“I’ll come visit you,” I promise. “After you take the bar, I’ll fly out to see you and we’ll party for three days straight.”

“By ‘party,’ you mean eat Sour Punch Bites, drink hard cider, and rewatch all of Gilmore Girls, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Have you heard back from the editor yet?”

“I promise, the second I hear anything, you will be the first person I tell.”

Meredith narrows one eye at me. “Before you tell Ari?”

“Before I tell Ari, I swear it.”

Satisfied in the knowledge that she is my true best friend, Meredith adjusts her carry-on bag over her left shoulder. “What are you going to do about Jack?”

I groan. Jack. I had gone a whole seven minutes without thinking about her (a personal record), but now I’m thinking about her again outside PDX. I’m thinking about how when I sent that email to the editor, she was the first person I wanted to tell.

We were going to celebrate together.

“I don’t know what to do about Jack. Nothing? There’s nothing I can do, right?

Meredith reaches up to give my face a not-so-gentle pat. “Let me know when you figure it out.”

I’m pretty sure there is nothing to figure out. I screwed things up with Jack beyond repair. One Christmas, I ghosted her. The next Christmas, I got fake-engaged to her brother, lied to her about it, and slept with her anyway.

It’s not the kind of thing you come back from.

I don’t even have any means of getting in touch with Jack. We never exchanged numbers, and she’s not on social media. And if I did reach out, what would I say?

I’m sorry?

She hadn’t wanted to hear that on Christmas Eve, and I can’t imagine her wanting to hear it now. No, any attempts to reach out at this point would be selfish, in service of my own needs, alleviating my own guilt.

So I don’t try to reach out. I get a job working at an art-supply store, part-time for now while I finish the new webcomic series I’m working on. I eat family-style dinner with the Brideshead housemates. I go to brunch with Ari and her amazing girlfriends on the weekends. I go to Winslow’s art shows. I figure out my state health insurance so I can find a therapist who isn’t awful—but only because Ari and Gardenia sit on my legs and blast deep tracks by the Pussycat Dolls until I finally complete the application. Apparently, this is an effective method of unfreezing me.

Then I make an intake appointment with a non-suck therapist. No Nicole Scherzinger required. Every single Brideshead housemate is in therapy, and they all refer to their therapists by their first names and talk about them in casual conversation. It’s weird, but in a good way.