Page 1 of Given Our History

PROLOGUE

SIX YEARS AGO

I might’ve been on time, were it not for the parking meters. They were old, coin-fed, dotted along a narrow one-way street shaded by brick buildings. My GPS had announced that I’d arrived at my destination, and I had driven right past. Some might call it stubborn, parking at a Harris Teeter three blocks away because I didn’t want to pay. I mean, this was Baltimore. You expect to pay an egregious amount of money for parking in a major city.

Anyone who says that has obviously never been a third-year graduate student surviving on Lean Cuisines and dreams.

I hopped out of my old Volvo and legged it to the sandwich shop, guided by my phone. It led me to one of the old brick storefronts, the entrance marked by a scalloped awning. I pushed through the door and a bell chimed overhead. The dining room was long and narrow with a checkered floor, and the smell of warm, fresh-baked bread wafted on the air.

Professor Blanchett was seated at one of the laminate tables, her sandwich untouched in a red plastic basket. “You’re three minutes late,” she greeted me primly. Her pixie cut was a shade grayer than I remembered, but her mouth was still pressed into the same thin line, bracketed by smile lines that seemed to indicate that she must have laughed at some point in her life.

“Parking,” I said, a little winded as I collapsed into the plastic chair opposite her and shrugged off my messenger bag. “Didn’t have change for the meters.” Not true. I kept a whole heap of change in my cupholder, but that was reserved for counting out quarters whenever I needed an iced coffee to power through another ten pages of my dissertation.

“Perhaps we’ll leave my thoughts on your punctuality out of the letter, then, shall we?”

Well. Off to a great start. I had no clue how to reply to that, so I gave her a polite smile. Dorothea Blanchett had been my capstone advisor during undergrad at University of Maryland, some years ago now. We didn’t really know each other; a lot of her advising was done through email, and we’d had only a handful of meetings in person to discuss the direction of my paper. She had retired a couple years ago. But academia loves its letters of recommendation, so when I applied for an online teaching position that called for three references—preferably, they specified, from different institutions—I had no choice but to shoot her one last email. I wasn’t even sure she remembered me. She’d asked to meet in person for a light refresher before she felt comfortable writing any sort of recommendation, so this felt more like a job interview than a happy reunion.

“Did you already order?” she asked now, like she didn’t just see me walk in.

My gaze flicked to the cheesesteak in front of her, then over to the counter. “Ah, no,” I said. “I guess I should maybe—”

“Clara?” a woman’s voice asked. “Clara Fernsby?”

My old college roommate approached our table, wiping damp hands on her jeans like she’d just come back from the bathroom and was in too much of a hurry to use the hand dryer. “Mindy,” I said. I was so taken aback that my brain short-circuited, and for a minute, I thought Professor Blanchett must have invited her as some sort of prank—but Mindy had barely set foot in the History Department. And Professor Blanchett wasn’t the pranking type.

Mindy didn’t wait for me to stand; she bent over and hugged me right where I sat, but the angle was awkward, encircling my shoulders. Immobilized, unable to really hug her back, I patted the back of her arm with a hand.

“It’s been so long,” she said with a sigh, drawing back. Now that I got a good look at her, I noticed that she’d stopped bleaching her hair, her mushroom-brown locks chopped in a wolfish shag that framed her round face.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“At the sandwich shop?” she said, a little bemused. “I’m meeting Ted for lunch.”

She said this with so much familiarity, like she expected me to recognize the name, but it still took me a couple seconds to register who she was talking about.

I should have been forgiven for not immediately realizing that she was talking about my former best friend on account of two things: first, because he and Mindy had only met a handful of times in passing. He didn’t even attend UMD with us.

Second, because she called him Ted.

“You’re meeting Teddy?” I clarified. “Teddy Harrison?”

Mindy nodded. “I’ve been telling him that I wanted to bring him here for weeks, but he hadn’t found the time to make the drive down—oh, sorry, Miranda Schooner,” she said, offering a hand to my advisor. Professor Blanchett eyed it like Mindy was offering her a dead fish.

“Wait,” I said. “You and Teddy, you guys are”—my brows pinched—“together?”

“I thought … I mean, I figured he told you.”

Professor Blanchett sighed theatrically, leaning back in her chair.

“He did not,” I said stiffly. Interesting that he hadn’t told her about our falling-out. Maybe they were still in the early stages of—well, whatever they were.

“Weird story.” She dragged a chair over to our table, metal legs screeching against the tiled floor. I would really rather she didn’t, actually, because if Teddy was on his way here—

“So,” Mindy said, “I was obviously attracted to him from the get-go. I mean, you remember how I asked you all those questions after he helped you move into your dorm, trying to make sure he wasn’t your boyfriend or anything.”

The bell above the door chimed, and I stiffened. I didn’t think I was capable of saying anything at the moment, so I gave a tiny nod of confirmation. Yes, I remembered.

“And then last year, I was having this conversation with my friend where we were talking, you know, like, ‘You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.’”