“Can I remove your sock?” she asks. I might be imagining it, but her voice sounds huskier, scrapes pleasantly across the exposed parts of my skin. I know she’s asking to be polite—that she is establishing clear boundaries between us—but there’s something about the way she waits for permission to touch me that stirs my misguided feelings back into action.

You’re over her, the voice in my head screams. You need to be over her.

But the lust is louder than the scream when I say, “Sure,” and Jack pulls down my thick sock to reveal my pale ankle. Her thumb slowly strokes the back of my heel.

“I didn’t realize pâtissiers needed such intense first-aid training,” I choke out. Maybe if I turn this into a joke, I can start laughing again instead of feeling like parts of myself are waking up for the first time in a year.

“I was a camp counselor every summer in high school,” she says, still stroking my foot with her callused fingers. “And I’m going to say to you what I said to a lot of crying ten-year-olds during games of capture the flag: you just twisted your ankle. It’ll probably feel fine in about twenty minutes or so.”

I wait for her to let go of me, but she still has my foot in her hands. There’s something so startlingly intimate about it. Her rough fingers, my cold foot, skin and skin and skin. There is something about the vulnerability of her hands on my body and the snow surrounding us that takes me back to that day, to the honesty game and the openness.

“I got fired from Laika,” I blurt into the quiet of the woods. As soon as I say it, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my chest, the hole inside me filling a little bit. I keep going. “I couldn’t hack it, and I got fired after three months. Like a total failure.”

Jack doesn’t look up from my foot, from the place where her fingers are still absently massaging my skin. “I know what that job meant to you, and I’m sorry. But people get fired, Elle,” she says with a shrug. “Failure happens. That doesn’t make you a failure.”

I shake my head. “You don’t understand.”

“Okay.” She sounds so casual, so unconcerned. “Then make me understand. Tell me what happened.”

I close my eyes and see my supervisor pulling me into his office; he had a thick beard obscuring his expression, and he was wearing a Patagonia pullover that smelled like patchouli and burned coffee. My stomach felt like a wrung-out dish towel because my gastrointestinal distress always knows bad news is coming before my brain does.