And if it didn’t, you were screwed. If anything went wrong, and you needed help or to call home, you would now be in twice the trouble, because you’d have to admit to all the lies and subterfuge that came before. I’d never had to do this, but I’d heard the stories, and they were always awful. Like, I imagined it was bad enough to have to call home and wake your parents up and tell them that you crashed the car. But to have to do it while admitting that you’d lied about where you were going that night, that there was no study group, and that you were, in fact, in New Jersey (just to take an example from Emery’s life) was so much worse.

But it would all be okay! Because Stevie was coming back. Any second now.

Any second.

My feet started to hurt. I felt the cold whoosh of air that accompanied the trains through my long coat.

Well aware that I was grasping at straws, I wondered if there was any chance I’d misread this. Was it possible that Stevie was somewhere waiting for me, getting upset that I wasn’t finding her? But even as I thought this, I dismissed it. She’d been the one with the directions. Stevie wouldn’t have expected me to find her.

And the more time that went by and the longer I stood there, as trains departed and arrived, and as people came and went all around me, the louder a terrible thought in my mind became.

Stevie wasn’t coming back.

She’d left me on purpose.

Too much time had passed. She could have easily changed trains and come back by now. And she hadn’t. Which meant she’d chosen not to.

All of a sudden, it seemed painfully obvious that I’d been waiting for someone who wasn’t going to show up. Her unreadable expression through the train window was haunting me. Had she been saying I was on my own? That she didn’t care what happened to me? She’d told me she was going home, after all. She’d told me she was done and she was going back to Connecticut. She’d taken the subway straight to Columbia to get the keys, and was probably halfway to Mallory’s by now, without a single thought for me, standing alone on the cold platform and trying not to cry.

Had she been that mad about our fight? Mad enough to go off and leave me alone? Mad enough to abandon me?

Clearly, she had been. Which meant I was on my own.

The enormity of this situation was hitting me in waves that just kept on getting bigger, like a terrible version of that old car game about going to grandma’s house.