Pulling said phone out, she swipes her fingers across the touchscreen. She stands eerily still before yelling, “Yes!”

“What is it?” I ask.

“I won the Oklahoma! digital ticket lottery!” she sings. Maggie tends to break out into song more often than not. She’s all but jumping up and down as she cradles her phone to her chest like a baby.

“That’s awesome,” I say, feeding off her excitement. “I didn’t even know Oklahoma! was on Broadway.”

“It only came on recently, but this version is edgy and fresh, and the cast is incredible.”

“Can’t fight that ‘Surrey with the Fringe on Top.’”

“No, you cannot,” she agrees, happily tossing her phone back into her bag. “I have two hours to claim my tickets online so when we get to the restaurant, our table needs to become mission control for a couple of minutes.”

“Fine by me.”

Maggie links her arm through mine once again, glowing from her musical theater victory. The funny thing is, she’s actually won discounted show tickets a bunch of times, but you’d never know it from her reactions. To her, each reduced-price ticket is the new best day of her life. She’s addicted to Broadway musicals. She calls it her hobby but it’s beyond that. Musicals are to her what romance novels are to me—necessary.

“Okay,” she says, winding herself down, “now that I’ve had my good news, I want to hear more about yours. You were talking about Ryan. Go on. How’d he look?”

My smile inadvertently changes to a scowl. “Ryan was always good-looking.”

“And he couldn’t have been a bad person if you used to date him. You’re one of the pickiest people I know. How long were you guys together?”

Maggie and I cross the street at the corner of 48th and 2nd, now only a few blocks away from our destination.

“We were together for two years, the last bit being long-distance.”

“Were you guys really close?”

He was everything. All of it. He was all I thought about on the inside and everything I saw on the outside. I took my first love experience and ran with it hard and fast until my lungs burned and my legs fell out from under me.

That’s my first thought.

“We were close,” I decide to say. Maggie looks as though she heard my initial response. “He was funny and sweet and he was the first guy to ever really notice me, to see me like that.”

“To see you like what?”

“I don’t know,” I answer. “Like something so special he could hardly believe it.”

“Did you love him?” she asks.

It takes me a second to respond. “Yes. Too much. More than I should have.”

“Well then,” she demands, “what happened?”

“It was a tough situation. It was the culmination of a lot of things.”

“Such as?”