“You look good,” said Elodie after a long pause. She drew her hand back.

So do you. But then, she always did. My lips tightened. I didn’t say a word.

“I thought you wanted me to say hi.” Her voice turned light, coy.

“Saying hi is different from ambushing me like this.”

Her eyes widened. “Ambushing? That’s not what this is.”

My mouth wouldn’t unstick for the longest moment. Finally, I managed to get out, “Why are you here?”

Her finger traced the pink splotch. I wondered if she even knew that she was doing it. “For you,” said Elodie, just like that, like the last year hadn’t happened. Like my heart hadn’t been ripped out of my chest and thrown into the sea.

I clenched my mouth—hard. My jaw began to ache from the pressure of my teeth. I hated the lilt of her voice, the earnestness in her face. I hated everything about this. “No, this is for you.”

“What do you—”

“This,” I said loudly. I gestured around my kitchen. “Coming here. Here, El. You’re still”—my breath caught—“hiding.”

“No, that’s not—”

“Like everything is the same,” I finished.

“You’re the same,” she said. “I’m glad. I didn’t want you to be anything other than how I remembered you.”

I stiffened. She didn’t seem to realize how entitled and unreasonable she sounded. I knew that I wasn’t the same. Not anymore. Not like she thought I was. Not like she wanted me to be. Because if I was the same Babe who was willing to hide her relationship, that would make it easy for her. And because I’d once loved her—loved her so much—I wanted to make it easy for her. But if I dug deeper, I knew that making it easy for her would only make it harder on me. And I was tired of things being hard for me.

“I don’t think I am the same,” I said after a long pause. “I think you want me to be, because if I was, it’d mean you know how the rest of this goes.”

“How would it go?” she asked quietly.

“Like this.” I stretched my hand out to touch hers. Just for a second. “It would start with this.”

“I sense a but.” She tried to twist her hand to capture my fingers, but I pulled back just in time.

“I moved on, El. I moved on without you. You should, too.”

“But … but I’m back now.”

“You’ve been back for a while. It took you until now to come up here.”

“It wasn’t so easy! You were so…” She paused. “Mean.”

“Mean? That wasn’t mean.”

“Pissed off, then.”