We paused, and Brougham took the reins. “Yeah, Finn’s fine. He didn’t even have a hangover, just popped up out of bed like nothing went down last night. I was surprised—I figured he’d be stuffed after the way he was carrying on.”

“Oh, good, great.” The silence returned. It was broken by a low growl of thunder in the distance. Brougham became inexplicably interested in the salt and pepper shakers—little ornate ones carved from chestnut—and I tried to figure out if he’d prefer me to pretend the whole scene with his parents hadn’t happened, or if he’d rather talk about it.

Well, I figured finally. He did bring it up. “You don’t have to apologize for your parents. It’s fine.”

Brougham spun the salt shaker around between two fingers. “It’s embarrassing.”

“What is there to be embarrassed about? You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Doesn’t matter. It still sucks. That’s exactly why I don’t let people meet them.”

I leaned back in my chair. “You let me meet them.”

“Yeah, that was urgent, though. And I felt weird about going to your house when your mum’s one of my teachers.”

“Couldn’t have been that urgent,” I said lightly.

“What?”

“You kicked me out after, like, five minutes! You barely even gave me a chance to get it right first.” I raised my eyebrows at him. Checkmate. “Not that it made much of a difference in the end, but you get my point.”

Brougham pushed the salt shaker away and straightened to look me in the eye. “That wasn’t about you.”

“Then what was it about?”

Brougham’s sharp, fine-boned face was perfectly still, and his eyes locked intensely on a spot near my shoulder. Then the corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly, and he took out his phone and started using it in his lap, the table blocking it from my sight.

Outside, the rain picked up, smashing against the ceiling in a flat roar. It sounded less like individual raindrops, and more like the ocean had been tipped over our heads. It drowned out even the conversation in the room, and the couple at the table beside us started shouting to each other to be heard.

But Brougham didn’t need to speak to be heard. He just had to pass me his phone.

On the screen was a picture of his mom in a bikini, on a beach. It was a selfie, taken by the man sitting next to her in the photo. He had brown skin, deep dimples, and thick eyebrows. He had his arm around Brougham’s mom, his fingers curling around her waist. It wasn’t a platonic pose.

The rain lowered to merely a monsoon, and Brougham leaned over so he could view the screen with me. “This is the guy Mum’s cheating with right now,” he said. “There’s been a few.”