Chapter Four

"I'm loving the comedy for you, and Kennenbear is hot, hot, hot. He has three upcoming joints." April, her agent, flipped through a script. Katie could see her Persian cat behind her, sitting on a cat tower, and another tail just off-screen.

"Are we saying that, for real? ‘Joints'? It's so dudeish, it makes my back teeth ache."

"Why your back teeth?" April leaned so close to the camera that Katie could make out the dusting of freckles across her milk-pale skin. April had her bright-red, super-coily hair piled up on her head, and she wore a bear onesie over her plus-size, six-foot-tall, screamingly hot body.

Sometimes it was hard to believe that everyone in Hollywood listened to April Feinstein, but they did. Katie knew for a fact that April scared people, though her reputation was that she was funny, warm, and scrupulously kind. Equitable. But no one fucked with her.

April was the agent Katie had found after she left Ben and had to fire the agent she shared with him. April had been such a boon, too, directing Katie to projects that had gotten her awards, challenged her, kept her out of harm's way, and made money.

"Like, because you grind your back teeth in response to dude things. Maybe." Katie was sitting on the floor of the suite her parents had built into the walkout basement of their house. She'd set her laptop up on the little coffee table in front of the squishy love seat. After her mom's party, she'd come back down here to its pink and gray and white womb-like squishiness to cuddle her cats, talk to April, and—

There had been the thing she'd done before she cuddled her cats. In the small suite's tiny, blissfully blackout-shaded bedroom with its gray gingham wallpaper and crispy white duvet, with the door closed and locked, and a pillow she'd ritualistically folded in half and straddled, her hand under her shirt, thinking about the white-blond baby hairs along Wil's hairline that she'd noticed when Wil had run her fingers through the hair at her nape, a little nervous in response to Katie's questions, and the way her breath had been soft against Katie's cheek when they'd quickly hugged good-bye at the end of the party.

Katie still felt warm from how hard she'd made herself come.

Before Wil left, Beanie had taken a picture of them together with her phone, and Diana had clearly tried to stop herself from reminding Beanie not to show anyone the picture she had just taken, and then failed, making Beanie visibly embarrassed she had taken the picture at all.

The exchange had made Katie's stomach cramp into a sharp ball. The old guilt at what she'd put her mother through ten years ago, as fresh as ever.

Sometimes Katie still had dreams where she woke herself up crying for her mom to come and help her, the phantom feeling of tears slick against the glass screen of the phone taking ages to fade.

When she came back to herself, April was studying her closely. "And Kennenbear makes your teeth ache in this manner?"

Katie smiled, but she could see herself in the little thumbnail screen, and her smile wasn't convincing. "It's mostly the term joint,but yeah, maybe also Kennenbear. I'm a little iffy on the whole ‘written and directed by a man' situation at this point."

"Like you are literally referring to a joint." April smiled.

"I know. Because words like auteur and film aren't good enough anymore? Or cool enough? I forget the difference."

"Fuck him. Fuck Kennenbear." April said this decisively. "Besides, the man is a multimillionaire, get a fucking pedicure. Those Jamaica pictures still haunt me."

"I'm intrigued by the Latener project." Katie sifted her hair away from her ear and shoulder, her mood lifting with her thoughts about the beautiful script she'd read on the plane on the way to Green Bay. "I love Gloria Latener, and I love the script."

"But?"

"Hmm. There's no buts, actually. It's something that would be a top-of-the-pile, one-hundred-percent yes at literally any other moment."

"But we want more." April smiled again.

"We do."

Katie looked away from April and ran her hands over Phil's body, stopping at his tail base to give him the scritches he asked for at the end of each pet that turned his purr motor on high. Her conversation with Madelynn had raked up a lot of feelings. A lot of knee-jerk risk aversion that had led to her calling this meeting with April to consider roles in the first place.

A fallback.

For when she fell.

But she hadn't told April that. If she did, April would want to brainstorm it, workshop it, challenge it, call someone in. But Katie didn't want that.

She'd always loved reading scripts. She loved how it felt in her brain to make them live in her head, loved making the characters and rewinding and rereading and lingering over little moments, writing down snippets from them to say out loud to herself and think about.

