“Yep.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I feel like a good friend.”
Lauren pulls her legs up and wraps her arms around her knees. “Can I bring up the elephant in the room?”
“There’s no elephant.”
“You slept with him, Syd.” Her voice is even.
“That was a million years ago. It didn’t mean anything.”
“Right. Which is why you’re gripping your wine glass hard enough to shatter it.”
I look down. I am gripping the glass harder than necessary. I loosen my hand and set it on the table.
“It was one time,” I say. “We never did it again, we never talked about it again, and it has absolutely no bearing on me going to help him with hiskidsfor heaven’s sake.”
Lauren lifts an eyebrow. “Okay, but what if he’s—I don’t know. He’s newly divorced. What if he’s looking for a rebound? What if he’s lonely and you’re right there and—”
My stomach jumps. “Archer isn’t like that.”
“All men are like that.”
“Archer is not all men. He’s—” I stop myself before I say something that proves Lauren’s point. “He asked me to help with the twins. That’s the beginning and end of it.”
She looks at me for a painfully long time. “Syd, I have a lot of friends. I wouldn’t do any of that for a single one of them.”
I don’t have a comeback for that. I reach for the green curry instead.
“I’m just saying,” Lauren continues, “most people send a casserole. Maybe offer to take the kids for a weekend. They don’t dismantle their entire life and move across the country.”
“My life was already dismantled. The timing just worked out.”
“The timing.” She says it flat, like she’s repeating evidence back to a witness. “Your life falls apart at the exact moment he needs you, and you don’t think that’s worth examining?”
We look at each other. She’s not wrong. I know how it seems—the way I let everything go without a fight, the way Matt, the job, and the apartment all fell away like they were never really holding me here in the first place.
But I’m not going to say that out loud. I get how it looks. Suspicious, at best.
That’s fine. She doesn’t have to believe me. I believe me, and that’s what matters.
“Can I say one thing?” she asks.
“Can I stop you?” I lift one brow.
“No.”
“Then go ahead.”
She pours us each a little more wine—probably to soften the blow—then sets the bottle down, and looks at me. “I’ve known you since we were twelve. I’ve watched you date guys who were perfectly fine and leave every single one of them. I’ve seen you build a career you don’t care about and quit it without flinching. I’m watching you torpedo your life in real time, and I just…” She takes a breath. Lets it out slowly. “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” she says.
I wave her off. “I’m not going to get hurt. It’s Archer. He’s my best friend.”
“Okay, Syd,” she replies finally.
And we leave it there, the way we always do—her not believing me, me not convincing her, both of us pretending that’s the same as agreeing.
