Jack stops whisking for a moment and looks up at me. An immediate warmth seeps into my bones from the heat of her gaze. It’s not fair. She broke my trust. She shouldn’t have the power to make me blush anymore.

“It is sad,” she agrees. “But I’m sure Andrew has told you all about our dysfunctional family.”

Andrew clearly didn’t tell me shit.

“I know what it’s like to have a dad who can’t bother to show up for the holidays,” I say, setting the schedule back on the counter. “Or ever.”

Jack’s face and eyes go soft. In the morning light of the kitchen, her eyes shine a dozen shades of brown, each one warm and comforting. Like molasses cookies. Like medium-roast coffee. Like the worn leather spine of an old, beloved book.

No, Ellie. You’re over her.

And it never meant anything to her.

And two hundred thousand dollars.

Jack’s eyes travel down to the iPad tucked under my arm. “So… you work as a barista now?”

I nod and hope against reason that she won’t ask any follow-up questions.

But of course, she does. “Does that mean you left Laika?”

I hold my computer against the front of my body like a shield. Jack knew me as the Ellie with dreams and goals, the Ellie who’d worked toward something her whole life and then achieved it. The Ellie who’d believed that most things worked out, most of the time.

Standing in front of her now as this Ellie—the Ellie who lost everything, the Ellie who failed, the Ellie who stopped believing in most things—I’m not sure what I regret more: my past naivete or my present cynicism.

“Yes,” I say. “I left Laika.”

“Why? What happened?” Jack asks bluntly. She’s always blunt, always direct, never wraps my fragile feelings in bubble wrap. I love that about her, and I hate that about her, and right now, I just want to evade her questioning.

“It didn’t work out.”

“What do you mean, it didn’t work out?” she pushes. “You moved across the country for that job. It was all part of your ten-year plan. You—”

“It just didn’t work out. I failed, and there’s nothing else to say about it.”

“Honesty game,” Jack says, reflexively, flippantly. It’s only after the words are hovering awkwardly in the kitchen between us that Jack seems to realize perhaps she shouldn’t have said them. She clenches her jaw.