She loved memorizing them and letting the words saturate her body before she ever began working on the character, even, just sitting with the words, and she loved when the character started talking just to her, then inside of her, and how the world around her began populating with the story and engaging with the character in her body.

Since she was a little girl, she'd had these feelings and sensations reading books, sometimes listening to other people tell a story, watching people, reading scripts and play texts and song lyrics. The stories worked inside of her like a mill, pulling feelings and ideas out of the depth of herself and letting her look at them.

Every single moment of guest directing Mary Wants It was one that Katie had relived and relived, her brain humming with pleasure. She'd loved the tools, the camera, she'd loved taking the script to the set, to the table read, she'd loved building the vision for the episode in layers and layers in her mind's eye. Working with the actors from behind the camera made her feel hot and giddy every day she was on set.

After her first guest direction stint earned her an Emmy, it had been an open secret that Katie wanted a feature film project. But she was still considered too young, too big a commodity by most studios as a leading lady box office draw. She felt the responsibility of that, the jobs her craft made for so many, including her team.

But making a whole entire film would also make jobs and opportunities for others, giving Katie the chance to break open what was a very conservative and backward town and guide other creatives over the rubble to make something even bigger than a film.

She could do that, just as long as she kept Honor happy, wrote an amazing script, and perfectly played her most important role ever as the woman in Madelynn's imagination—the one sitting in a director's chair, vetted, funded, trustworthy.

April was watching her again. Katie had been silent for too long.

She sat back and gave her agent a smile that looked weary, even in the tiny square floating above April's head. "Don't worry about me. I've got this."

"Hmm." April reached up and pulled the pencil out of her curls, gathered her hair up again, and stuck the pencil through it. Her thinking move. Very dangerous. "You talked to Madelynn."

Katie narrowed her eyes. "You already know that. All of you"—Katie made a wild, circling gesture with her hand—"talk to each other, about each other, at each other."

"Yes. But Madelynn talked to you."

"April."

"Katie." April raised her eyebrow. "I want to get this thing out of first gear. To be clear, by ‘this thing,' you know that I mean our company, your projects, your script. I want to get to the part where we're not spending our own money. I want to take the meeting with Marisol Gonzales that she requested after Ben's horrible Variety piece, because on the phone, she definitely implied that her Emma Tenayuca biopic that Universal, New Line, and Columbia are fighting over would be a better fit for whatever we're doing, and she wants to know how we could make that happen."

Katie felt a hot flip of pleasure in her chest, followed immediately by sick self-doubt. "It's much too soon. We need to have Honor completely on board first. Without Honor, there's no way we could fund a period epic like that, with hundreds of cast, and get it right, really right, get it as good as what Marisol does. She's seventy. She doesn't suffer fools."

"You need to think more about what it would feel like to walk into that meeting and less about what we would tell her. Marisol directed her last Oscar-winner with a one-point-five-million budget at a closed hotel in Guatemala. She's interested in our vision, not if we have the latest in camera drones and post-production compositing. This is what we want. Right? This is what we've always talked about. Don't shut us down before we get to one meeting. And I know I've said this before, but I really think if you let Madelynn do her job and skewer that hangdog-eyed starlet stalker Adelsward, you'd find that the world is a lot bigger and brighter than you—"

"April." Katie shook her head, interrupting April before she could say more. Before she tried to encourage her to step through a door that opened into a freefall.

"Just let us keep talking, okay?" April said.

What she meant was, I understand that I just scared you, and I am backing down. I also understand you're hiding right now, and you know I'm worried about that, but as long as you keep talking to me, I won't push it.

"But I'll talk to Latener, too," April said.

Katie let out a long breath and tuned her body in to the feeling of Phil's heavy weight on her lap. She felt guilty for putting her team in a place where they had so many concerns, and she felt even worse that she couldn't make an immediate and clearer plan for what they wanted, but she couldn't. She'd gotten this far considering every angle of every move. "Yes, that's good. Talk to Gloria. See what it would look like to fit the project in."

"Are you writing?"

"I am. Ish. I am writing in the sense that people on the internet, in their writing memes, say is writing. Meaning I am deleting. And making myself snacks. And reading other people's writing and feeling bad."

