“What?” I ask her, confused.
“You used to all the time. Luke this and Luke that.” She bobs her head back and forth. “And now he’s back in the conversation with the handoff thingy the other day and all the texting and now Marlowe’s tonight.”
“Are you serious? I never talked about him before.”
I’m sure I mentioned him a time or two back when we worked together, and surely when he left. But “all the time” seems like an exaggeration.
“You did,” she says. “I used to tease you.”
I shake my head. “No, you didn’t.”
She contemplates that. “Maybe it was just in my head.”
“How nice,” I say, my tone flat.
“But then you never brought him up again.”
“Well, he left and took my client,” I remind her.
“Yes, but what about the voicemail? Maybe there was more to the story.”
“Well, I deleted that,” I remind her. “So we’ll never know.”
“That’s so annoying.”
It is annoying. Even more annoying is that I can’t figure out what he meant by things he probably shouldn’t have said.
“Are we going to watch this show, or what?” she asks. She points the remote toward the TV, the next episode ofKingdom of Flame and Moonlightpulled up and ready to go, an artsy picture of Kaelric and Elora gazing longingly at each other, frozen on the screen.
“Yes,” I tell her. “Just let me scroll through a couple more posts.”
The pictures of Bailey, looking happy and surrounded by friends, are spreading like wildfire. It’s going exactly how I wanted it to go.
“Do you think it’ll work?” she asks.
I shrug. “There’s no way to know yet, but I’m hopeful.”
“And what are you hoping to get out of this?”
“That the public sees her moving on and happy, and we can bury this whole ‘who did the cheating’ game.”
She props herself up on her elbows so she can see me better. “I still don’t know what the point of all these back-and-forth posts is?”
“Basically, it’s a popularity contest,” I tell her. “Except no one is voting, and instead, people are deciding who they feel sorry for. Because whoever gets the sympathy has the upper hand.”
“It’s so weird that as humans, when we feel sorry for someone, we automatically believe them.”
“I’m sure you would have learned all about that in therapy school.”
She laughs. “It definitely wasn’t covered in the first two semesters.”
My phone beeps, and I see that I have a text . . . from Luke. Fabulous.
Jerkwad:Loved running into you tonight
Running into? More like forced proximity. I send him back a rolling-eyes emoji.
Jerkwad:Nice move with the mass unfollowing. Your idea?
