Prologue

PROLOGUE

SIX YEARS AGO

I might’ve been on time, were it not for the parking meters. They were old, coin-fed, dotted along a narrow one-way street shaded by brick buildings. My GPS had announced that I’d arrived at my destination, and I had driven right past. Some might call it stubborn, parking at a Harris Teeter three blocks away because I didn’t want to pay. I mean, this was Baltimore. You expect to pay an egregious amount of money for parking in a major city.

Anyone who says that has obviously never been a third-year graduate student surviving on Lean Cuisines and dreams.

I hopped out of my old Volvo and legged it to the sandwich shop, guided by my phone. It led me to one of the old brick storefronts, the entrance marked by a scalloped awning. I pushed through the door and a bell chimed overhead. The dining room was long and narrow with a checkered floor, and the smell of warm, fresh-baked bread wafted on the air.

Professor Blanchett was seated at one of the laminate tables, her sandwich untouched in a red plastic basket. “You’re three minutes late,” she greeted me primly. Her pixie cut was a shade grayer than I remembered, but her mouth was still pressed into the same thin line, bracketed by smile lines that seemed to indicate that she must have laughed at some point in her life.

“Parking,” I said, a little winded as I collapsed into the plastic chair opposite her and shrugged off my messenger bag. “Didn’t have change for the meters.” Not true. I kept a whole heap of change in my cupholder, but that was reserved for counting out quarters whenever I needed an iced coffee to power through another ten pages of my dissertation.

“Perhaps we’ll leave my thoughts on your punctuality out of the letter, then, shall we?”

Well. Off to a great start. I had no clue how to reply to that, so I gave her a polite smile. Dorothea Blanchett had been my capstone advisor during undergrad at University of Maryland, some years ago now. We didn’t really know each other; a lot of her advising was done through email, and we’d had only a handful of meetings in person to discuss the direction of my paper. She had retired a couple years ago. But academia loves its letters of recommendation, so when I applied for an online teaching position that called for three references—preferably, they specified, from different institutions—I had no choice but to shoot her one last email. I wasn’t even sure she remembered me. She’d asked to meet in person for a light refresher before she felt comfortable writing any sort of recommendation, so this felt more like a job interview than a happy reunion.

“Did you already order?” she asked now, like she didn’t just see me walk in.

My gaze flicked to the cheesesteak in front of her, then over to the counter. “Ah, no,” I said. “I guess I should maybe—”

“Clara?” a woman’s voice asked. “Clara Fernsby?”

My old college roommate approached our table, wiping damp hands on her jeans like she’d just come back from the bathroom and was in too much of a hurry to use the hand dryer. “Mindy,” I said. I was so taken aback that my brain short-circuited, and for a minute, I thought Professor Blanchett must have invited her as some sort of prank—but Mindy had barely set foot in the History Department. And Professor Blanchett wasn’t the pranking type.

Mindy didn’t wait for me to stand; she bent over and hugged me right where I sat, but the angle was awkward, encircling my shoulders. Immobilized, unable to really hug her back, I patted the back of her arm with a hand.

“It’s been so long,” she said with a sigh, drawing back. Now that I got a good look at her, I noticed that she’d stopped bleaching her hair, her mushroom-brown locks chopped in a wolfish shag that framed her round face.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“At the sandwich shop?” she said, a little bemused. “I’m meeting Ted for lunch.”

She said this with so much familiarity, like she expected me to recognize the name, but it still took me a couple seconds to register who she was talking about.

I should have been forgiven for not immediately realizing that she was talking about my former best friend on account of two things: first, because he and Mindy had only met a handful of times in passing. He didn’t even attend UMD with us.

Second, because she called him Ted.

“You’re meeting Teddy?” I clarified. “Teddy Harrison?”

Mindy nodded. “I’ve been telling him that I wanted to bring him here for weeks, but he hadn’t found the time to make the drive down—oh, sorry, Miranda Schooner,” she said, offering a hand to my advisor. Professor Blanchett eyed it like Mindy was offering her a dead fish.

“Wait,” I said. “You and Teddy, you guys are”—my brows pinched—“together?”

“I thought… I mean, I figured he told you.”

Professor Blanchett sighed theatrically, leaning back in her chair.

“He did not,” I said stiffly. Interesting that he hadn’t told her about our falling-out. Maybe they were still in the early stages of—well, whatever they were.

“Weird story.” She dragged a chair over to our table, metal legs screeching against the tiled floor. I would really rather she didn’t, actually, because if Teddy was on his way here—

“So,” Mindy said, “I was obviously attracted to him from the get-go. I mean, you remember how I asked you all those questions after he helped you move into your dorm, trying to make sure he wasn’t your boyfriend or anything.”