April laughed. "This part, I'm not worried about at all. You are the reigning queen of finding a way. Remember when Dick Mayhew stopped taking my calls because he said he wanted a lead who could pull off eighteenth-century Dutch? And he didn't think that could possibly be you? And so then you followed him into that patisserie looking like a Vermeer with honest-to-fuck panniers under your skirt and ordered in a perfectly accented noblewoman's Dutch? Surely writing is easier than that."

"Wellicht," Katie said, the Dutch for perhaps coming smoothly to her as soon as she thought of the character she'd played in that film, which had earned her a second nomination from the Academy.

April laughed again, and Katie had to admit she did feel a little better. "So what's next this evening?" April asked. "Writing? Slipping into a food coma? Your mom sent me a box of cookies that I've proposed to."

"I'm going out with an old friend." Katie smiled.

April raised her eyebrows and did jazz hands. "Do you have a hometown fuckbuddy, Katelyn Rose Ellis Price?"

I wish,some version of herself, deep in her chest, whispered.

Except, first of all, she didn't want a fuckbuddy, never had, and, second, the idea of Wil Greene occupying a role so trivial wasn't something that would ever feel true or possible. Even if it had been thirteen years.

Katie didn't hide her smile, but she kept it cool. "She's the daughter of my mom's oldest friend. We went to high school together. We're going to ride around in her truck and soak in nostalgia."

"You didn't answer my question. You used heteronormative assumptions to dodge my question, in fact." April grinned, leaning back in her bright pink gaming chair, pleased with herself.

Katie looked away, but only to better sift through a few memories so she could tell something to April that was true, even if it wasn't everything.

A tumble of emotion-tight images gathered somewhere in her chest. The way Wil would break out into laughter at the end of every cheer at games, jogging back to the sidelines with her poms at her hips, her high ponytail bouncing, and pull a motorcycle jacket over her uniform to stay warm, which was impossibly cool, and how Katie would feel the phone in her hands vibrate because Wil had sent a text, making Katie nearly explode with the delicious knowledge that the first text the head cheerleader sent from the sidelines after halftime was to her, Katie Price, when Wil was literally sitting right next to the most popular and interesting girls at school.

Wil Greene could drive a stick shift. Wil Greene wore a two-piece dress to homecoming that showed her belly button. Wil Greene got straight As in her AP classes but wasn't stuck up.

ThatWil Greene had belonged to Katie Price. For a little while.

ThisWil Greene wasn't hers, not anymore, but Katie couldn't imagine her as anyone's anything on the side. She was too big, too charismatic, too engaged when she listened, too… Wil Greene.

Katie decided to go with the scaffolding of the truth. "Wil and I hung out in a pretty intense way my senior year. Nothing happened. I've started thinking about her again lately because of something she's involved with. When I saw her tonight, I wanted to see her again."

April leaned forward. "This would be Wil-You-or-Won't-You?"

Katie's heart stopped, then started back up with a slow, blood-draining thud. She put her hand over her mouth. She probably shouldn't have been surprised that April had guessed, or known, but years of guarding everything, everything, meant she was rarely caught off guard and hated it when she was.

And until April guessed, Katie hadn't talked to anyone, at all, anywhere, about Wil or about Wil's TikTok. Both had been just for her.

"How?" The word came out a bit of a croak. "How did you guess that?"

"You said ‘Wil,' you're in Green Bay, my niece and I trade TikToks all fucking day long. That shit is hot. Is she repped?"

"You"—Katie pointed at her—"are both mercenary and also a lot for me at this moment."

"I bet. A lot of reality coming at you if Wil's your plan, tonight, in the dark, driving around Green Bay, Wisconsin, the air cold, the cab of the truck warm, the radio softly playing."

"Write your own script, April." Katie pointed at her again.

"I am." April's grin was fully salacious. "I'm writing it, and I'm feeling it inside of my body, and I like it, Katie. I like this script. Also, give me the heads-up if you're going to make out on her channel, and I'll be the one to tell Madelynn. I feel like I'm a bit of a Madelynn whisperer, honestly. I can give her stuff like this and make it feel like a career opportunity. For her. That's why she likes me."

"Are you finished?" Katie tried for imperious, but it just came out resigned. April sounded and looked supremely pleased with herself, and of course she should be, given the enormity of what she'd just pried out of Katie.

