“Sabrina, I have been happy with Sean. Just because I feel more overall when Elliot is around doesn’t mean that those feelings are more valid, or happier.”

“Really? Do you even know what happy looks like? I was wondering this the other day, actually. Had I ever seen you happy before the picnic?”

This feels like a violent shove from someone who has known me for ten years. “You’re joking.”

She shakes her head. “When Elliot walked up to us . . . I swear that was the first time I’d seen you smile like that—with your entire body—and it made me question everything about your personality before then.”

“Wow,” I say slowly. That feels . . . enormous.

“You think you’re happy, but you’re barely living.”

“Sabrina, that’s residency and working eighty-plus hours a week.”

“No,” she says with a firm shake of her head. She leans back in her chair, taking her mug of coffee with her. “Do you remember freshman year?”

I feel the cold shadow of that time creeping over me. “Barely.”

“Ever since I met you, Elliot has been the third person with us, every second. I sometimes felt like the things you told me, you only told me because he wasn’t there.” She holds up a hand when I start to respond to this. “That’s not a complaint, by the way. I had Dave, and I had you. You had me . . . but you also had him—in your thoughts, in every single thing you did. When you went out with guys, it was like . . . you were slinking out and sneaking back in at night, as if there was someone who might be mad that you’d been on a date.”

Letting out a long breath, I study her, hating her for doing this, for putting these truths, which so far lived only in the dusty shadows of my memory, out into the public space.

“The first time you slept with Julian? You remember that?”

I let out a laugh-groan. I do remember. It was halfway through freshman year. Guitar-playing, long-haired Julian was a demigod on campus, and a junior. Beautiful, mildly vain, not as deep as he thought he was—or maybe that’s just my take in hindsight. For whatever reason, he started pursuing me in October, much to the heated jealousy of his band’s groupies. I finally agreed to go out with him; at the time I thought maybe diving into something with someone else would make everything back in California disappear.

We had sex at his place after our first date. I don’t really remember much about it other than thinking, while it was happening, that there were at least fifteen other women who would want to be in this bed right now, and that he was probably doing a fairly capable job at the whole thing. But all I wanted was for him to be done so I could go home and curl into a ball.

I got back to the dorm room I shared with Sabrina, and before I could say a single word, I threw up on her favorite pair of purple Docs before breaking down into a hysterical puddle and telling her everything about Elliot.