AS MY MOTHER led everyone out to the porch for after-dinner drinks, Leigh pulled me aside in the hallway. She pushed her mousy brown hair behind her ears and drew her thin face into a worried expression before saying quietly, “I know you saw Aly.”

Her pale eyes searched mine, plainly looking for some sign of guilt, some admission that I’d done something wrong. I wouldn’t give her that satisfaction.

“Yeah. So?”

Leigh shifted, looking uncomfortable. “You know Aly doesn’t want to see you.”

“Then why did she call me?” I challenged.

“Oh, Peanut,” she sighed. “Aly didn’t call you. Don’t forget that she and I are friends; she told me all about you going to her house.”

“She did call me,” I insisted. “Yeah, I stopped by her house the other day and she told me she didn’t want to talk, so I left. But she called me yesterday morning and asked to grab coffee.”

Leigh stared at me, her expression unreadable. I stared back, daring her to call me a liar. I knew she wouldn’t. She was too sweet. There was a reason Leigh was the only member of this family I would spare in a massacre.

But I understood her doubt. Leigh had set us up, and Aly had always run to her with all sorts of complaints about me, from my alleged clinginess to the time I shattered her bathroom mirror. (The latter was a simple misunderstanding, but that hadn’t stopped Aly from spinning a tale for Leigh about my supposed rage issues.) I was sure Aly had called Leigh to report my uninvited appearance, but hadn’t bothered to later correct the record when she called me. Because she had called. Saturday morning, her voice supplicating, Aly had phoned and asked if I still wanted to talk. When I said of course, she suggested meeting at a coffee shop. Neutral territory, she’d said.

Territory. As though we were warring nations rather than onetime lovers who had drifted apart. Christ, Aly could be so dramatic.

She met me at the coffee shop wearing white, something that irritated me for its connotations of purity. Aly was not the innocent one here, and I was about to tell her so when she opened her mouth and apologized.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “I’ve thought about it, and I think I overreacted. I was surprised to see you, that’s all. After how we left things.”

And I smiled. How had I forgotten that while Aly could be theatrical and irrational, she was also quick to say she was sorry? I graciously accepted her apology and offered my own for not calling ahead, all the while hoping she would give me what I really wanted: a playbook to help ensure I didn’t make the same mistakes with Audrey, didn’t drive Audrey away like my family thought I did Aly.

But Aly had nothing to say she hadn’t said already, just one more chorus in the song of “it wasn’t meant to be.” Why had she called me, then? To assuage her own guilt? What a self-serving waste of time.