The bell above the door chimed, and I stiffened. I didn’t think I was capable of saying anything at the moment, so I gave a tiny nod of confirmation. Yes, I remembered.

“And then last year, I was having this conversation with my friend where we were talking, you know, like, ‘You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.’”

Teddy was making his way over to the table. He didn’t seem to have registered who his girlfriend was talking to. There was a rising feeling in my chest, something burning its way up my throat like it was looking for a way out—panic, or maybe bile.

“And I was like damn, that’s real, because there was this guy that I met a couple times back in college who I was super attracted to, but I never had the balls to just go for it. But then I remembered that I added you”—she pointed at me, and it felt very accusatory, like I was a suspect in a lineup—“on Facebook, and I was like, ‘She has to have him on her friends list, they were best friends, right?’ So I looked, and there he was.” She glanced up at him warmly and he snaked an arm around her back, bending to plant a kiss on her cheek.

Bile. It was definitely bile in my throat. I gave them a close-lipped smile. “How sweet.”

At the sound of my voice, Teddy did an almost imperceptible double take, his eyes widening when he finally registered who was sitting at the table. His lips parted in surprise, but neither of us said anything. It had been three years since we last spoke, and longer still since the last time I saw him. He’d grown his hair back out, loose brown curls that looked like he’d just finished running a hand through them, and I found a small measure of satisfaction in knowing he’d taken my advice.

Not that it should matter. He wasn’t dating me. I’d made sure of that. But when I saw him now, something feral clawed at the inside of my chest. He looked… good. He was wearing a black T-shirt, just snug enough to show off his broad chest, and his olive skin had a healthy summer tan. Memories floated to the surface, unbidden.

I tore my eyes away, fixating on Professor Blanchett. This was testing her patience, no doubt. Her slender arms were folded over a herringbone blazer, the shoulder pads hunching. Beneath the table, I was pretty certain she was jiggling a loafer-clad foot.

Mindy was still talking. “—sent him a message, and the rest was history.”

Teddy cleared his throat and glanced at his girlfriend. “She’s leaving out the part where she sort of harassed me for a date,” he said. His tone was obviously meant to be light—teasing—but it came out sounding a little forced.

She rolled her eyes at him. “You loved it.”

I hazarded another glance at Teddy. Dark eyes met mine from behind black-framed glasses.

“Hi,” I said, because the longer I went without saying something to him directly, the more it felt like there was an elephant in the sandwich shop. But I didn’t know what else to say, what I could possibly tack onto that sentence without it sounding completely hollow.

“Hey,” he said quietly.

I couldn’t bear to look at him for longer than a couple seconds, so I stared at the table, the laminate curling up along the edges.

“Anyway, enough about that,” Mindy said, oblivious. “I’m gonna grab some food. You want anything?” She flung this question at me without any real warning, and my brain was still processing everything else, so for a few seconds, I gaped like a fish. “The food here is really good,” she added. “Their turkey melt panini has me in a chokehold.”

I looked up at Professor Blanchett, whose nostrils flared. Her cheesesteak was still untouched. “Actually, I’m kind of in the middle of—”

“Are you kidding? We can all eat together. Lunch is totally on us.”

Us. The word was a knife slipping between my ribs. Mindy left the table to order at the counter, but a presence hung in her wake, the third chair at our table still very much occupied. I felt a little guilty that my knee-jerk reaction was to hope someone spat in her turkey melt. Mindy hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Clara,” Teddy began, and I sprang out of my chair on autopilot. Whatever he was about to say, I didn’t think I had the heart to hear it. “I’ve been meaning to—”

“You know what,” I said, ignoring him, collecting my messenger bag off the floor. It was heavy, laden with hard copies of old essays and unofficial transcripts. Evidence that I’d meant to present to Professor Blanchett. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sit around and wait for this storm to blow over. “I actually need to get going. I’m sorry,” I told her, a little frantic, “and I completely understand if this ruins my chances of getting that letter. I just—I can’t stay for lunch. I’m sorry.”

“Clara, wait—” Teddy tried to stop me, fingers closing around my arm, and I jerked back. Our eyes locked and he searched my face—quick, cursory, but enough that he came to some sort of conclusion. He released my arm with a mumbled apology, and then I was out the door, power walking down past parking meters along a shady one-way street. I glanced over my shoulder once or twice, half expecting him to come after me, to insist that I hear him out, but he didn’t.

We’d gone three whole years without speaking. But that day, the day I walked away and he chose not to follow—that was the day I finally realized that I’d lost him for good.