“So you never take that necklace off, and now you’ve given it away to someone, which seems like a fairly significant gesture of fraternity. Which is interesting given that the last time we talked about her, we decided it’d be best if you and Jess just stayed colleagues. I’m not aware that colleagues have the sort of relationship where they trade jewelry.”

“What on earth do you mean by ‘significant gesture of fraternity’?” said Touchstone.

“You decided it’d be best if we stayed colleagues. But things changed,” said Ros. “I decided to show her the poem. And now we’ve been hanging out a little.”

“Dang, Ros’s got game,” Touchstone said, and offered them a pound. My stomach dropped. This was getting worse and worse: the poem, the chain, and now hanging out? How was this all going so thoroughly sideways?

“What do you mean, hanging out?” I said, trying to keep the wailing out of my voice.

“I mean—hanging out. I don’t know. We go to her house. We go for walks. What’s with the third degree? Why do you even care?”

I was almost insulted by the question. Why wouldn’t I care? Ros was my best friend in the whole entire world. Maybe I was jealous, that was always possible, but let’s not forget they were now involved with someone who, last time I checked, had punched someone at a party. I cared because our first night here, they had walked headlong into the river, without knowing how deep it was or how strong the current was, and they were doing the exact same thing, only now with their heart.

And I had followed them the first time, but I couldn’t follow them now.

“Phoebe says she’s bad news,” I said, pathetically repeating my same lie.

“You said that the first time we talked about Jess,” Touchstone said.

“Who’s Phoebe, anyway?” said Ros.

“Seriously? You met her. She’s my coworker at the costume shop. See, this is why I care about the chain—because we came here, the three of us, and the whole point was that we were going to spend time together, but I feel like I haven’t seen either of you in weeks. We’re the Triumvirate! And we have only two months left in the summer, and we don’t even know the basics about what’s going on in one another’s lives.”

“Yeah,” Touchstone said. “Like how some of us wanted to go to the Dropped Acorn.”

“It’s like—we’re sleeping in the same room, but I feel like we’re living in different worlds,” I said to Ros.

It wasn’t just that we were living in different worlds. It was that Ros was carefully, and deliberately, constructing another world without me.

“So come hang out with us,” Ros said.

“Okay,” I said, sort of surprised at how easy that was. “When?”