that.

"And then that... went the way it did," she says with a nod, figuring she shouldn't get any more into it than that and risk ruining the mood. "For me, this is the most serious I've ever been, actually."