Oliver acted like I was some kind of lesbian playboy with a harem of curious ladies lining up each night. His perception of my sex life couldn’t have been more wrong. I hadn’t done anything more than a sneaky shift since Hannah and I split. OK, so the list of kissing partners was long, but so what?

I think the indiscriminate snogging started the rumor that I was getting it regularly, but in truth, a bit of over-the-bra action was as far as it ever went.

Oliver paused in his complicated sonata and then played the first confident notes of “Heart and Soul.” After a moment I joined in, my fingers sloppy over the keys. I was tipsy and missed half the notes and Oliver laughed. We’d both gone to the same piano teacher at school when we were eight. “Heart and Soul” was about as much as I could remember. I’d quit after a few weeks. Oliver had been practicing, obviously.

After our impromptu duet, we drank for a few silent minutes.

Oliver started playing again, and I took it as my cue to leave and continue my journey to the bathroom. When I reached the door, the music stopped abruptly, so I looked back. Oliver was frowning, fingers frozen, hovering above the keys.

“Her name was Gracie Belle Circarelli,” he said.

“What? No, it wasn’t.” I shook my head emphatically, but after all the vodka it made me kind of dizzy.

“Yeah, it was. Her dad was this big Italian dude. They had an ice cream place on the promenade. Circarelli’s.”

“Huh . . . well, that doesn’t even sound a bit like Corban, does it? First love can be so confusing.”

Somehow the party lured me in again. The kitchen was greenhouse hot and smelled like sweat and hormones, so I rummaged in the back of the junk drawer and found the key to the French doors. They stayed locked at Oliver’s parties since the time Loren Blake climbed a tree, jumped into the neighbors’ garden, and got caught throwing up in their koi pond. Oliver’s problem was that although he knew that I knew where the good vodka was, where he stashed the patio keys, and where the bodies were buried, he never remembered to do anything about it.

I slipped out through the smallest crack I could make in the door and locked it behind me. The garden would be no relief if everyone could get out there, after all.

The thump thump thump of the music followed me with the occasional squeal or scream, but it was like submerging yourself underwater—the detail didn’t get through. I breathed in a lungful of night air and found myself following a stone trail that twisted and turned through flower beds of azaleas, past a Victorian gazebo that looked like something out of The Sound of Music, and down to the lilac bush at the end of the garden.