"Not really. Also, you've noticed Wil is incredibly beautiful, right? Like, in the cartoons, where the tongue rolls out and the eyeballs pop and the horn goes wah-wah-wah-wuh. Her handle is hilarious to me, ‘Wil-You-or-Won't-You'—of course I fucking will. There must be a line to her front door that backs up into Ohio." April sighed. "Now I'm done."

Unbidden, the picture Katie shouldn't have looked at on Wil's phone swirled into focus like ink dropped into water. Wil with both her hands on Emory's nape, her tongue just past her teeth, Emory's hand either pushing down into the front of Wil's pants or dragging back out, their fingers pressed into the skin of her belly.

Fuck.

Incredibly beautiful didn't completely cover it.

"Say hello to Meryl and Viola for me," Katie said, referring to April's cats. "Tell them that Sue, Trois, and Phil say hi from Green Bay." She flashed the tiny, prim smile that meant she'd finished, and the conversation was complete.

April broke out into a grin. She was the one who'd taught Katie how to do that. Years ago, when Katie was reeling in the months after leaving Ben, she'd complained to April at one point that every interaction, every interview, seemed to end with someone getting more from her than she wanted to give them.

Stop fucking talking,April had said. You're an actress. Act like it's over. Then she'd made Katie show her what that looked like, trying on one expression after another until they settled on this one.

Katie's victory smile, April called it.

"I love you, honey. Be careful," April said, waving.

Katie stood up and stretched, then attended to her cats' bedtime needs. Phil and Sue had medicine, Trois had eye drops, and their litters needed to be scooped. Katie talked to them with and without the buttons, watching them to make sure they were well settled in. They had stayed in the suite before and seemed unbothered. Katie made sure that she turned on all three heated cat beds on low so they would have a warm place to sleep. It was no small thing to acclimate to Green Bay's winter.

Then Katie brushed her teeth and her hair, pulled on a sweatshirt because she hated coats and always had and it was only thirty-eight degrees—though that was balmy for a Midwest winter—and put Uggs on her bare feet. She turned out the lights and waited for Wil's truck, watching out the back slider, her skin buzzing.

It was a familiar feeling, waiting by a door for the lights of Wil's Bronco to sweep through the window.

By her senior year, Katie had maxed out the regional and local acting workshops. She'd learned everything she could from the instructors who would work with kids. She'd earned a lead in every local theater, which was as many leads as she was going to get, because no company in the Midwest was going to give the same child two leading roles. Katie remained committed to doing the work for her dance and music teachers, but when she got accepted to summer stock in Chicago for the summer after senior year, she realized she wanted to do high school. She hadn't even tried out for the East High School plays or the musical.

Diana was surprised, but thrilled, and tried and failed not to give Katie too much social advice as though she needed it, which she did, and in the end, the only advice Katie took on from her mother was to stick close to Wil Greene.

She's very involved at East and could help you figure out what extracurriculars you might like.

The subtext was that Wil could also introduce Katie to the people Katie had only observed from a distance since kindergarten but had rarely talked to because Diana drove her to Milwaukee and Madison and even Chicago multiple times a week for acting obligations, and probably those kids thought Katie was horribly stuck up.

They did think that, it turned out. They told her as much in the hallway outside the theater the afternoon of the first rehearsal for Seussical the Musical, in which Katie had been given the role of the Cat in the Hat. Katie had tried to casually strike up a conversation with a few of the theater girls right after the rehearsal, and they told her she'd stolen the part from one of the girls' boyfriends, who actually deserved it, and thereby ruined the musical, and probably Katie had only been given the part because Diana had agreed to make costumes.

Katie was snot-crying and walking on a cold September evening after this unfortunate event when Wil picked her up. After that, Katie didn't really see the need to stick close to anyone else. Wil was everything she needed and a lot of things she didn't realize she'd missed out on. Plus, Diana was right, as always, because everything got a lot easier after Katie and Wil were friends.

Nothing, nothing, had been that easy since.

The headlights on the Bronco lit up the backyard before Katie saw the truck pull in. Its orange and brown and yellow paint job filled her with so many feelings, she thought she was going to black out. She ran out to meet it after setting the alarm on the slider behind her.

Wil leaned over in the cab, and the door opened from the inside.

