“It was my fault.” She’d forbidden herself from saying those words, from even thinking them. She couldn’t afford years of therapy, the safe place to unpack them, and the rule was both cost-effective and soul-preserving. But sometimes the words slipped out anyway. The only people Phoebe had talked about it with were Ted and Malcolm. She hadn’t told her parents or her brother. None of her friends. She didn’t want to drag the memory of one event through the rest of her life, for it to define her, limit her. She didn’t want friendships that bent around that weak spot, cradling her like a baby. She wanted it forgotten.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” James said. “Whatever happened in that room, that was on him.”

“I know. I do know that. But I shouldn’t have asked you to bring me. In a way, I think I was using you.”

She looked at his face and saw James wrestling with the idea. The sun glanced off the worry lines in his forehead.

“Ted and I weren’t getting along very well by then,” Phoebe said. “And I liked being around you. I liked the way we laughed together. I had my elevator pitch for Jerry down pat. I knew the numbers backward and forward. But nobody wanted to do business with the Dragon Lady. They wanted a different version of me. Relaxed. Happy. And I felt that way when I was with you. I knew I’d be nervous, and I didn’t want to go in there coiled up so tight.”

“I liked that you didn’t have to worry around me. You had so much on your shoulders. I prided myself on making you smile. And I let you go in there to meet him like that, without your guard up. I feel like I led you to the slaughter.”

“I was stupid. I thought I’d be safe, because of Ted.”

“I did, too,” James said, the regret in his voice so thick, it was like a salve.

Once upon a time, she had made those kinds of assumptions about men, which ones she could read, which ones she’d be “safe” around. And then, for years afterward, she knew that the only answer was none of them. Every man was suspect, even Malcolm at first.

Phoebe put her hands at her back and breathed in deep. She focused on a little dot out on the horizon, a ship or an oil rig, maybe. In for four seconds, hold for four more, and let it out for four. Then again.

“I wish I was a better friend to you,” James said. “After. I didn’t know how to talk about it. I’d never seen someone on the other side of that type of hurt.”

“But you were a good friend. You drove me home. Took me to Ted. You were so careful with me.”