“Did you feel the same way? When you left?” they ask. It’s a pointed, almost mean question, and it startles me a little because it’s a welcome reminder of why I got along with them all those years ago when we met in college. I knew Sam was going to be my friend the moment I saw them, so confident and tall and long limbed, snarky like Quinn was, but edgier. I wouldn’t have called them mean or callous, but there was a hardness to them that called to me, that made me want to bum a cigarette off them after a Steinhardt class one night.

I stutter out a laugh, keeping my cool. “Yes, it was such a good break from my boring, uneventful, mundane life. Nature is really the balm that soothes all sores.” Quinn emits a chuckle and I give him a grateful glance, a silent thank-you.

“How was last night, by the way?” Quinn asks. And I know I could easily say something like “fine,” leave it at that, wipe the evening from my memory or conversation. But something about having Sam there, this familiar face, a good ghost of my past, makes me barrel through that instinct. I like Sam. Maybe I should try liking people more, start giving more of them the benefit of the doubt. “It was kind of a mess. She’s kind of a mess. The whole thing, her whole situation, it’s dark in how unanswerable and dismal it is. I’m not sure I want to see her again. I don’t think I can give her what she wants, not in the way you originally thought I could, all the healing shit.” I finish off the mimosa, traces of pulp swimming at the bottom of the glass.

“Don’t blame me. I told you to do what you wanted.”

I sigh. “I’m not. I promise. This is just my sad little life now.”

Sam leans in, plants their chin in their hands. “Okay, I know you two have your own weird language, but I’m your guest and you seem to be intentionally excluding me. Hello! I exist! Who is she?”

I begin to tell them, starting with the situation at the ceremony, the strange comfort Odilie’s family had found in me, the way Page seemed so lonely, desperate for company in the city. How the more I spoke to her, the more she wanted information from me that I couldn’t exactly give her, that her family’s pain was deeper than I could have known because of how little they actually knew about Odilie. How she wanted to learn about her sister, the life she led up to her death. Page’s goal to associate with these wealthy Brooklynites; the favor she was asking of me.