“What about my life?”

She closes her eyes briefly, shakes her head, and I think she might be retreating, readying herself to cut this conversation off.

But then she opens them again.

“New York was my dream, Meg,” she says, her voice hard, but tinged with sadness. “My whole life, I planned to come here. I love you, and I’m glad you’re successful. But . . .” She trails off, and for one miserable, horrible second, I see her chin quiver. I step forward, on instinct, but she holds a hand up.

“But after all this time, I’m still nannying. I spent years in dance classes, in vocal lessons. The most I use them now is to entertain two kids who’ll probably have forgotten about me by next summer, because they’ll have some new version of Miss Michelucci.”

This part, it’s not new. Sibby and I have spent hours talking through her dashed hopes, her disappointments, her frustrations. We’ve cried over shitty auditions and lost parts together, ranted about her nannying job and its various annoyances. But the way it’s directed at me now, the way it’s an indictment of me, somehow—that is new. New and awful.

“I worked so hard to get here, Meg. You didn’t even like the city. You . . . fell into it.”

Something must pass over my face, some trace of the devastation I feel at being told that this is what Sibby thinks of me, and of my work. She raises a hand to her forehead, rubs her hand across it in exhaustion.

“I know you work hard, okay? I know you do. But you came here, and within a year you had people lining up for you. We move to Brooklyn and it’s hardly any time at all before you’re practically famous here. You start a whole new business.” She gives a breathy, exhausted laugh, looks toward the couch where Lark and I sat. “You’re friends with a movie star.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, but even as I’m saying it, I know it’s not right, or at least it’s not all the way right. I’m sorry for the way Sibby feels, but I don’t know if I should be sorry for why she feels that way, for how my work has made her feel. I’m speechless. I have no idea what to say, where to even start, to confront this.

“So,” she says. “You’re happy to know it? The entire, petty truth of it? It makes the friendship so much better to have that out in the open?”

“It’s not petty,” I stumble out. “And it is better. It’s better if we don’t . . . if we don’t hide things from each other. I’m really trying not to do that.”