"Hi!" Katie climbed in. The woven fabric bench seat felt exactly the same. It smelled, like always, like wintergreen Altoids and the Aveda rosemary shampoo Wil used. Katie grabbed the seat belt and buckled herself in.

"Hi, yourself." As Wil put the Bronco into gear, Katie looked at her manicure. Wil wore her nails short, in pretty ovals. Her ring finger was maroon with a perfect white circle, and the rest of her nails were buff clear, with perfect maroon circles. The TikTok people loved to talk about Wil's nails. Katie was certain Wil had influenced all kinds of trends and fads.

Wil wore jeans that fit her exactly right, and her black motorcycle boots, and an unbuttoned gray waffle Henley, different from the tee she'd had on earlier, cleavage pushed up just so. Her soft, pale blond hair was styled in an artful, femmey mullet that drew Katie's eyes to her perfect mouth, which literally everyone on the internet was talking about, the bottom lip so full, it creased in the middle.

"You must have so many offers," Katie said. Because she knew the business. She saw what April saw. Everybody had seen it in high school.

Cool, beautiful, smart Wil.

"To ride in the Bronco? Less than I would expect, but I'm biased."

Katie laughed. "No. Entertainment offers. Offers from people who want to gift wrap what you've got going on and act like they invented you."

Wil wrinkled her nose. "A few."

"Not good?"

"I mean, it's interesting trying to figure out the what and the why of the offers." Wil took a detour in Katie's parents' neighborhood to avoid getting to the main road via a steep hill that was always covered in ice this time of year. Katie's dad took the same detour. "Some are obvious. The porny stuff, for example, sure, inevitable. Those are easy to pass on. But there's stuff from cosmetics people, streaming people, completely random ad people. What do they want? What do they think I can give them? How far will they go to try to exploit me?"

Wil tapped the steering wheel. Her smile was small, private. Katie felt like she'd been invited inside Wil's mind, which was a delightful feeling.

"I ended up reaching out to some other creators on the platform," Wil said. "That led me to a pretty intense deep dive into all the ways the people making the content are getting screwed over. I actually spent most of a four-day weekend off work one time just reading the terms of service from beginning to end, marking them up, making sure I completely understood everything. Now every time they update, I'm on it, checking it against my notes. I'm all up in the forums, leaving comments for other content creators, helping them sort through their problems or understand their situation better. It's the same thing I do at work all week. Cut through red tape. Simplify complex situations for other people."

Wil glanced at Katie and smiled right at her. "I like fighting for other people, figuring out how things work and looking for ways they could work better," she said. "But as far as making decisions about anything beyond just basic ad packages on my channel, I don't have a decision tree for any of that stuff."

"Do you want one?" As soon as she asked this, Katie realized she wasn't sure she wanted to give Wil a decision tree for media offers. One of the things she liked best about Wil's channel was that everything about it had been decided by Wil. It was hers. She'd made it, in the most absolute and basic way that Katie never got to make anything.

"I need a decision tree for my entire life." Wil laughed. "I'm not irresponsible or impulsive or anything, truly. I have a tendency to stick? I guess."

"Like in a rut."

"Like in what's comfortable, mostly because I really enjoy everything. I genuinely like my job, for example."

"As an insurance adjuster?" They had picked right back up the conversation they'd started earlier. It was as if everything they said to each other was part of one long, continuous talk that never ended.

"I love being an insurance adjuster. I love knowing all of this ridiculous, industry-specific language and going out to places and taking my pictures, writing the report. Fixing something simple with money. I also love that no one cares, at least in my company, what I'm like, or how I dress or spend my time."

Katie listened, watching Wil drive.

Once, all those years ago, Wil had taken her hand off the gearshift and put her arm along the back of the bench seat. Then, when it was time for her to shift again, just as she was taking her arm away, she'd softly pulled Katie's hair and slid her fingertips down Katie's arm.

It had been the first time Katie had ever spontaneously felt herself get wet. She hadn't felt strange about it. Being with Wil had been incredibly fun, easy. Getting turned on like that before she even knew what she wanted from, well, anyone had only been interesting. They were leaving for college soon. Everything was golden hour.

Looking at Wil now, in the dark, Katie wondered, though, about all that intensity then. Why she remembered everything about the cab of this truck down into the deep sense memory parts of her brain.

