“The papers can say whatever they want,” I say dully. “But I’m not actually going to start a relationship with him. I’m going to let him down easy.”

One day, I know, I will have to figure out what to do with my public image. But that is a problem for future-Rose. And future-Rose, I’m quite certain, will be older, and wiser, and much more assured of herself in awkward situations such as this one. Present-Rose will only make a mess of it. Best not to risk it.

Mum, Father, and William all exchange a glance.

One I can’t for the life of me interpret.

NINETEEN ROSE

Months.

It’s been years since Danni last spoke to me.

The longest decade I’ve ever slogged through.

Made all the worse by the fact that in reality, it’s barely been a fortnight.

I had a terrible feeling when I first received her text that it would be difficult to adjust to life without her friendship, but I was sorely underestimating how hard “difficult” would hit. Danni’s abrupt disappearance from my daily life sits like a hole dug into damp sand. Perhaps the walls will dry out and cave inward to fill the chasm one day, but in the meantime, it’s gaping.

I hadn’t quite realized how much my happiness had come to correlate with the amount of time spent in her orbit.

That, and I can’t shake the fear that if she takes a large enough step away from me, she, too, might come to notice that my eyes are empty.

For now, at least, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Though she’s now sitting at a table next to Molly at the back of the class each day, she smiles and greets me at the start of our shared lessons. And though she goes directly to Molly’s room after lessons finish, she gives me a pleasant nod whenever we pass each other in the hall.

But still. We’ve stopped texting. And I don’t think we needed to stop texting in order for her to be there for Molly.

“I just hate it,” Eleanor grumbles to me as we pass Danni and Molly shooting a post for Molly’s social media by the oval. They’re laughing, so heartily Molly bends over for breath. I wonder what the joke was. “It’s like we’re dead to them out of nowhere.”

The two of us are on our way to the performing arts auditorium, where the cast list for Macbeth is being posted in approximately five minutes. Eleanor has been a bundle of nerves all day. I’ve never seen her want anything this desperately before, except for, perhaps, Santi’s attention. Which, now I think about it, isn’t necessarily extricable from this.