I skimmed the rest. Madison’s Eliza tips were things I’d never have thought of and made me uneasy, like there was a tarantula in the bathtub I didn’t know about. Then again, maybe a new approach was what I needed.

You’re the man, Maguire. You got this. You can do it. Go talk to her. Come on. Go go go go.

Recovered from my trip to Losertown, I found Eliza exactly where I had left her: throwing the last ingredients into the saucepan and making a sizzling sound that was less like cooking and more like burning.

My stomach growled. Uh-oh. No one in the history of forever has performed well when they were hungry (maybe food-eating-contest winners, but we all know those people are really glitches in the Matrix).

I sat at the island in a tall bar stool. It matched the other counters in the room, which were now filled with either Ms. O’Connor’s mixers and decorating tools or elements of Eliza’s curry production. All around, this was a very creative family. Minus Carter.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, thanks. Oh hey, um . . .” Heat caught in my throat as I tried to keep this casual, “How’s Hannah doing?”

Eliza shook a green spice jar into her concoction. “Robert can’t ask her himself?”

I studied my hands. Here comes the hard part. “Not asking for Robert,” I said.

“Nick . . .” she warned.

Well you’ve certainly got her attention. “Can’t I ask how Hannah’s doing without it being a whole big thing? She likes me more than him anyway.”

Honestly me dating Hannah would have been a service to both of them.

“Are you serious? You’d really do that to Robert?” She gave me the kind of stare my mom had trademarked. As if I had let her down, but she wasn’t invested enough to be disappointed.

“Do what?”

“Okay then.” Her cooking was no longer the spiciest thing in the room.

“Is there a problem?” I said. Madison had instructed me to make Eliza jealous by asking about her best friend. Which upon further consideration, might have been backfiring.

“No.” She turned off the stove and threw a cover over her pot, steam pouring out from under it. “I didn’t expect you to break the Bro Code for Hannah Green.”

“The Bro Code?”

“Yeah, like how Robert has dibs on Hanns and stuff. Not that any guy ever, like, has dibs on a girl. And it’s not as if your guys’ holy commandments are some big secret.”

She still wouldn’t look at me.

“What’d you think I would break it for, then? Someone one of my buddies had already hooked up with? Someone’s sister?”

Come on, Eliza. I could not have been more obvious, right?

“Whatever,” she said.

Without Carter as a buffer, her forced indifference felt like flames without a heat shield. Carter always mediated between our differences of opinion, and I always mediated between theirs. So far, Carter and I hadn’t needed a mediator. Hopefully we never would.