You had to know her to see the cracks in her veneer. For example, when she realized she’d rented an English basement, concern flickered through her blue-green eyes for a fraction of a second. She blinked it away so quickly that most people wouldn’t have noticed it, but I did. That was part of being a best friend.

I didn’t need that minute slip to know she was anxious, though. Sometime around three that morning, I’d been walking to the bathroom when I heard a voice coming from the guest room. I eased open the door and peered inside. There was Audrey, stretched out on the bed with eyes closed and mouth moving. I strained to hear what she was saying but it sounded like nothing more than gibberish. I was turning to leave when she clearly said, “I’m scared.”

I knew little about somniloquy, my entire experience limited to the times Audrey talked in her sleep during college. Her nighttime utterances were usually indiscernible, but often included some variation of the phrase I’m scared. At first, I thought Audrey was having nightmares, but I later realized they corresponded with a particularly stressful time: midterms, finals, the weeks leading up to graduation. That was the only clue that Audrey was nervous; she hid her anxieties well. I would have sold my soul for a poker face half as good as hers.

I wished that for once she could allow herself to be a bit vulnerable and admit that she was scared. She didn’t have to stay in that basement apartment with its window opening onto an alley and its sketchy upstairs neighbor. She could move into my guest room instead. I could help her. Back in college, Audrey had offered me a hand, had given me hope when no one else did. Her friendship saved me. She had guided me through a tough transition, and I was determined to repay the favor in kind.

CHAPTER SEVEN HIM

Like all of Audrey’s followers, I knew she moved to Washington, DC. I’d seen the announcement during one of her Instagram Lives. I had been so captivated by her pale, freckled shoulders, visible from underneath a white, spaghetti-strap dress, and the way that her beautiful red-gold hair curled around them, that I almost missed what she said. For days, she had been teasing “exciting news” and I’d guessed she had a trip planned—the last two times she’d done a Live reveal of “exciting news,” it had been for trips to London and Miami. So when her glossy lips revealed that she was moving here, my brain short-circuited. I rewatched the Live twenty times or more, my pulse thundering more loudly and powerfully each time, until I realized that it was true: Audrey would soon be here.

I marked my calendar with her moving day, and I began checking her Instagram every hour, often more frequently, hoping for updates. My bones rattled with anticipation as the days until she arrived dwindled to three, two, one. And then she was here. Her Stories showed her buying coffee at Columbia Brews, a hipster coffee shop near Logan Circle, and captured a team of men in matching T-shirts carrying boxes into her apartment. The evidence was indisputable. She was really here, and I could think of nothing else. With every inhalation, I knew we were breathing the same thick air. With every sunrise, I knew the sun was creeping across our rooms at the same time. With every passing second, I wondered if she was nearby. She obliterated every other thought, leaving me a stammering mess during dinner with my family, an ineloquent scatterbrain on work emails.