“Please don’t tell Brandon I told you all this,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I won’t. You’re doing the right thing.”

“Whatever,” I muttered, feeling utterly miserable. I lit another cigarette and watched him drive away. My throat was sore from smoking.

I went inside and poured a glass of whiskey, angry at myself for calling Ash, for betraying Brandon. And Sally, too, for that matter. I was crying again. I poured more whiskey. I thought of what Brandon had said: “Since Danielle died, I can’t be sober.”

On the wall hung a paint-by-number of egrets on a lake. My mom had bought it at a thrift store when I was a kid. The boundary of each shape had the same wildly trembling line. I drank and stared at it until the wobbly edges took over. I was retreating to the place where everything gets quiet and still, and I didn’t have to think about Ash or Danielle or Sally or Brandon or my own fucking feelings. I practiced not breathing until I felt like nobody, like open space. I kept drinking, kept looking out the window. The sunset began in ugly pink streaks.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The sunset faded and I turned on a lamp. I sat on the floor, flipping through an old Southern Living I’d brought home from the café. I studied a recipe for pressed herb pasta, thin sheets of dough encasing the tiniest leaves of basil and thyme, like flowers flattened in a book. I didn’t have a pasta machine or know where to buy those baby herbs. Maybe you had to grow them? And if I made the recipe, what would I do, eat it? Have a dinner party? I marveled that such a thing existed in the world. It was so pretty and foreign and ridiculous I almost laughed.

My phone rang. It was Audrey.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you busy tonight?”

“No.”

“Can I come over?” she said. “I have weed.”

“Sure,” I said. “That sounds good.”

A half hour later she sat in the chair by the window and pulled a one-hitter from her bag. It was painted to look like a cigarette, white with a brown filter. I poured her a drink and we smoked the weed.

“I can’t stop thinking about Danielle,” Audrey said.

“Me either.”

Audrey passed the fake cigarette to me.

She said, “When we first met I knew she would be my best friend. I knew immediately.”

“How?”

“We connected. It was like we already knew each other. I can’t explain it.”

“We became friends right away, too,” I said. “I thought she was cool. I couldn’t believe she liked me.”

“How could she not?”

I shrugged. “She was rich, popular. I wasn’t.”

“Well, you’re really easy to talk to. That matters more than money, you know?”

“I guess,” I said. “She did need somebody to talk to. With all the shit that happened to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“You knew, right?” I said. “That she was abused.”