“I assure you, I have no interest in talking to anyone about this ever again.”

That’s his promise back, I guess—his version of I’ll never tell, and it should make me happy, or at least relieved. Instead I feel like I’ve done whatever the Masterpiece Theatre version of a drug deal is. I guess it would still be a drug deal, but an old-timey one.

When Reid moves, as though to stand, I get a strange sense of panic at leaving it this way, with this clandestine promise between us, and so I speak—the first question I can think of.

“Why now?”

Left Quirk is the only response he gives me before straightening in his chair again. He turns the cup one-quarter and looks at me.

“I mean, why come to me now, if you saw this then? Before the . . . before the wedding, I mean.”

“It wasn’t the most urgent thing on my to-do list,” he says dryly, but somehow he has managed to telegraph directly into my brain every single way I probably screwed up his life—his relationship, surely his living situation, his job, possibly his friendships. “And I suppose I’m running out of time.”

“You’re running out of time?” This last part is high-pitched enough to sound almost hysterical. Is there something wrong with him? Am I on this man’s bucket list? My eyeballs feel like they’re in a 3D movie, jumping right across the table into his face.

Please, don’t let something be wrong with him, I think, with a startling amount of feeling.

“Ah, no,” he says quickly, obviously disconcerted by my 3D eyeballs. “I’m leaving New York. Probably by the end of the summer.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry? What do I have to be sorry for? This is good for me, that he’s leaving. This is the best possible outcome for this meeting, short of Reid developing spontaneous, highly specific amnesia about me and his wedding program.

The noise he makes—it is a scoff. Nothing so sloppy as a snort. “I’m not.”

“You don’t like New York?”

“I hate New York.”

It almost makes me recoil, the way he’s said this. Bold, sans serif. No caps, but italics for the It’s not a harmless, pedestrian “I hate this song” or “I hate those chocolate balls rolled in shredded coconut.” It’s not one of those small, meaningless hatreds that shear the word of its meaning.

When Reid Sutherland says he hates New York, he really, really means it.

“Why?” In my head I see a very whimsical arrangement of letters asking me “why” I would even want to know this. It’s unusual for me to press this way—to want to press this way. I keep it light; I keep it cheerful.

I keep the peace.

But everything between me and Reid feels a little unusual.