“Okay, well, I don’t know what I’ve told you. But, so, before they started dating, I actually”—I shiver—“hung out with him one night at his house. He played in a band and, at least that night, I thought he seemed cool. Which he wasn’t. We hung out in his basement and he and his friends smoked weed and got drunk and played video games.” I cringe, thinking about how cool I was trying to seem to them. “Then I lost a bet and had to smoke hash oil. I had never smoked anything in my life and I thought I was going to die. I was lying on the ground, feeling paralyzed, and they had a dog that was crawling all over me while everybody laughed.”

“God,” says Kiera. “Vile.”

“Yeah. It took like three days to feel normal again, but I still hated everything that happened that night. He actually tried to kiss me, and I didn’t want to kiss him, and he was really nasty to me about it and then told me he’d fuck my friend.”

Kiera’s eyebrows shoot up.

“I didn’t tell Aimee about it because I thought she was way smarter than I was and that she’d never fall for his bullshit. I was also way too embarrassed to tell her I’d tried drugs, which we were super not into, or about the dog walking all over me. It was so awful and saying it out loud would have been … like, impossible at the time.”

I realize as I’m saying it that this was probably my first case of major denial.

“Surely once they started dating, though…”

I shrug. “I was a teenager. I told her way too late. By the time I did, she told me I was ridiculous for trying to insinuate their entire relationship was about me. Which I understand. At that point, it had been a few months. But still.”

“Well, that’s truly villain shite.”

“It is, right?”

She nods. “I know him now. I can say he loves his kids. He loves her. He’s sort of boring, if anything. A normal guy who seems like maybe he was cool to his mates once, but now he’s some interesting woman’s husband. If that makes sense.”

I clench my jaw and shake my head. “Yeah.” I bite my bottom lip and stare at the ground. “Still, she deserves so much more than that.”

Kiera says nothing, and when I eventually look up at her she gives me an empathetic smile. “I’m sorry. That sounds like a terrible night and an absolutely horrid thing to carry with you. Especially once she started seeing him and you had to be around him all the time.”

“That was the worst of it. Then I saw him treating her the same way he treated me that night. It felt like insert girl here, you know? And then after—”