“I’ll walk back with you to the hotel,” I say. “Your mom can see us back there. We can make a detour for some guava juice if you want.”

He lifts one side of his mouth at that, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. I get the sense he’s trying to make me feel better, instead of vice versa.

“Okay, well…goodbye,” he says to Lorna.

Lorna smiles at him, then at me.

“Goodbye, you two,” she says, her voice steady, giving nothing away. I put my hand on Sam’s shoulder as I steer us towards the stairs, and feel the hairs on my neck prickle—the prickle of uncertainty, of a future we can’t see coming.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Outside Lorna’s apartment the sun is shining, the city is bright and thriving and suddenly loud. I realize how tired I am, and now this farewell with Lorna seems to have used up whatever emotional energy I had left after Hannah Feldman.

“I could use a coffee.” I look over at Sam. “Want to get something?”

Sam shakes his head, not looking at me.

“Want me to carry those books for you?”

“It’s okay.”

We walk on through the streets, and I’m thinking again how much life there is here, how small a city can make you feel, surrounded by so much energy that’s not yours. I wonder if Hannah Feldman lives in a city. Oliver didn’t say, but I imagine her living in New York: a sharp, slick eighteen-year-old, fluent in cultural references that are too witty for me to ever understand, with a confidence I’ll never possess.

I wish she’d never emailed him. I wish he’d never known.

I don’t like to think of myself as ungenerous—she’s just an eighteen-year-old girl. And maybe it’s a cop-out but I feel so sure that if we had kids of our own, I could bear it better. I’m almost certain I could.

She hasn’t stolen anything from you, Gillian.

It’s true, I know it is. But my heart and my head feel different things.