“But if you look at what’s actually happening,” Dani went on, shaking her finger at the TV, “if you look at the way they look at each other, it’s not that creepy. He knows it’s never happening. He knows he’s been a dick about it. He knows she knows he knows. It’s his way of closing the door on it, saying he’s going to be less of a dick going forward. I think it’s actually rather lovely. I like that line, ‘At Christmas you tell the truth.’”

“Being less of a dick,” Max said. “Something to aspire to.”

She threw a pillow at him. He caught it and watched her watch the rest of the scene.

“I don’t know,” she said, sighing as the man walked away from Keira Knightley’s house. “It’s a memorable scene. I guess there’s just something about an unrequited crush.”

Yes. “There is, isn’t there?”

When Dani woke the next morning in Max’s giant, posh bed at the Four Seasons—Max himself was on a shrimpy rollaway—it was to the sound of an incoming text.

She read it through bleary eyes. She and Max had stayed up until four talking. Not even about anything of consequence, unless you considered bickering about Love Actually of consequence. She suspected he’d been leaning into the meaningless banter because he had exhausted his well of revelations. And what revelations they had been. Surprising, but only in the way that stories of cruelty always were. In another, deeper sense, they were the missing piece to the mystery that was Max. The explanation for why he was always deflecting attention from himself and embracing his bad reputation.

But actually, there was still a bit of a mystery, and that was how he had retained his guileless ability to express emotion. To say, I like you and I want to hang out with you, when he had grown up with such unkindness.

She was suffused with tenderness toward him. Not pity, because she knew he wouldn’t want that, but her heart broke to think of the little boy trying to protect his brother. And of the man that boy had become. Her wonderful, strong friend.

She’d have thought they’d run out of things to say last night, given that they’d now spent almost forty-eight continuous hours together, but they hadn’t. In fact, they’d fallen asleep talking in the dark, like teenagers at a slumber party.

“Oh my god!” she exclaimed as she read the text.

Max sat bolt upright in bed, his hair sticking up like he’d stuck a finger into an electrical socket. “What? What’s wrong?” Max Minimus started barking. He was in Max’s bed, the traitor.