Instead of answering, because it was rhetorical anyway, she slides on a pair of reading glasses and opens a blue file folder. “You were talking about Tate earlier.”

“I was?”

She nods. “Yes, about your feelings when he left Whittier.”

“Oh, right. Well, it hurt like hell.” I stop, hating the bitterness that punctuates my words. Tate understood something early on that I didn’t get until much later: we couldn’t heal each other, no matter how much love there was between us. He tried to tell me that he was leaving, I think, but we were teenagers, and I was too embroiled in the storm of my own thoughts to understand what he was trying to say. It was a late-October evening, and Tate and I sat in the bed of his pickup truck at the head of the bay, a six-pack of beer between us, our middle fingers raised to each car headed out of town.

We were happy, I thought, content with the universe of our friendship—at least I was. It was Tate’s eighteenth birthday, and I’d just finished putting the last candle into my impromptu cake of Twinkies and Ho Hos. Make a wish, I’d said.

We sat with our legs crisscrossed, our knees touching, and Tate looked at me with his green eyes that nearly always took my breath away.

I love you, he said.

It wasn’t the first time. We’d been telling each other for as long as I could remember. With him, it was simply a feeling that had always existed. But this time when he said it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end because I thought he was trying to tell me something more, and I didn’t understand. I ignored the feeling and kissed him—light, probing, sweetened by packaged sugar and cream filling. Soon his hands roamed, leaving heated trails down my back. This wasn’t new, either, but when he lay on top of me, it felt like he savored me in a different way, and it left me with an empty yearning.

Afterward, we’d settled back onto the truck bed, lain next to each other, and watched the stars pop out one by one. The length of his body warmed my side, simultaneously familiar and intoxicating. I was happy, satiated, sure that this was something that would never change.

I can’t s . . . s-tay here, Claire.

I’d sat up so fast my vision blackened. What?

His eyes stayed on the sky. My dad will never leave, you know that, r . . . r-ight?