"Every day is different," Wil said, still answering Katie's question. "I don't even mind that the clients calling in are often upset, or angry, or both. It feels like what I can do is useful. Document. Listen. Look. I don't make the money decisions, not really, or the policy ones, but I can advise clients."

"I can see that. But you're doing this creative project, so I wonder if something's not all the way stuck down."

"Maybe. Or a lot of little things aren't? Living in the same place, which, again, I like. I like how the space feels, and my landlord, who I've known for a long time, and I've been interested in my different housemates, and some of them have become friends. But."

"But." Katie smiled.

Wil rolled her shoulders and grinned at Katie. "Something isn't fitting right. Even the TikTok, I can feel there's a way that it wants to be something else, and it's happened faster than anything else in my life, that shift."

Katie liked looking at Wil this way, in the Bronco, with the only light coming from the street. Even more, she liked looking at her live and in person instead of on the tiny screen on her phone. It seemed inconceivable that she hadn't spent any time or talked to this woman in thirteen years.

It felt like something else Ben had taken away, something Katie hadn't even realized Ben had taken away.

But also, once things had settled—once there was an April, once her mom wasn't flying out to LA at least once a month to stay and help Katie get on her feet again—there hadn't been anyone who'd thought to tell her that if she wanted to be comfortable in this new normal, to stick with Wil Greene.

Wil was gone by then, of course. In college. Three years and thousands of miles away from the Wil who Katie had known, somewhere in the middle of her junior year, living a college life Katie had only seen—and wasn't that ironic, wasn't that funny?—in the movies.

Wil had pulled up to the intersection that fed into the loop in front of their old high school and waited for the light to change. She pulled into the loop, followed it, and then parked in a spot where they were facing the front of the building. Wil unbuckled her seat belt and turned to face Katie. There were lights all around the school filtering into the cab. "Did you get my care package?"

Oh.

Katie had to draw on her training to school her expression when what she wanted to do was close her eyes. Lean her forehead against the cold passenger window.

That care package was the last thing she'd had of Wil before she didn't have her anymore.

It arrived in Chicago a few weeks after Katie did, the smallest Priority Mail box you could get from the post office, with Katie's name and address printed in Wil's handwriting. There was a staff member for the summer stock program who passed out the mail, who handed Katie the package when there was a whole group of other actors standing together, joking, laughing, and of course they asked her who it was from, wanting to know if she had a person back home, but their teasing had an edge to it.

The package came the morning after Katie had said yes to Ben. As much yes as an eighteen-year-old girl could give a thirty-year-old acclaimed actor who had just been named People's Sexiest Man Alive. Already, her peers that summer had stepped away from her at the same rate Ben stepped to her. She didn't have anyone to tell what had happened. She could hardly admit it to herself.

Inside the box, there was a wide, intricate green-and-pink friendship bracelet knotted with the words KATIE KAT. It had a button clasp with a bead shaped like a cat's head, and there was a scribbled note from Wil on a piece of misprinted law office stationery that Beanie kept in a box in the kitchen for scratch paper.

Katie didn't remember what the note had said. She remembered the paper. She remembered Wil's handwriting. She remembered the catch in her throat and the feeling that she was lost, and it wasn't just that she'd graduated and left home, it was more.

She was lost.

She'd put the bracelet on in the middle of the room where all of them were waiting for Ben, her throat thick and her eyes burning, and she'd wanted more than anything to be on one of her late-night drives with Wil, pretending to investigate Mr. Cook, but really talking, just like they were now.

Katie hadn't thanked Wil for the package. She hadn't even texted her that whole summer. She'd wanted to, but Ben was so preoccupying. Everything was so, so much. And when she thought about texting or calling Wil, she felt like she wasn't even the Katie who Wil knew.

Or that Wil wouldn't understand.

Now, Katie smiled. "Yes. I did. I wore the bracelet every single day until I left it at Ben's accidentally, and he claimed to have never seen it when I asked for it back. Maybe he didn't, but he knew how I felt about that bracelet, and no cleaner would throw something so obviously personal away."

Katie touched her left wrist compulsively.

She'd even called Ben's brother, a man who had always been kind to her, to ask Ben for it back, more than once. But it was gone.

