“Mmm?” Her mind kept wandering. What was the purpose of this dinner exactly? To normalize their relationship, she assured herself. Whatever that meant. Should she have gotten a healthier dessert? Clementines? Raspberry sorbet? Did Mandy know? She hadn’t exactly been friendly at the karaoke party. Her beautiful smile was reserved for the select few: Stuart; Roy Clarke; Roy Clarke’s wife, Wendy—she seemed to like her a lot. Peaches had gotten the brush-off—the vague smile, the cursory nod. Well, she was only the school nurse, after all.

“Will you be needing a bag today?”

“No, no bag,” Peaches said, and carried the pie out of the store. A green taxi raced up Court Street. She could have sworn she saw Liam’s friend Ryan with a tiger painted on his bare chest in a poster in the advertising box atop the taxi’s roof. The word SUBLIME was stamped in purple above his head.

She was half an hour early. Stuart Little’s place was only three blocks away. If she wandered the streets nearby, she’d risk bumping into him. She decided to walk down to Congress, over toward the water, and then circle back up Kane.

The sun was low and the sky was streaked with violets and pinks. Peaches carried her pie down the hill and across Hicks Street. Van Voorhees Park was just ahead, more a large playground with slides, monkey bars, and swings than an actual park. The younger grades at Liam’s school had their end-of-the-year picnic here because there were sprinklers and enough benches for the parents and teachers to sit down. Last year, Peaches had had an awkward conversation with the mother of a third grader. She wanted advice on how to make her daughter “cool.” She worried her kid would suffer in middle school because she liked hats and refused to wear denim.

“My husband likes hats,” Peaches told her. “And he doesn’t own a single pair of jeans.”

There were two teenagers on the big-kid swings, a boy and a girl, kissing. Peaches looked away and then looked back again. She’d washed those gray pants over the weekend, that blue NASA T-shirt. It was Liam with Roy Clarke’s daughter, Shy. They weren’t kissing normally, either. They were really going at it and sort of licking each other. Peaches ducked behind a tree. The pie trembled in her hands. She didn’t like to spy, but she’d never seen Liam with a girl before.

“Grrr,” she heard Liam growl. Then he licked the girl’s neck.

“You are so high!” the girl squealed. She was wearing the type of jumpsuit gas station attendants wear. It was pretty cool.

“Grrrr,” Liam growled again. The girl pushed him away and he fell on the ground.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Get down here and look up at the sky!”