“Oh, you know.” His head wobbled back and forth awkwardly. Hem, haw. Hem, haw. “Rope.”

“Rope?” Then it hit her what he meant. “Oh, I’m so sorry. When was that?”

“Three years ago this March. I met Paris when she was in grad school when I hired her as a researcher, and this was like . . . maybe three months later. But then Sirvan died and, uh, well . . . more than once Paris would show up to a meeting at a bar in Manhattan, and I would already be lit.”

“How old was she?”

“At the time? She was only twenty-two. And I was so inappropriate.”

“You mean . . .”

“No, I mean professionally inappropriate. I get that alcoholic mentors are common to the point of cliché in the writing world, but I hate to think that was me. I didn’t sexually harass her, if that’s what you’re asking, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t put in a position where she had to talk me down from getting in a fistfight with 9/11 truthers in bars a time or two. But yeah, she forgave my transgressions and stuck by me at a really hard time. So I owe her a lot.”

Must be nice, she thought. Having friends who support you even when things go to shit.

“So what do you want to do with your life?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the road.

“I guess I kind of assumed my life would be dedicated to . . . him. To being his interlocutor.”

“Well, if that wasn’t a thing, what would you do?”

She sank back into her seat, embarrassed at the thought that if all this hadn’t happened with Ampersand, she’d still be a college dropout who had blown the one job opportunity she’d gotten, at a temp agency of all things. When Kaveh was her age, he was probably getting his Rhodes Scholarship application together. “I guess finish my degree, take it from there.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I couldn’t afford it.”

“Is that why you dropped out?”

She sank farther, the embarrassment swelling. “Sort of. I dropped out because I got put on academic probation and lost my scholarship.”

He raised a subtle “What happened?” eyebrow.

“It was a confluence of things,” she continued. “Nils was starting to get really famous, and people were starting to get all invasive and ask questions about it, and then I went through a breakup and, as so often happens with friend groups, everyone had to choose sides and . . . most of them sided with her.”

He snorted. “Hate it when that happens. I know it’s cold comfort, but I think your former friends might be idiots.”

Her stomach flooded with butterflies. Was he just being nice, or was that flirting?

“So what’s your dream school?” he asked.