“C’mon,” Bea says. “If we’re gonna get mozzarella, we need bread or crackers or something.”

“Sure.”

“Hey, Molly said you said you weren’t dating anyone. That girl is a gossip black hole, I swear. She sucks in information like it’s her job.” Bea pauses, but Lulu doesn’t say anything, so she continues. “Was she wrong? Or did you and Cass break up?”

“I don’t know if we were ever really dating.”

“That sounds like semantics.”

Eataly is the fanciest grocery store Lulu’s ever been in, but it’s still just a grocery store: fluorescent lit, with aisles of small, brightly colored things. When she and Bea used to do this, Lulu felt like such a grown-up.

“We’re not talking,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Bea pauses them so that she can examine a display of preserved fish. “You aren’t an anchovy person, right?”

Lulu shakes her head.

“I was excited about you and Cass,” Bea says.

“Yeah, well, me too.”

“It seemed like she was good for you.”

Lulu balks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It wasn’t an insult.”

“No, I know, but it makes her sound like . . . vitamins, or something.”

Bea selects a tin of anchovies anyway, and tosses it in their basket before moving down the aisle. “Well, maybe that’s what you needed,” she says, and Lulu’s still catching up to her, so she almost misses it. “At least you wanted to talk to somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

Bea’s standing in front of the olives now, which Lulu knows she doesn’t like. Still, she scrutinizes the labels like they’re important documents. “I don’t know if you know what the last few months have been like for me, Lulu.”

“For you?”

“Yes, for me! For me, trying to take care of you, and having you just insist on pretending everything was okay. Which it clearly wasn’t! It, Lulu, it clearly was not.” Bea pulls a jar of black olives off the shelf and then replaces it again. “So when you started hanging out with Cass I was pissed, selfishly, because I missed you, but mostly I was glad, at least, that you were excited about something. I figured, at least she’s talking to someone. Since you wouldn’t talk to me.”

“I talked to you!”

“Not about anything that mattered. Not about what was really going on.” Bea has had enough of the olives. She spins to face Lulu now, and that’s when Lulu realizes, Oh, we’re really doing this. In front of a display of imported olives in a fancy food store in a fancy mall. Why not? Where would be better?

So she says, “You wanted to hear, what? A big gay sob story? A tender coming out?”

“Jesus, Lulu. I wanted to hear whatever you wanted to tell me.”