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Michelle chuckled. “Hard no. No offense to Nolan, but our relationship wasn’t anything special. We had fun, but I knew we wouldn’t last forever. I knew he was into me, but it always felt like he was holding a part of himself back. And I was into him, but not enough to dig into why.”

That was interesting. It mirrored what Nolan had told Eli his astrophysicist girlfriend had said about him. About having one foot out the door.

The interesting thing, though, was that Eli didn’t get that same sense.

At least he hadn’t until recently.

In the two days since Eli had told him about Freddie’s letters being an assignment, Nolan had vehemently refused to talk about it. He didn’t want to talk about how that knowledge affected his search, and he certainly didn’t want to talk about how he felt about them being an assignment.

Nolan wouldn’t give up searching for Freddie—Eli was sure of it. What he wasn’t sure about was whether Nolan would do so out of a sense of duty or because he truly wanted to get the letters back where they belonged.

“He and I were a passing phase,” Michelle went on, dragging Eli back to the conversation. “What’s it like for you guys? Is it serious?”

“I want it to be,” Eli said without thinking. “Hey, I’ve got to go. We’re going to be taxiing soon.”

“Sure. Say hi to Nolan for me.”

“Yeah, I’m not going to do that.”

She was laughing when she hung up, but Eli couldn’t find any amusement in the situation.

Michelle and Nolan had broken up because Nolan had left. Moved to Toronto for work.

Would Eli and Nolan break up once Nolan finished this job with the Trailblazers? What was Nolan’s plan for post-Trailblazers team audit anyway? Was he going back to San Francisco? Would he move to Vermont to be closer to his dad or to New Brunswick to be closer to his mom and stepdad? Was he applying for jobs and he’d move wherever the next one took him?

Eli hadn’t thought about any of that because he naturally tended to focus more on the present. But he was thinking about it now, thanks to Michelle.

And he couldn’t exactly have the relationship talk with Nolan so soon after they’d started dating. Or fooling around or whatever they were doing. Nolan didn’t exactly scream “relationship talk” anyway. Maybe Eli could talk around it in a way that made Nolan think the conversation had been his idea.

There was a thought.

“They were an assignment, eh?” King said over Nolan’s car speakers. “That makes a lot of sense if you think about it.”

It did not make sense, and Nolan was a little offended that King would suggest such a thing. “How so?”

“Because who willingly writes letters like these?”

Okay, fine. Maybe it did make sense.

“If Freddie and Annie lived far apart from each other, I could maybe understand these letters,” King said. “But they don’t. And even if they did, email exists. Texting. Even still, people don’t talk to each other like this. The letters have a romantic undertone, but I never read them as love letters. They’re more like a diary entry—they read as if Freddie is trying to figure himself out. So the fact that they’re an assignment as part of a psychology class honestly doesn’t surprise me.”

Ugh. It did make sense, damn it.

Eli texted to let him know he’d landed, so Nolan drove out of Burlington airport’s cell phone waiting lot toward Arrivals.

“You’re awfully quiet over there,” King said.

“I’m annoyed that you’re making sense.”

King barked out a laugh. “I do that from time to time.”

Nolan drummed one thumb against the steering wheel and tried to put his thoughts into words. “I guess I feel cheated. Like maybe the letters aren’t as authentic as I thought.”

“That’s bullshit” was King’s opinion on that. “Just because they were an assignment doesn’t make anything Freddie wrote less true. It probably makes it more so. Knowing he had to hand these in but that they wouldn’t be read? He was probably more honest than he expected to be. I mean, listen to this, from Freddie’s fourth letter: Because maybe that’s the problem—I haven’t been meeting them where they’re at. Maybe they’ve been trying to meet me where I’m at and I’ve been too self-involved to notice. Seriously, Nolan. Who writes this kind of shit unless they’re genuinely trying to understand themselves?”

Nolan sighed, and he recognized how miserable it sounded. “Fine, you might have a point.” A thought occurred to him, and he frowned as he kept an eye out for Eli while he crawled along behind other cars in Arrivals. “Did you take photos of the letters?”

“No. I asked Eli to send me his photos of them when he asked me to call you. I thought I might need them as backup. Though I practically had to sign an NDA to get him to send them. He was not keen on sharing them with yet another person, whatever that means.”