‘No,’ she said, the syllable low and punchy. ‘I’ll explain, but … no. You gotta believe me, Whitaker.’

I did.

‘Well.’ She took a breath. ‘God. I don’t even know how to do this. You know I’ve thought about this moment happening probably hundreds of times? Literally, hundreds? And even then I never knew what to start with. There’s so much that I just … don’t know where to start.’

This wasn’t going to be easy, I realized. Not just in the sense that it wasn’t as simple as going down a line of questions, ticking them off, moving on – for June, this was a catharsis, and for me … well, I wasn’t really sure what it was yet. That depended on what she had to say.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘If we go chronologically – I already told you some of the very beginning stuff. Moving kind of sucked. This place was totally foreign to me. I met him, Heath – I met him at cheer tryouts at the beginning of summer. He was at the school for some student council thing, and it was right after tryouts, and I felt like I’d done terribly and I was so worried that, like, all the girls were looking at me, and I was so homesick … So afterwards I just found this stairwell to go cry in. I felt so pathetic. He found me there. Brushed me down. Made me laugh. And oh my God, Whitaker, I know based on what just happened this probably seems too awful to say, but he was so charming. Seemed so mature. Even when we were, like, what, fourteen? We were dating three weeks later. I was obsessed with him – I felt like I owed him everything after what he’d done for me.’

Her words were already stilted, wavering, and I thought I should touch her, so I reached over and took her hand, the way she had in the car, and squeezed. ‘You’re OK,’ I said.

‘He did everything right. He was so sweet. Considerate. My mom loved him. I loved him.’

She stopped, so I asked, ‘What happened?’ to help spur her along.