"What?"
"Not *you*. Nobody got a picture of you, I checked, you're safe. Paige posted a photo of the cake." Fran turned on the espresso machine. "But in the background, if you zoom in, there's an older lady sitting on the edge of a pool with her shoes off. She looks like a painting."
Avery kept shaping. Pull, turn. Pull, turn.
When she got home at one, Paige was in the kitchen.
She was sitting at the little table by the window where they had eaten approximately two thousand bowls of cereal together. She had made coffee, and she had a plate of the lemon bars Avery liked from the place on Fourth Street, and her eyes were swollen.
"I'm not here to fight," Paige said. "I'm here to tell you the rest."
Avery set her bag down. She sat.
"It wasn't just me," Paige said. "The first date was me. Me and Ellis. We thought — he's lonely, you're lonely, you'd like each other, it's *obvious*. Ellis said Dorian hadn't been out with anyone in two years. He said Dorian spends every Sunday at his mom's fixing things that aren't broken." She wrapped both hands around her mug. "But after the date went bad, it wasn't just us anymore."
"Who else?"
"Vivian." Paige winced. "She came to me after Ellis proposed. She asked me, very politely, if she could be near you at the party. She said she'd done something she needed to put right. She didn't say what. I didn't ask. Then Harlan said we could use his yard, and Ellis said maybe if you and Dorian just saw each other again, somewhere nice, with good lighting—" She stopped. "We were all doing it. Everybody had a reason. Everybody thought their reason was kind."
"Was it?"
"I don't know." Paige looked at her. "Mine was. I think. I wanted you to have what I'm getting."
"Ellis."
"No." Paige shook her head. "Not Ellis. *Them.* Av, the first time I went to Vivian's for Sunday dinner, she asked what my favorite thing to cook was, and the *next* Sunday she'd made it. She remembered. Dorian drove forty minutes to jump my car in January without my asking. When my grandma was in the hospital, Vivian sent a card to the hospital. With my grandma's name on it. Spelled right." Paige's voice wobbled. "I grew up in a house where everybody loved each other and nobody showed up. And I walked into this family and they just — show up. All of them. All the time. It's almost too much. And I looked at you, getting up in the dark every day, calling your mom on her birthday and getting her voicemail, and I thought, *I want this for her too.*"
Avery looked at the lemon bars.
"You don't get to give me a family," she said finally. "Like a housewarming gift. Like a spare key."
"I know."
"I'm not saying it wasn't kind. I'm saying it wasn't yours to decide."
"I *know*, Av."
"And I said a cruel thing to you. In the bathroom. About the houseplant." Avery looked up. "That was cruel, and I'm sorry for it. And I'm still angry. Both of those things."