"I have to go back out," Paige said. "It's my party. Ellis's mom is going to make a toast and I'm supposed to look surprised even though I helped write it."
"Paige—"
"Put on the dress. It's a nice dress." At the door she paused, one hand on the frame. "For what it's worth, I didn't plot against you. I plotted *for* you. I know that's not better. I just wanted you to know which direction I was aiming."
The door closed.
Avery peeled off the ruined blue dress and put on Bev Pruitt's yellow one. It fit almost perfectly — a little loose at the waist, a little long — and when she looked in the mirror she saw a stranger who belonged on a dock in the sun.
She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and put her face in her hands, and because it was quiet, and because the seashell soaps would never tell, she let herself remember March.
* * *
Lucca's was the kind of Italian restaurant that had been in the same strip-mall corner for thirty years and refused to admit the strip mall existed. Inside it was all dark wood and candles in red glass and a man who played accordion on Thursdays whether anyone asked or not.
Paige had suggested it. "His name's Dorian," she'd said, holding out her phone with a photo of a man laughing at a barbecue, face half-turned. "He's a friend through Ellis. He teaches chemistry. He's *nice*, Av. Not boring nice. Nice nice."
"Chemistry," Avery had said. "So he can explain why my sourdough starter keeps dying."
"He'll explain it so gently you won't even feel stupid."
And at first, he had.
He'd been there when she arrived, standing when she came to the table — an old-fashioned thing she'd found herself unexpectedly liking. He asked about the bakery and actually listened to the answer. When she told him about the starter, which she had named Gerald and killed three times, he said, "You're probably overfeeding it. People love their starters to death," and she had laughed harder than the line deserved, because it was the first time in a long while she'd felt seen by someone who didn't already know her.
He was funny in a way that crept up on you. He waited for her to finish sentences. He had a scar through one eyebrow that he said came from a bunk bed — *long story, mostly the bunk bed's fault.*
But he kept looking across the room.
Not at other women. She checked. He kept glancing toward a two-top by the window, half-hidden by a pillar and a potted ficus. Small glances, every few minutes, quick as a man checking a clock. Once he lost the thread of what she was saying entirely and had to ask her to repeat it, and she watched his ears darken with embarrassment.
"Sorry," he said. "I'm — sorry. Go on."
Forty minutes in, a woman with short grey hair came out from behind the ficus and walked to their table.
"I'm so sorry," the woman said, "I'm not staying. I'm his mother. Vivian. I just wanted to say hello."
She sat down.