“You look good, really good. How’ve you been?”

I believe he means what he says, but I can’t believe what he says means anything.

I don’t have the chance to answer. Tiff Reade, one of the reunion committee members, has swooped down on us. She’s hawking raffle tickets from a big roll she wears on her forearm. The prizes are gift cards for local restaurants or BOGOs for attractions you’re supposed to take your kids to, except that my kid doesn’t like loud noises or crowds, and too much fried food will make him puke. I buy an arm’s length of tickets for five dollars anyway, although I know even that small, unexpected expense is going to nibble a bigger hole in my wallet.

“Use his arm,” Tiff says with a grin and gestures at Christian. “It’s longer. More tickets.”

Gallantly, my former high school crush offers his arm. She measures off a strip of tickets and winks at me, then him, and hands them to me. She does the same for him next, but Christian takes four sets. He hands her a twenty and takes the paper anaconda of tickets from her. Quickly, carefully, precisely, he accordions them all into a thick but compact bundle and shoves them in the pocket of his suit pants.

“Who are you here with? Ken?” Christian asks.

He remembers my husband’s name.

“Ken is out of town,” I say.

My husband troubleshoots point-of-sale systems for small businesses. Mom-n-pop motels and convenience stores in the middle of nowhere. He’s on the road three weeks out of four, these days. It wasn’t always like that.

“That’s too bad. It would’ve been great to meet him. And I promise”—he holds up his hands—“I wouldn’t even tell him about what a bad girl you used to be.”

“Maybe he already knows,” I answer coolly, although of course Ken has no idea who I was before I met him. He doesn’t know who I am now.

Where is that bad girl, anyway? Worn away by the years of packing healthy lunches and laundering the stains out of her husband’s tighty-whiteys. She’s buried beneath the weight of credit card debt and a house she keeps for a spouse who’s hardly ever in it. She’s struggling to protect a weird and socially awkward son from a world that would love to knock him down again and again. That bad girl has become a caricature of wife and mother.

But not tonight.

Do I imagine the gleam in Christian’s ice-blue eyes? Wishful thinking? No. His interest is definitely there, and in that instant, I release a tension I’ve been clenching inside my chest since I first read his name as “attending.”

Christian remembers me.

“Good to see you,” I tell him, all easy-breezy. I squeeze his bicep, hard as a rock, through the sleeve of his black suit jacket. I move away from him, my eyes already seeking out someone else. Anyone else. I don’t care about a single other person here, but I want Christian to think that someone, anyone, is more important to me than he could ever be.