My focus slides past him, to my father glowering mutinously in the doorway. He’s wearing a Santa hat on his head, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t put it there.

“You should probably leave Dad alone. He’s not the kind of guy who shares earbuds. Or listens to podcasts.”

Hall’s mouth thins, looking drawn. “Maybe I should sing to him?”

“Please don’t.”

My phone keeps buzzing with notifications, which I’m not going to check here in public because there are too many busybodies. “I need a minute. Don’t sing to my dad.” I’m trying to impress him and make him regret all of his offenses against me, such as not letting MTV film in our house for my super-sweet sixteenth birthday. Also, for allowing me to be named after his mother-in-law.

As I slip past Dad, he seizes my sleeve.

“Where did you meet your boyfriend?” he whispers. “How long have you two been together? Something is off about him.”

Athena and her husband are watching, tittering like two nosy old crones. The glue in their relationship is pettily judging everyone else’s relationships to feel superior. “Fiancé, not boyfriend,” I correct him, then hurry away.

I fish my phone out of my pocket, closing the door to the screened-in back porch behind me. I haven’t posted anything on Instagram in a few days, which is the longest social media break I’ve ever taken.

I’m being tagged in stories from my followers, all screenshotting Lucas Dormer’s latest post.

My arms are going tingly, blood pooling to my forehead, my ears, where my heartbeat rushes loud and swift. I lean against a support beam, index finger digging at a perfectly fingertip-sized hole in the screen, and brace myself for impact, as the name Lucas Dormer generally provokes in me a frothing swell of rage.

I have him blocked, which is why I didn’t see until now that he posted a picture of me for Flashback Friday. I swipe over to his profile and grimace at a picture of us kissing, looking lovey-dovey. The next picture in the slide is an engagement ring, and he’s captioned it with a broken-heart emoji. Sometimes I think about what could’ve been.

I suck in a sharp breath, scrolling through the flood of sympathetic comments. You’ve got to be kidding me.

Everyone loves Lucas Dormer. A real boy-next-door type, despite his rebellious phase after he left the boy band The Right Now to go solo.

Lucas is the sort of person who seems like a dream come true at first.

He was so much more attentive, so much more in love, so much more committed than any guy I’d ever been involved with, which elevated our relationship status in record speed. We were using words like soul mate and spending every single second of every single day together. If I had to leave him for a couple hours, he’d text me long, heartfelt messages. After two weeks, we were talking about having children together. Big romantic gestures were everyday occurrences: a wall of roses, pink diamonds, spur-of-the-moment vacations, surprise fireworks. You know that high you get when you say I love you for the first time to someone? It was like that, nonstop. Whenever I started to drift down from that high—after a while, it was exhausting being up there all the time—he would outdo himself. Bring us back up to that level again. It was, in a word, intense. To me, intense = good, because?? Right?? It had to be a positive thing.