That happened sometimes. Mia’s cousin—the same one who had told them about how liking somebody is like looking at them through 3-D glasses when the rest of the world is in blurry 2-D—had been dating someone else when she’d started hanging out with the boyfriend she was always texting with. But it turned out she liked the new guy even more.

Annabelle rested her own hands on her upper arms, where she imagined Connor placing his, and she rubbed them up and down as she shivered in the bus’s blasting air-conditioning.

It was dangerous, letting herself imagine this when she’d already felt the icy-sharp stab of finding out Connor was with Caroline. It was like getting into the water on a too-cold day. It was never comfortable, but the initial shock was the worst part, and if you got out and then had to get back in, you felt it all over again. But she couldn’t help herself.

By the time Annabelle got on the T, her stomach was growling. She hadn’t eaten in ages.

What if her dad wasn’t working today and wasn’t at his apartment? Would someone else at his coffee shop give her food if she said they were related?

A guy wearing a Patriots T-shirt wanted to sit down next to her, so Annabelle had to pick her bag up off the seat for him. When she lifted it, she felt something hard in the outer pocket.

The rock she’d picked up the night of the bonfire, when she’d burrowed her hand in the sand as she waited to hear what Connor was going to tell her. She’d held on to it without realizing and slipped it into the pocket of her bag on the bus ride home that night.

It was a salt-and-pepper granite. Not as pretty as pink or white quartz. Not even white and black like salt and pepper, really. Just light gray with darker gray speckles. It was sort of an oval, but with one fat end and one skinny one, and the skinny end had a pointy bump. She gripped the rock in her good hand and rubbed her fingertip over the point.

She tried again with the happy memories. Dad made the best mac and cheese, and he’d made it week after week if she asked for it. He laughed as hard as she did at the cartoons they watched on the weekends, and he taught her how to ride a bike when she was six. And . . . she couldn’t remember much else. It was Mitch who ruffled the top of her hair and made waffles on weekends and cheered the loudest at her swim meets. She kept trying to call up a memory of Dad and getting one of Mitch instead.

But she’d been living with Mitch for years now, so no wonder she had fresher memories with him. That didn’t mean anything, really. She could make all sorts of new ones with Dad now. In her head, she recited all those questions from his email, the ones she hadn’t finished typing out answers to but could answer in person instead.