The orchard isn’t really big enough to be an orchard, technically—it’s just a loose cluster of a half dozen or so trees (oranges, lemons, and a lone avocado) and stone benches that sit, quiet and solid, under their branches.

Lulu hears Owen before she sees him. He’s quiet too, barefoot like she is, but Lulu has spent years and years in this space when it was truly empty. She knows what it sounds like the moment someone else arrives.

He’s carrying a bowl. “I didn’t know if you needed something for the oranges,” he says. “To put them in.”

“Oh,” Lulu says. “Yeah. That’s smart, actually. Thanks.”

Owen places the bowl on one of the benches, and Lulu puts the oranges she’s already picked into it.

“It was also a good excuse,” Owen says. “To. Um. Talk to you.”

How long have they known each other? Lulu watches the way the light filters through the trees’ leaves, falling on the mess of his sandy hair, and does the math: since the first day of seventh grade. It was five years in September, then. Like, basically a third of her life so far.

“About what?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, “to start with. The way I ended things . . . I’m not proud of it.”

Owen didn’t ghost her, but he came close. He told her he didn’t want to talk about what had happened on the phone, and then he didn’t try to make plans with her when he got back to LA. Finally, desperate, she called him the night before school started.

He said, “I can’t do this anymore, Lu.” He probably said other things too, but that’s what Lulu remembers: the word can’t, and how tired his voice sounded, and how much her heart ached, like it was exhausted, like all it wanted was to be allowed to quit beating for a while.

Now he says, “You were, like, really important to me, and I hope I didn’t make you feel, just because it ended badly, that I hadn’t—that I didn’t—that—that wasn’t true.”

This does not sound like a prelude to an offer of the two of them starting over again. Lulu feels her defenses rising as surely as if they were physical walls going up, locking firmly into place.

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she says. “I mean, since you’re here and everything. I feel like it’s obvious that I’m okay with you. Don’t worry, O. We’re good.”