I’d been expecting plenty of questions, from Why didn’t you tell us you were a model? to What the hell were you thinking when you did that photo shoot? But not this one.

“Why—why are you here?” My voice catches.

“What?” She looks confused by my confusion.

“That photo shoot … you saw it, everyone saw it. And I’m not even a model anymore,” I babble, aware that I’m probably making zero sense. “You don’t gain anything out of being friends with me, so why did you follow me?”

Daisy stares at me, stunned. Then, very slowly, she says, “Leah, have you never had a real friend before?”

A real friend. My mind browses through the years and comes back empty-handed. You have plenty of people you hang out with at school, I try to remind myself. Hundreds of numbers in your phone. People who compliment you all the time and invite you to things. But how many of them can I actually call? Someone like Cate would drop me in a heartbeat if I ever made a scene the way I did just now. With her, everything is conditional, transactional.

“No, not really,” I whisper. It’s so humiliating to admit that I can’t even look at her when I say it. The mirage is gone now, the beauty filter switched off, the makeup removed. It doesn’t matter how pretty or popular I make myself—I’m always going to be the girl nobody wanted to sit with at lunch.

“Okay, well, now you do,” Daisy says. She sounds more sure of herself than I’ve ever heard her, and I jerk my head up in surprise. “I don’t know exactly what you’ve experienced in the past,” she goes on, louder, raising her voice for the first time since we met at the airport, “and there are a lot of horrible people and horrible situations, but you can’t keep holding on to that for the rest of your life. You have to believe that there are people who will genuinely like you, and care about you, and worry over you when something’s wrong.”

I swallow thickly. “I … I’m just …” Bone-tired. Unbelievably, extraordinarily sad. Guilty. Betrayed. Heartbroken, heart-shattered, heartsick. All of the above, and yet, that still wouldn’t even begin to cover it. Every emotion I’ve ever pushed down in the past few years has reappeared, breaking past my ribs.

“Also, for what it’s worth,” Daisy adds, “Sean’s an asshole.”

“Sean?” I repeat, confused.

“He kept insisting that he recognized you from somewhere, and then he basically stalked you online for proof …”

I barely hear the rest of what she says. “Sean was the one who found the photo shoot?” I ask, my pulse skipping.

She nods.

“Not Cyrus?”

“Cyrus?” Her brows scrunch. “No, I don’t think any of us have even spoken to him since lunch.”

“You’re certain?”