Or it would be a prize if she'd get back together with Ben.

"Was it… Are you okay?" Wil pushed up the sleeves of her Henley and turned down the blasting heater.

She was so pretty, so Wil. Gorgeous and blond wrapped up in boots and waffle weave, minty and self-assured and thinky, wanting to know. Always wanting to know.

"It was the worst, and I'm okay," Katie said. Then she changed the subject. "And you went to the University of Michigan like you planned."

Wil nodded. "I did."

"What did you major in?"

"Pre-law."

Katie leaned forward and smiled, giving Wil her full tell me everything treatment. It made Wil roll her eyes and squirm in a way that shot Katie through with tingles.

Wil was the same in this way, too. Forthcoming until you hit on something. Until Wil didn't know the answer to something. Katie had spent so much of her time trying to stump Wil like this, just so they could go deeper.

"I got into Michigan Law," Wil said. She obviously couldn't hold Katie's gaze, so she looked out the windshield at the high school. "I got the adjuster job the summer before. They had a temp program that was a decent bit of cash, and I thought it would be good starter money. I moved into the place I live now. It was good money. The job had so many of the types of people and fixing problems and tiny details that attracted me to law, and maybe… It was hard. I felt like Beanie couldn't be alone. I was tired, I think. Because, you know, I had lost my dad at the end of college, when I was away. So I deferred for a year. Then I couldn't defer again. If I reapplied, I'd have first consideration, but I haven't."

Katie had been in Paris when Jasper Greene died. The apartment they were shooting in was one that had been owned by a minor aristocratic family until they fled the German occupation and never returned. It became the lavish set of the intimate marital drama that was the first big project April found for Katie, within the year after she left Ben, and Katie's costar—an intense, serious method actor who never broke character—would not have tolerated Katie's leaving the set to attend a funeral in Wisconsin.

Diana had called her the day after and described everything in detail, because Katie had wanted to feel as though she'd been there. But she hadn't been there.

"Do you want to reapply?"

Wil looked back at Katie. The blue of her eyes was always so interesting with her pale brows and lashes. Under her left eye, Wil had a new patch of freckles—evidence, along with the sharper bones of her face and the lushness of her body, that she was older.

And evidence that there wasn't anywhere on her face that wasn't good to look at.

"Sometimes I do. More and more sometimes. But it doesn't feel possible anymore. Just a scattered, diffuse, regretful feeling." Wil said this while rubbing her hand over her throat.

"Is that where you feel it?" Katie reached over and touched Wil's hand.

Wil smiled. "Maybe."

"Something I've learned to do is think about where I feel something in my body. It's so you can take care of that part of your body, regulate it, and maybe be able to safely address the feelings."

Katie thought about Wil's Altoids habit. Her kissing. Always having someone around to talk to. Her mouth. Her throat. Places Wil was trying to take care of in the absence of not giving them what they needed.

A voice.

This time, she reached out and touched Wil's throat directly with the tips of her fingers. It made Wil laugh, just a small laugh, and look away again, thinking.

That was okay.

Katie adjusted herself in the seat to have a better view of the school. She'd never been back after graduation. East High was a massive early-twentieth-century brick fortress with honest-to-God statues on the rooftop. Looking at it made Katie wonder why she'd had to let go of everything, absolutely every part of her life, when she left Ben.

Hadn't there been a way to keep more than just her parents and her career?

They were quiet until Wil's phone made a series of chimes, and she pulled it out of the back pocket of her jeans.

"What is it?" Katie asked after Wil had been tapping and swiping for more than a few moments.

"I'm sorry. It's just that the video I shot this morning posted, and there's always a bit I have to do when it goes up."

It was Wednesday. Traveling had made Katie's schedule feel slippery.

God.

There was something completely unanticipated happening to her, knowing there was one of Wil's videos up while she was sitting next to Wil. Talking to her. Looking at her. Thinking about her.

She must have gone silent for too long, because Wil finished and then looked at her—looked at her in a way that Katie could feel, even though she was trying to keep her gaze trained on the school building.

"Hey, Katie?" Wil asked.

"Yeah." She said the word the way she felt it, wrapped up in nostalgia, longing to get back what she'd lost.

"Do you want to watch it with me?"