“I was going to dump her as a friend,” Sarah said quietly. “In college. She got into RISD . . . I didn’t get into Brown. She lived in the coolest student housing ever; I was at URI in a triple with the girl in the top bunk drunk-puking on me four nights a week. Lauren was here on the Hill, so happy and confident that the world was hers, and I felt completely unremarkable by comparison. It bugged me so much I was thinking about transferring somewhere.”

“Why didn’t you?” he asked.

Sarah shrugged. “I had a good scholarship at URI. In my mind, I was brave enough to go out west, to California or Seattle, but in reality, I was in Kingston, thirty minutes from home. Every time I saw Lauren, she was telling me how fabulous and interesting school was, how cool her professors were . . . she was majoring in clothing design originally. I don’t know if you knew that.”

“I did.”

“Yeah. So she was taking classes like History of the Little Black Dress or whatever, making her own beautiful clothes, while I was slogging through statistics taught by these sleepy adjuncts who never bothered to know my name. I didn’t even know what I wanted to major in.”

“That’s not uncommon,” Josh said. Good job, he could just about hear Lauren say. Good sympathetic listening.

“So. I was sick of her sparkliness. Her perfect life. Her happiness, honestly. I was tired of comparing myself to her and coming up short. Everything about her was cool. Her married sister, her hot brother-in-law, her field of study.” She poured the remaining wine into her glass. Her eyes filled again with tears. “I wanted something crappy to happen to her, because it seemed like nothing ever did. So you were right. I was bitter and petty.”

“Why didn’t you, um, dump her?” he asked, a little fascinated.

“Her father died. And she was completely heartbroken.” Sarah wiped her eyes carefully, so as not to smudge her mascara. “The first bad thing that ever happened to her. Mr. Carlisle . . . he was the best. I still remember her voice when she called me. I knew right then and there something horrible had happened.”

And so Josh learned that Sarah’s own father had left when she was eight, popped out a few new children with his next two wives and had to be ordered into paying child support by the court. Sarah was her mother’s only child, alone to bear the contentiousness of the divorce and the neglect from her father. When Sarah did visit her father in Arizona, she was forced to babysit her younger half brothers and a stepsister, courtesy of her father’s second wife. Sarah had adored that little girl, but once her father divorced Wife Number Two, she never saw her again.