You didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that, but I thought it spoke well of Greg that he understood I’d been operating out of a place of pain for our whole marriage.

“Yeah, well, that didn’t work with you or Jeremy.”

“Speaking of Jeremy,” he said.

“Are we?” I asked. I heard an alarm bell clanging in my head. Jeremy had hated Greg, while Greg always seemed ambivalent about him. Why now would Greg want to talk about him? It was unsettling. I led Greg into the living room, where we sank onto the couch facing the fireplace, settling in for a nice catch-up.

“We are now,” he said. He took a long sip off his beer. “He called me.”

“What?” I spluttered beer all over myself. Mercifully, I had a cocktail napkin to dab it up with. I hacked until my throat was clear and asked, “Why on earth would he call you?”

“He thought you came back to me,” he said. “As if that would ever happen.”

Was he fishing for a denial? Because he wasn’t going to get one. He was absolutely right. That would never happen.

“Your abrupt departure to Phoenix. He thought it was all too coincidental with my touring schedule being in the Southwest,” Greg said. He rested his arm along the back of the sofa and put his ankle up on his knee. He looked perfectly at home. It was weird but it also grounded me.

“I can’t believe he called you,” I said. I hadn’t spoken to Jeremy since I’d left for Phoenix and was planning to give it a few more months before I reached out to him to see if we could be friends.

“I know, he hates me,” he agreed.

“He doesn’t, okay, yes, he does,” I said.

Greg stared at me for a moment, and I sensed he had a lot more to say, but when he finally did speak, it was short, to the point, and devastating. “You know he’s in love with you, right?”

“He’s not,” I protested.

“He is,” he said. “Or more accurately, he thinks he is.”

I felt my stomach twist into a hard knot. “I feel terrible about how things ended. What did you say to him?”

“That he needed to grow the hell up and stop being such a damn mama’s boy.”

“You didn’t!” I stared at him with my mouth hanging open. How many times had I wanted to say that very thing to Jeremy? “I don’t imagine he liked hearing that.”

“He didn’t. He swore at me. Then he hung up on me.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

He held up his thumb and forefinger, holding them about an inch apart. “Maybe about this much.”

I laughed. “You’re a horrible person.” I kept my voice light so that he’d know I was mostly joking.