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!

I look up, and our eyes meet, just like they did all those years ago on Drury Street. Even then I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this girl was put in my life to change it. I didn’t know at the time she’d choose to derail it and lead it on a collision course with everyone I cared about.

“Sooner or later, we’ll both have to play nice. Shiny Boyfriend is leaving tomorrow,” I hiss.

“He has a name.” She lowers her camera, her eyes narrowing.

Ken. I bet it’s Ken.

“I don’t care for it.” I press the pen against the page in my notebook until it bleeds, my eyes still trained on her.

“Callum.” She lowers her camera. “His name is Callum Brooks.”

I hitch one shoulder up. “All I heard is Shiny Boyfriend.”

I scribble something in the notebook.

Can you please stop being so beautiful and real and alive all over my house like you own it or something?

Can she?

Can she kindly enlighten me as to what went through my mind when I came up with this plan? What I was hoping to achieve, other than dragging her down the miserable road I have walked one too many miles on?

Rory takes a few more pictures. I chew the tip of the pen. I don’t know how authors do it, how they bleed words onto the clinical, plastic keyboard. Seems cold and impersonal. I can barely write on a page. I bet Rory could be an author. I bet she could write on a MacBook, the mother of all fancy-schmancy technological diseases. I’m making myself sick just thinking about it.

Also, since when did I stop calling her Aurora in my mind and go back to Rory?

“Do you have a MacBook?” I blurt.

She shakes her head, but doesn’t look at me like I’m a weirdo. I’ve always loved that about her. “Why?”

“Never mind. So, napkins,” I repeat the word.

She sighs. “It means nothing.”

“Nothing means nothing; otherwise it wouldn’t exist.”

“Some people collect coasters, postcards, stamps. I collect napkins. It’s not a big deal.”

Silence.

I look down at the notepad. Back up. “I just find it quite peculiar, since I was under the impression you hated me.”

She looks up from the pictures she’s scanning in her camera. Her eyebrows pull together. “Why would I hate you?”

Why indeed.

Why?

I’ve asked myself the very same question a million times, wondering if I should buy a ticket to America, if I should send her one to Ireland, if I should rip out my heart and dump it at her door.

“I didn’t hate you then,” she whispers. “But I’m starting to now.”