He looks up from his menu and maybe it’s my slightly anxious expression that clues him in. “With Rachel?”

I nod, but her name triggers a defensive reaction in me: he should be with someone named Rachel, who reads with relish every issue of the New Yorker, and works in nonprofit, and composts all her eggshells and beet peelings so she can grow her own produce. Meanwhile, I’m a mess, with never-ending med school loans, mommy issues, daddy issues, Elliot issues, and a shameful subscription to US Weekly.

“Things are okay, actually,” he says. “I think. I hope eventually we can be friends again. In hindsight, it couldn’t ever have been more.”

This sentiment slips into my bloodstream, warm and electric. “Elliot.”

“I heard what you said,” he says earnestly. “You’re engaged, I get it. But it will be hard for me to just be your friend, Macy. It’s not in my DNA.” He meets my eyes and puts the menu back down near his arm. “I’ll try, but I already know this about myself.”

I feel his disarming honesty chipping away at the resilient shell around me. I wonder how many times he could tell me he loved me before I melted into a puddle at his feet.

“Then I think some ground rules are in order,” I say.

“Ground rules,” he repeats, nodding slowly. “As in, no expectations?” I nod. “And, maybe . . . anything you want to know, I’ll tell you, and vice versa?”

If this is quid pro quo, I’m going to have to put on my big girl pants and get through it. Although everything inside me is rioting in panic, I agree.

“So,” he says, easing into a smile, “I don’t know what you’d like to know about Rachel. We were friends first. For years, in grad school and after.”

The idea of him being friends with another female for years is a knife pushed slowly into my sternum. Taking a sip of water, I manage an easy follow-up. “Grad school?”

“MFA from NYU,” he says, smiling. Rubbing a hand over his hair as if he’s not quite used to the feel of it yet, he adds, “Looking back, it seems a little like when we hit twenty-eight, we defaulted into a relationship.”

I know what he means. I turned twenty-eight and defaulted to Sean.

He’s a mind reader: “Tell me about this guy you’re going to marry.”

This is a minefield, but I may as well put it all right up front and be honest, too.

“We met at a dinner welcoming all of the incoming residents,” I say, and he doesn’t need me to do the math for him, but I do: “in May.”

His brows slowly inch up beneath his shaggy mop of hair. “Oh.”

“We hit it off right away.”

Elliot nods, watching me intensely. “I assume you’d have to.”

I blink down to the table, clearing my throat and trying not to respond defensively. Elliot has always been brutally honest, but it never came out sharply at me before. To me, his words were always gentle and adoring. Now my heart is pounding so hard, I feel it swooshing between us, and it makes me wonder whether our individual heartaches are silently duking this out from inside our bodies.