We all nodded.
“That’ssucha cool job,” Bridesmaid Two said, looking decidedly starry-eyed.
Okay, Bridesmaid Two. Settle down.
Though… itwasa cool job. I couldn’t resist one-upping her. “That,” I corrected, “isthe coolest job in the world.”
Cooper nodded at me. “It really is.”
“And you’re in London?” Mrs. Dunn asked.
Cooper looked at me. “I just got an offer to move back, actually.”
“To Los Angeles?” Mrs. Dunn inquired, like Cooper was still talking to her.
But he kept his eyes on me. “To Austin,” he answered. “They make a lot of movies there.”
Mrs. Vargas again: “But you couldn’t possibly leave London?”
Cooper’s gaze stayed fixed on mine. “I could be talked into coming home.”
It was really bothering me that I hadn’t known about Cooper’s job all this time. But that’s what his mom had told my mom after he left: that he’d gone to London to play in a band.
That’s what he’d been doing in my head for four years.
“Your mom said you were in a band,” I said accusingly.
“I was—at first,” Cooper said. “We still play sometimes.”
“In clubs?” Bridesmaid Two interrupted.
Cooper shook his head. “Mostly busking for money on the Tube.”
“There’s no Tube in Austin,” Mrs. Vargas cautioned.
“No,” Cooper agreed. “But there are lots of tacos.”
I processed it all.
Maybe I really hadn’t wanted to ask him about what he’d been up to all this time. Maybe I’d wanted to just act like those four years had never happened.
But I guess they had happened, after all. Days after we graduated college, after we’d returned home and formulated a plan to get summer jobs at the same bookstore together, Cooper ghosted me. Left without a word. One minute, I was showing him my new engagement ring, and telling him Pearce had an internship in DC, and making Cooper promise that we’d make the most of my last summer as an unmarried woman… and the next minute, Cooper was just—gone. Hardcore gone. Like not answering calls or texts gone.
His mom was always so apologetic when she saw me. “Maybe his phone doesn’t work over there,” she’d say. Like that might make me feel better.
It didn’t.
I’d been so absolutely wrecked by the way he left—and the question of how my oldest friend could do that to me—that the fact of it stayed centered in my mind like a wound that refused to heal.
But I guess Cooper had been doing fine.
Doing fine, and living his life. Hiscoollife. Working for the BBC and busking in Tube stations. Without me.
At some point, I’d have to ask what the hell, exactly, had happened.
But the problem was, I wanted to know precisely as badly as Ineverwanted to know.
And, at least for now, that would have to be that.
