Ugh. She’s still trying. I don’t know if it’s obnoxious or pathetic. Maybe both. Rather than acknowledge her, I open one of the boxes waiting to be unpacked and start pulling out shrink-wrapped pairs of spray bottles full of cleaning solution. Rather than leave them on the shelves this way, so somebody will cut away the shrink wrap and leave it lying around, I separate them and line them up on the shelf. I might not have a typical job here, but I’ll still do it right.

“I heard why you left early,” she offers. “And I’m sorry she did that. I don’t know why she does those things.”

“Don’t apologize for her,” I warn in a flat voice. “You have no idea how it sounds. And it makes me feel sorry for you.”

“You feel sorry for me?”

“I do.” I still don’t want to look at or speak to her, but now that she’s the one who started this conversation, I’m not going to hold back. If she doesn’t want to hear it, she should leave me alone. “You know what she’s doing is wrong, and you know it deserves an apology, but you won’t stand up to her and tell her to quit it when she’s in the middle of being awful. So yeah, it’s really sad to listen to.”

“You don’t know how it is.”

“I think I do. But it doesn’t matter. You made your decision, and that’s fine. But you can’t change your mind and act like the past never happened. It did. And it hurt.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I really am.”

What good has that ever done? It doesn’t erase any of the pain she’s caused. All the time I spent wondering what I did wrong, why it was so easy for her to turn her back on me.

I can’t pretend it doesn’t feel good, though, hearing her apologize. Still… “That’s fine, but it doesn’t change anything. You betrayed me, and you were the one person I thought I could count on. We’re never going back to the way things used to be.”

She works silently for a few moments, and I think I might hear her sniffle once or twice when she’s facing away from me. “Okay, so it can’t be the way it used to be,” she finally murmurs. “But can we at least talk? Like, when we’re here together. We might as well talk, right?”

“Honestly? I have nothing to say to you. We’re not going to be friendly, so let’s just get the job done.”