Who the hell could be knocking at her door?

Her heart jumped. Could it be Max? Maybe he’d come back to say how much she mattered to him. How much he wanted her back. How he’d do anything.

She stood on her tiptoes and looked through the peephole. Jamila, not Max. Of course, not Max. He was in DC, remember? On TV? Granted, she’d recorded the show, it had been filmed hours before, but that wasn’t enough time for him to get from DC to L.A.

She took a step back and opened the door.

“I was wondering if you were going to let me in,” Jamila said. She strode past Olivia into the house.

“Oh, I didn’t … did we have plans?” Jamila had a bag of food in her hand and walked straight toward the kitchen with a determined look. Maybe she’d texted Olivia about dinner and Olivia had texted back without remembering it? That was unlike her, but the past few weeks had been unlike her, too.

Jamila set the bag down on the counter and took a bunch of food cartons out of it.

“Sure, we had plans. If by ‘plans’ you mean you haven’t shown up for the Wednesday volunteer night in three weeks, and that I haven’t heard from you since I walked you to your car when you ran out of the community center except for that curt text that you and Max broke up, and you’ve ignored all of my texts, and I was worried about you. That’s definitely what ‘plans’ mean to me—that’s also what friends mean to me, by the way—but you might have a different definition.”

Olivia felt guilty and touched, all at once. She hadn’t wanted to show up to the food pantry, because everyone there had met Max, and they all knew the two of them were dating, and she didn’t want to deal with their kindness right now. She knew it would take only one question and she’d throw herself into the arms of one of the sympathetic older ladies there and sob for hours. So she just hadn’t shown up. But she should have texted Jamila to say she couldn’t come. And it made her weirdly happy Jamila had worried about her like this.

“I’m sorry. I’m not doing … great about all of this, and I didn’t want to have to answer questions about Max or listen to people talking about him or wonder if anyone was talking about me … I couldn’t deal with any of that. So I just stayed away.” She put her hand on Jamila’s shoulder. “But I’m really sorry for ignoring you these past few weeks. Thanks for being a friend. I appreciate it. I really don’t know what I would have done without you that night. Or for these past six months, really.”