“I’ve got a pack of cigarettes and a pack of beer,” she says. “We’re about to time travel.”

We wade through weeds to get around the building and out to the platform, which is pretty much as we left it. Mia takes out two beers, opens them, then hands me one.

“To us,” she says.

“Cheers.”

We clink our bottles.

“Now,” she says, “tell me everything about your life.”

I laugh.

“For real! I want to know. All of it.”

I give her the CliffsNotes of the last decade. College. MBA. Life in the city. My friends. My job. I give her the highlight reel of all my hookups. I don’t tell her about the werewolf stuff, obviously. And for some reason I don’t tell her about Ian.

“Good for you, girl,” she says, raising her bottle. “Always seemed like things were going well, but you never know off social. And you rarely post.”

“I’m not an Instagram star like you.”

She revels in the compliment.

“What about you? How you’ve been?” I ask her. “I’d say I’m sorry to hear about your dad, but I know that was . . . complicated.”

“Thanks,” she says, flicking something off her jeans with a neon acrylic. She shakes her head, takes a swig of beer. “I was so ready to get out of here, the second I turned eighteen. Thought I’d never come back. Never see him again. But turns out, he’s everywhere. He’s every guy I ever dated. Can’t seem to get away from him. He’s gone now. He’s dead. But everything he did, everything he was, I still have to carry that. I tried to outrun it. Trust me. Not that I have to explain it to you. You know. You know how it is.”

She pulls out a cigarette and carries it to my lips. Slips it between. Lights it for me.

“Thanks,” I say.

She lights her own, takes a drag. “I’ve missed you, Rory.”

She’s not often serious. Even now, though I know she’s being sincere, the corners of her lips flirt with a grin.

“I’ve missed you, too.”

Whatever whispers of daylight remained suddenly go dead. It’s dark. Foggy.

“We understand each other. With our pasts. Everything we’ve been through. Everyone else, they want to judge girls like us. Hate us. Keep us. Either call us sluts or call us brave. Blame daddy issues for the choices we make. Blame us for the choices made for us.” She pauses to laugh, to ash her cigarette. “They don’t know anything, do they? They’ll never know.”

Girls like us. I take another drag, another sip of my beer. I wonder if she’s buzzed. With her it’s hard to tell.

“You’re the only person I ever told,” she says, letting her head back so her long hair scrapes the ground.

“Really?”

“I did tell one of my exes,” she says, whipping her hair in front of her face. “But he basically took it as permission to treat me like shit, too. That was the end of that. Once you tell them, once they know, they never look at you the same.”