He laughs out loud. “Yeah, babe. I know a good thing when I snag it, and I ain’t letting go of you.” His words are light, but I feel like if I were closer, I’d see a heaviness behind them.

I feel the pilot light of my panic furnace kick on. Whoomp. Just a simmer, at first. But it’s growing. And the more he dissembles, the higher the dial will go. He knows he can’t fool me, not for long. So now he’s not even trying. He’s still not talking, not sharing: I still can’t get through.

I know him, though.

He can’t hide anything from me for long.

But for the first time, I wonder if I want to know.

If maybe this is something I’m better off not knowing.

“Beaches!” Tess garbles, around a mouthful of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

“Hell no!” I shout from the couch, flipping through Netflix. “I need the opposite of sobbing my eyeballs out. Dumb and Dumber?”

“‘Hey, you wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world? AAAAAHHHHHH!’” She does a gratingly accurate impression of Jim Carrey in that scene, to the point that I throw a throw pillow at her face from across her living room.

“Is that a yes or a no?” I ask.

“Nah,” she says, batting it aside. “Seen it a bazillion times. Far and Away?”

“‘Tell me you like my hat, Shannon,’” I quote, in a terrible Irish accent. “Nuh-uh. Eat, Pray, Love?”

She brings over the gallon of ice cream, hands it to me, and returns to her kitchen, where she peruses the wine rack in her pantry. “Josh, Joel Gott, Jordan…Decoy, Duckhorn…”

I twist on the couch, to stare at her. “Tess McAlister. Do you have your wines alphabetized?”

“No,” she says, her voice defensive and sullen. “Maybe. Yes. Shut up. I was bored, okay? Clint was in Milwaukee for two damn weeks, and I was bored out of my fucking mind. So I alphabetized the wine. And the DVDs we haven’t watched in like, five years. And the, um, soup.”

“Soup?” I take a bite of mint chocolate chip. “You alphabetized your damn soup? If you’re that bored, you need a hobby. Needlepoint or some shit.”

“By that point, I’d crocheted an entire scarf, done about fifty word searches and three crossword puzzles, and only cheated twice on the crosswords, by the way and thank you very much. I even did fucking Sudoku, and you know numbers make my nose bleed. I watched an entire season of Grey’s Anatomy, and all three Lord of the Rings movies, with commentary and bonus features.”

I laugh. “At that point call me. You can organize my pantry for me.”

She fakes a violent shudder. “No thanks, bitch, I’ve seen that abomination.”

“Shut up, it’s not that bad.”