“Well, I didn’t want you to call the cops.” She flopped herself down on the hand-me-down armchair Paul had given her nearly two years ago, her legs dangling over one of the arms. “I’m not going to kill myself, if that’s your concern.”

“It’s not,” he started, more tentatively than his words suggested. “But that’s good to know. How are you?”

“You know.” She gestured around at the worrisome state of her studio. “Not great.”

She felt something stabbing into her from the side of the cushion and reached down to pull out a hairbrush. She threw it across the room onto her unmade bed as Paul’s eyes followed its trajectory, lingering for a moment before turning back to face her.

In the ensuing silence, she moved her head to the aria that had just started. The playlist was one she’d created when she first started falling for Danial, when opera felt like the only thing capable of expressing her feelings. Now, it was like the soundtrack to a funeral: a burying of that potential love, of this version of herself. She closed her eyes, relishing the sharpness of the pain she felt, stepping intentionally toward it like a too-hot shower.

After a time, she finally broke the spell with the most self-harming line of questioning she could think of: “I saw Danial and Daphne stayed at the party all night. They were at Conrad’s.”

“I wasn’t there.” He set down his glass, looking her in the eyes. “I waited outside your building so long your neighbor threatened to report me for trespassing.”

“I was asleep.”

“I was terrified.”

She did not apologize, or even acknowledge his statement. She thought, briefly, that maybe he wouldn’t have been so terrified if he hadn’t flippantly given her Xanax, but she no longer had the energy or desire to argue. She only wanted to return, masochistically, to the subject of Danial.

“He’s still with her.”

The music swelled between them in the vacuum of her statement, taunting them with Italian lyrics about star-crossed lovers. Paul’s eyes darted toward the stereo, as if attempting to destroy it with his mind.

“What do you want me to say, Lex?” he finally said, still looking uncomfortably at the stereo. “I guess they’d been dating for a while, and it was getting kind of serious. I wish I had known.”

“Have you seen them since?”

He hesitated, and her heart fell through her stomach. Daphne would get everything that Alex had struggled so hard to cling onto, simply because she was born rich and beautiful and brilliant while Alex was a fool for ever believing she could fake her way into such a life. But then, this was the most devastating possible outcome, so in some small way the news that they’d all hung out was almost reassuring. Her humiliation was total.