But she caught me looking; I could tell from the deliberate way she ate, lingering over each piece and sucking her fingers clean.

She chased the orange with another sip of wine, then set the can on the coffee table. “Speaking of confidences,” she said, beckoning imperiously toward my arm. “I was told there’d be more.”

“So demanding.” I scooted closer to her with my feet tucked under me, until my knees brushed hers. Being so close to her made me feel dizzyingly present, hyperaware and oversensitized, as if the whole of my skin had woken up after a long sleep. My heart kicked up into overdrive, thrumming against my ribs. No one knew what all my tattoos meant; not my closest friends in Chicago, not even Lin. I’d been hoarding them like a treasure trove of secrets I carried around hidden in plain sight. And I was about to share them with Talia, whom I’d technically known my whole life but really only known for the last two weeks.

Trying to muster up some courage, I rolled up my sleeve and draped my arm across her lap. She ringed one warm hand around my wrist, keeping it in place, and lazily circled the first tattoo with a fingertip. “Let’s start with this one. The arrow.”

I cleared my throat, taking a sip of wine with my free hand. “That was the fall after the . . . you know, the summer that shall not be named. November, I think, so I would’ve just turned eighteen. It was when I decided I was getting the fuck out of Dodge for good.”

Talia traced the arrow, a tiny, pensive furrow forming between her dark brows. “So that’s what it means? That you were set on leaving?”

“I could have gotten more creative than an arrow, I guess, but I wanted something really simple. Something that I could look at and just think, ‘Fly away.’ ” I bit the inside of my lip, remembering how teen me had felt in the chair at Black Cat Ink, Thistle Grove’s one and only tattoo parlor at the time. The buoyant hope for a different future, the sea of sadness churning just beneath. “I was still kind of a mess, but it felt amazing to wrest back control like that, to decide something so big for myself. I remember I felt like such a total badass.”

A faint smile ghosted over Talia’s lips. Then she lifted my hand to her mouth and pressed a butterfly-light kiss to the arrow, like a token of thanks.

“And this one?”

I let out a little sigh as she traced the outline of a stylized phoenix, thrown more off-balance by that tiny kiss than I should have been. “That’s, uh, the U of Chicago mascot. Phil the Phoenix. I got that my sophomore year, once I started feeling like I really belonged there. Like I’d made a good choice.”

“Because you weren’t sure before?”

I laughed through my nose. “Oh, not even close. I was miserable my freshman year. I missed home so badly and second-guessed everything, especially once my magic went. I barely had any friends, and I’m sure I drove the few I had nuts with the constant, high-key angst. Especially since it wasn’t like I could tell them what my problem even was.”