Doesn’t matter if I draw a dick with a bowtie on the notebook. It’s pitch black and neither she nor I will be able to see it.

“Suí síos le do thoil.” Sit down in Gaelic.

She ignores my party-pooper comment. “Sorry, I don’t speak dead languages. Wait here, please.”

Aurora dashes into the house and comes back with a plastic bag. She takes out two flashlights, loads of little candles, and a box of matches. I scan her coolly as candles drop from her delicate hands. She is flustered and struggles to keep it all together.

“Are you trying to summon your long-lost, non-existent soul through séance?” I wonder aloud.

She lets out a breathless chuckle. “I just remember how dark the night was in your backyard from when…” She turns the two flashlights on, placing one behind me and one in front of me, then shakes her head.

From when I unknowingly took your virginity because your ex-boyfriend couldn’t finish the job and in exchange gave you multiple orgasms. Yeah.

“Anyway, I’m going to drag some of your furniture out here so I’ll have somewhere to light these candles. I can’t take a decent picture with no light.”

“Cheers, Captain Obvious.” I watch her face, looking for crumbs of emotion.

Aurora doesn’t respond. When she enters the house again, I follow her. No matter how much I’m trying to be a dick—and, in my humble opinion, my efforts don’t go unnoticed—I’m slightly above watching her drag heavy furniture outside in the middle of the night by herself.

I carry the coffee table she pointed at and put it outside. She lines it with candles and lights them. I go back to my spot between the flashlights, plucking the pen from behind my ear. I scowl at the notebook again. In my periphery, Aurora is plugging the tube adapter into her camera.

She squats down on one leg and takes a picture of me. I clench my jaw, remembering what she did with the original pictures she took of me. Her cruel confessions. Her pretty, glacier heart.

But then she collects napkins and asks me if I want something from the store and asks about Mam and Father Doherty. Something doesn’t add up.

“Napkins.” I look up, musing. One word. Five tons of history crammed into it.

“Weren’t you the one who enacted the no-mingling rule?” She bats her eyelashes, feigning innocence and taking another picture of me.

She stands up and changes the position of the flashlights, now aiming them at my face. I don’t squint. Sitting around in a garden with a notebook is emasculating enough.

“It’s a statement, not an olive branch.”

“In that case, I choose not to address the statement and tramp all over the un-extended olive branch,” she snaps.

I get sick pleasure from knowing I hit a nerve. Hate is the closest thing to love you can squeeze out of the unattainable.

I hurt her back!