I also try to find the Druid’s Stone, again, so I can tell the teenage psychic she’s wrong. I’m in love and I’m still here and she’s full of shit. But I don’t get the satisfaction because it’s still gone. It’s like it never existed. I even ask the lady working in the Thai food place next door, but she shakes her head and smiles and feeds me curry puffs.

I’m home every day at 3:07 when Eloise sticks the note under the door. Every day, when she doesn’t bother to knock and just slips me a note.

Alex said I was brave, and yet I’m still not facing the music with Eloise. Or anyone or anything else right now.

Was he wrong about me? Maybe he only thinks he likes me, or he likes some false version of me, and if the days move forward and he discovers what a true coward I am, his feelings will change.

I can’t have that. I will face this final hurdle, but not for Alex. For me.

Eloise was . . . is my closest friend. Even though we are nothing alike, and we fight sometimes, we’ve always had each other’s backs.

Until we didn’t.

We moved to the West Coast together five years ago. We lived together, shared an apartment. But then Eloise was going to LA all the time for auditions and eventually moved down there. Then she got her big break, a starring role in a Netflix dramedy.

Everything changed. She stopped calling. Stopped texting. Our conversations went from daily to weekly to once a month. But I just wrote it off. She was busy. Too busy for me, and I got it. I was fine with it, or I thought I was. I had other things to worry about too. And she would come up and visit during breaks in production and regale me with all kinds of funny stories. She was so happy. So successful.

I wasn’t. But I pretended I was.

Then she called me on it.

“Are you sure you’re happy here?” she asked the last time we spoke. We were in my apartment, eating Chinese takeout and watching Grey’s Anatomy.

I grabbed the last crab rangoon from the box. “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Her tone was soft, but her gaze was pitying. “I don’t know. The job at Blue Wave sounds fine, it just doesn’t seem like . . . you.”

“Why not? What’s wrong with me?” Defensiveness sent the pitch of my voice three octaves higher.

Eloise’s voice was calm. Sensible. “There’s nothing wrong with you. That’s not what I’m saying.”

Her self-assuredness in the face of my own self-doubt was like a lance to the gut. So naturally, I lashed out. “What about you?”

She blinked rapidly. “What about me?”