Lily launches into her version, which is ninety percent enthusiasm and ten percent choreography. Luke resumes his sway. I stand in the middle of the living room with my heart hammering and turn back to the speaker because I need to do something with my hands that isn’t staring at Archer Lockwood’s face.
That night, he suggests dinner out. “I don’t feel like cooking tonight. Let me take you guys somewhere.”
We end up at an Italian place three blocks from the house. Red booths, checkered tablecloths, a votive candle on each table. Lily insists on sitting next to me. Luke sits beside Arch and reads the menu with the intensity of a food critic, even though he can’t read yet and will order buttered noodles regardless.
Archer orders a beer. I order wine. The twins share a basket of bread.
It’s nice. It’s really nice, actually—the kind of dinner I used to imagine when I was twenty-two and stupid enough to think about what my life would look like if Archer and I had ended up together. The kids, the restaurant, the easy back-and-forth of two people who’ve known each other long enough that silence is comfortable. Nice.
Except we’re not together. I’m his friend. I’m here to help. This is a one-time dinner, not a life.
“Tell me about Coach Davis,” I say because I need the conversation to go somewhere safe. “Is he still making the freshmen do ballet?”
Archer grins. “He retired two years ago. But yeah, the ballet requirement is still going. His replacement kept it last I heard.”
“Good. Those boys needed it.”
He scoffs. “We did not need it.”
“You absolutely needed it. You couldn’t touch your toes when you walked into that studio.”
“I could touch my toes.”
“Archer, you could barely touch your knees. You were the least flexible human I’d ever met.”
“I was fifteen and six feet tall. My body was ninety percent limbs.”
“And I fixed you.”
He lifts one dark brow. “You tortured me.”
“I improved you. There’s a difference.”
He’s smiling now, really smiling, and I’m smiling back, and Lily is trying to stack sugar packets into a tower between us, and Luke has folded his napkin into a rectangle, and this feels like—
“Excuse me.”
A woman stops at our table. Mid-fifties, warm face, holding a glass of red wine and beaming at us.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I just wanted to say—you have a beautiful family.”
The air leaves my lungs.
Archer looks at me. I look at him. Lily knocks over her sugar tower.
“Oh,” I say. “We’re not—”
“Thank you,” Archer says at the same time.
The woman smiles and walks away, and I’m staring at the tablecloth because my face is on fire and Archer is looking at his beer, and neither of us corrected her.
Neither of us saidwe’re not togetherorwe’re not a family.We should have.
I take a sip of wine. Then a bigger sip.
The thing is—I’ve imagined this. Not this restaurant, not this city, but this. A table with Archer. Kids between us. Someone looking at us and seeing what I’ve wanted since I was seventeen years old. I had to watch him marry Bree. I stood at the altar in a dress she picked out and read a poem I don’t remember and smiled until my face ached.
I held his babies in the hospital—both of them, one in each arm, still wrinkled and pink—and I looked at them and thoughtthis could have been mineand hated myself for thinking it because that’s not what good friends think. Good friends are happy. Good friends don’t leave and cry in their cars in the hospital parking lot.
