“Love at first sight,” I mused.

“Love at first sight. As soon as I saw him standing there with his guitar on his back, nose purple with the cold, waiting for the train, I knew there’d never be another.”

“Did you tell them you were seeing someone?”

“Are you mad?” Claire chuckled. “They’d have reefed me by the hair right back to Galway. They passed about a year after we met. I don’t regret not telling them. They’d not have liked him one bit, I’d say. His family were so kind and welcoming. We were lucky in that sense. The last thing I ever wanted was to turn out like my parents.”

I missed Connie more than I would have thought possible. We were inseparable, a well-established fact by that time, but sometimes it would catch me off guard just how fundamentally entwined our lives were. I did nothing without her, rarely went a day without seeing her. Because there were moments that snuck up on me, time and time again, that would leave my mind reeling. Like when we would be sitting next to each other outside the gym, mitching class, with her head on my shoulder while I smoked—and I would wonder abruptly at how simple it would be to merely twist my own head around a few inches and press our lips together, so casually, so easily. Like a habit, nothing out of the ordinary routines of our lives. Or we would walk down by the beach after school and my hand would itch to reach out for Connie’s, or I would think to wind an arm around her shoulder and pull her so close that there could be no telling where one of us ended and the other began. There were other thoughts, too, thoughts that made my cheeks blush and my throat tighten, my heart pace quicken. But no matter the nature of the moment, no matter how restless I became that Connie might catch something faltering in my gaze, they were unified in that they were unbidden and discouraged, slipping so easily into my thoughts. It was horrible to feel those unbidden, unwanted feelings but it was so easy, sometimes, to slip-up and to want, for just a minute, what I thought I could never have. Just a minute, before I accepted the reality of our situation.

Connie was simply not that type of person.

I’ve often wondered when it was that I first fell in love with Connie. I’ll never be able to fix on the moment, the place, the look we exchanged or the words she shared, which forced me to give up my heart to her. Maybe I was simply in love with her right from the beginning, and only realized it when I was already ensnared. I couldn’t quite pinpoint when they began, those thoughts, but every time it happened, I would swear it was the last. I knew I didn’t fancy her the way I did other girls, those silly, passing infatuations. There were the tell-tale signs of a crush and none of them existed with Connie. I wasn’t afraid of her. I didn’t stammer or trip over my words. I didn’t zone out when she was near and fixate on her every movement. I could actually hold a conversation with her. She was my best friend, my better half. Any feelings I had for her were nothing more than a slip-up, a malfunctioning in my brain.