‘He doesn’t know how to pull weeds for his life!’ She chortles. ‘And those ties! My god!’

‘I wouldn’t let him out of the tunnel!’ I howl, making her laugh even harder.

‘Oh, May.’ Mrs Bradley lets out one last chuckle before smiling contentedly my way, pushing a stray piece of her greying brown hair back into her ponytail. She has a youthful face, and I can tell she’s given Colt much of it – the steely eyes, the dimples. ‘You are so good for him, though, you know? He struggled a lot last year. It’s good to see him back on his feet. Literally and figuratively.’

I swallow hard. Well. Like every conversation I have with anyone close to Colt, this seems to have taken a turn. Maybe I shouldn’t pry, but I think about how patiently he’d just sat and listened when I talked about what happened in Pontiac. The image of my photo taped to the inside of Colt’s locker comes back to my mind, clear as day. The direction our conversation had started to tentatively creep in, out of the lines I’d drawn for myself before we started this thing and into territory that more than broke fake relationship play number four: no deep life conversations. Who knows how long that photo had been on there? Since he got drafted? That meant that maybe I was wrong, and maybe he had remembered me in his stupid, no-contact way.

And maybe I’d also never reached out. I hadn’t texted or called or anything either, but I remembered him just as well. Clearly my head and my heart remembered him. Because even all these years after he left, I was still talking to him with the kind of candour I could never muster with anyone else. I had never told anyone else about how I felt after junior year, not even Jordan, not completely. Did that mean he’d been more than a friend? What the hell was he now?

In the moment, though, I snap back to reality and repeat Mrs Bradley’s words in my mind until they make sense. He struggled a lot last year. ‘Struggled?’