Greta rolled her eyes. That sounded like Ash. “And you let him get away with that?”

Truman looked up.

“You mean as opposed to looking the man I fell for in the face and being like, ‘no, I demand that you give me things you don’t have after I move somewhere you don’t want me’? Um, yeah.”

Greta shook her head. “No, as opposed to, like, asking him what he meant and talking about it.”

“I tried to get him to talk about it, and he said he couldn’t. Then he basically begged me to leave him alone, so I did.”

“Listen, I’m not trying to do Ramona levels of witchy meddling here—P.S., has she been sending you strangely cryptic texts that, like, come true?”

“Yes!”

“Freak. Anyway, I’ve known Ash a long time. If he said he doesn’t feel like he has anything to give you, it means he’s scared that what he has to offer isn’t enough for you, not that he won’t give you anything. You need to talk to him.”

She held up her phone.

“Um.” Truman’s expression was nervous, but he was nodding.

“I’ll just tell him to come over, shall I?”

“Ugggghhhh,” Truman groaned, burying his face in his hands. “Fine.”

Greta dialed. “Ash Sundahl, I am at my house right now, and I demand your presence! That’s right, I said demand, because I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning, and I must hug you.”

She hung up. Truman let out a breath of relief.

“He’ll come over, and we’ll talk about this,” Greta said.

A buzz ran through her. She felt powerful.

“Did you know,” she confided manically to Truman, “that you don’t have to accept whatever happens to you?! That you have power over your life?!”

“Some people do,” Truman mumbled. “I gotta take a shower before he gets here. I don’t want him seeing me like this.”

“I think some eye drops and an ice pack might serve you better.” Greta grabbed the former from the bathroom and set Truman to making the latter by wrapping crushed ice in a towel that she applied to his eyes.

Twenty minutes later, she got a text from Ash that said Omw.

Chapter 28

Truman

Before Greta burst through the door, Truman had been chatting with Germaine and Charlotte. He’d gotten as far as telling them what Ash said about not wanting him to uproot his whole life for him when Charlotte had dumped a wall of text. Often, when Charlotte wall-of-texted, it was simply because she’d switched to using voice-to-text, but sometimes—and this was one of those times—it was because she believed so fully in her opinion that she had to let you know right away. She was, it must be said, right approximately 93 percent of the time, by Truman’s calculations. So he’d grudgingly read: