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The quiet becomes a different texture.

“Dinner,” Wren says.

“At his apartment?” Margo asks.

“As in, you and Evan, alone, at his apartment.” June closes her book. June never closes her book unless she needs both hands for the conversation. “You didn’t.”

“I said I’d go.” I look up. “It’s dinner. Not a wedding.”

“Sloane.” Margo’s voice has dropped into the register she uses for things she means. “He showed up outside the theater building three times last spring.”

“He was walking by.”

“All three times?”

“He lives in that direction.”

“And the texts?” Wren says. “The two a.m. ones?”

“He was drunk.”

“He was always drunk.” Margo sets her fork down with a precision that means she has more to say but is choosing the measured version. “I just think that a person who texts you at 2 a.m., shows up at your workplace, and then asks you to have dinner alone at his apartment after a break that you asked for is not actually respecting the concept of the break.”

“It’s dinner,” I say again.

“It’s a trap,” June says.

“June.”

“I’m not being dramatic. I’m being accurate.”

She is being accurate. This is the problem with living with people who know you well — they see around corners you’re still pretending don’t exist. I know what dinner at Evan’s apartment means. I have known since I said I’d go, and I’ve been performing not-knowing ever since, which is a kind of exhausting I do not have the vocabulary to explain without giving away too much.

I want to be done with it. That’s the thing. I want to go and have it be nothing and come back here and tell myself I ended it cleanly, on my own terms, the way I do everything.

“I’ll be fine,” I say.

Wren looks at Margo. Margo looks at June. June looks at me.

Then they all three groan.

“We’re putting this on record,” Margo says. “Officially. For the record.”

“Noted.”

“This is a bad idea.”

“Also noted.”

She points her fork at me. “If he does the thing⁠—”

“He won’t do the thing.”

“If he does the thing where he talks for thirty minutes about how his last coach didn’t understand his potential and how this season is going to be different⁠—”

“It’s dinner, Margo.”

“I’m just saying,” she says, in the voice of someone who has given up winning and is now purely documenting, “that we are all on record as having had concerns.”