At that, Doris gives up all pretense and her head snaps up, her gaze flicking between us. By bedtime, everybody on both sides of the mountain will know what happened here, how after all this time, Sam and I finally had it out. He waits, watching me from the other side of the partition.

“You were right. Is that what you wanted to hear? I married a guy you warned me about, and now it’s blown up in my face, just like you said it would. Does that make you happy?”

“No, Charlie. None of this makes me happy.” He still looks pissed, but the sharpest edge is gone from his tone. “And for what it’s worth, I remember us being friends. That’s what makes this so damn hard. Because for a while there, I honestly and truly thought we were on the road to being more than friends. I thought that’s where this thing between us was headed.”

I nod because I know. If I’m being completely honest, I’ve always known. All those times Sam went quiet, watching me with a blend of frustration and longing. All the times he stood too close or stayed too long, like he was waiting for something to happen. He wanted me, and I wanted Paul. No wonder he spent this past year angry.

“I should have been more sensitive to that, and I’m sorry. If I could go back and do it all over again, there are a lot of things I’d do differently. Like tell you how much I loved you, just not in that way. But that was the whole problem. I loved our friendship too much to risk it.”

“So you sabotaged it instead.”

“You can’t help who you fall in love with, Sam. If you’ve learned anything from this shitshow, surely you know that.”

He puffs a pained laugh, and when I smile at him, he smiles back. It’s not a big smile. It’s not an easy one. But it’s a crack in that big, angry wall he’s put up between us, and I’m just stubborn enough to keep hacking.

With a sigh, he slaps the file to his desk. “Ten minutes, starting now.”

He leads me down a hallway and parks me at a table in a windowless room that does double duty as a kitchen. A counter is shoved against a far wall, battered and basic: a fridge, a double sink, an industrial-sized coffeepot lined with dark sludge. A vent above my head pumps in stale air, drying my throat into brittle paper.