“Yes. That’s . . .” A giggle escapes from my lips. “Okay, that’s actually hilarious.”

She cackles. “I know.”

My laughs turn into coughs and eventually Tracey leaves with the promise to check on me again soon, but I can’t stop thinking about what she said.

And then there’s the other thing. The rom-com thing. I’m trying my hardest to resist the candy-coated, artificially sweet, totally fake rom-com narrative that Annie would love to impose on my life. Well, that she has imposed on my life. But I’ve seen enough romantic comedies to know how this works.

Take, for example, You’ve Got Mail. It’s one of Annie’s favorites because she’s obsessed with Tom Hanks, but not, like, when he’s stuck on an island and befriending a volleyball. She loves the Tom Hanks of romantic comedies, the one who shows his emotional side and has touching monologues and makes her cry, even though she’s seen this movie one thousand times, as I always remind her.

Because no matter how many times I’m like, “Uh, Annie? Joe Fox put Kathleen Kelly’s store out of business and this movie is about how capitalism destroys lives, not how love conquers all,” she adores it, which means I’ve also seen it one thousand times. And I remember, so well that I could probably quote it, the scene where Tom Hanks comes over when Meg Ryan is sick. He takes care of her and he brings her flowers and he asks if she will be his friend, because he’s almost certainly already in love with her and wants her to fall in love with him, too.

And what else does he do? Well, he makes her tea, because, as Tracey said, that’s what you do when you care about someone. You take care of them.

All of this gives me an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach (and not, as Nick feared, because I’m about to puke). After all of my complaining that I don’t like romantic comedies, that they aren’t realistic, that happy endings don’t exist and true love is for suckers, I can feel myself slipping. I’m thinking about Nick, and I’m liking what I’m thinking about, and it feels a hell of a lot like a romantic comedy.

This is all Annie’s fault. My finger hesitates over the call button as I wonder whether it might help me to talk this out with her. I know she’d drop everything to go over the Chicken Tortilla Soup Incident in exhausting detail. But I just can’t do it—I need to handle this situation by myself. I fall asleep with my phone in my hand.

Chapter Nineteen

I knock on the door, holding my pie like a peace offering. In retrospect, I regret making a pie for this situation. My reasoning made sense; a pie is comfort, a salve for wounds. But pie represents joy, and it seems offensive to place something so joyous into a breakup situation. The pie didn’t ask to be dragged into this drama.