“I felt different, being back there. It was like one of those dreams where you show up back in high school and you’re naked, or you’re in a play and don’t know the lines. It was surreal and unnerving.”

Hannah tried to mask the curiosity she knew must be flooding her face. This was more than she’d ever heard Georgia say on the subject of the cross-continental move she’d abruptly taken some years back. When Georgia had departed Charleston, she’d joined a practice in La Jolla, a gleaming, ritzy town north of San Diego, only thirty minutes away from Hannah, and had announced the world’s longest engagement to a man Hannah still hadn’t met. It was not surprising that Hannah hadn’t seen this coming; Georgia typically played things close to the vest, checking in with the rest of them at infrequent intervals while divulging little of her circumstances. The little Hannah knew had been gleaned from cryptic allusions in group texts that she’d studied as assiduously as a World War II cryptographer, piecing together the outline of her friend’s life as best she could from the careless fragments Georgia tossed out. Some dark trauma had been at the heart of this remarkable evolution involving Georgia’s closest friend, another doctor, who had been fired from the clinic where they’d both practiced, but the details remained murky to Hannah.

“And then on the flight here they called overhead for a doctor. I could not believe this was happening to me again.”

Now, this was a story Hannah did know. Georgia had met her fiancé, a man named Mark, when she’d responded to a flight attendant’s call for help with a sick passenger on an airplane. It was the ultimate meet-cute: not only had she saved the life of the passenger, but it turned out he was a single, attractive man with an interesting job who’d been inadvertently poisoned. Only in fiction did such events occur, unless you were Georgia. Somehow she managed to barrel through life assembling an extraordinarily intense collection of oddball relationships.

“Did you have to save this one too?”

Georgia laughed. “Nah,” she said. “It wasn’t like last time when a stuporous man imprinted on me and I found love. This time it was a stuporous man who’d been overserved at an airport bar prior to boarding. He barfed and felt better, and we all went back to watching bad movies.”