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Part of Avery felt like she should apologize for the fake dating ruse, but that wasn’t just her screwup to own, and she didn’t want to get Theo in trouble with the rest of their friends too. She felt terrible about how things ended with him, but there wasn’t much she could do, since he clearly wasn’t speaking to her. She knew that for a fact, because she had texted him yesterday to ask when he was going to be back in Itasca, and he hadn’t replied. But he’d read it, and that told her everything she needed to know.

“Do you think your mom will go through with it?” Grace asked.

“I don’t know, but I think the fact that she’s seriously considering it is a good sign.”

“You want them to split up?” Harper said, and for the first time in the entire conversation she didn’t sound hostile or cold.

“I don’t know, I just think stuff needs to change. We can’t keep going like this, and something has to change. Savannah’s parents got divorced, like, five or six years ago, and she said it got better after.”

Grace looked thoughtful. “When my aunt and uncle split up, Mike was pretty angry for a while, but he seems better now.”

“Have you talked to your parents about it?” Harper asked.

“Not directly. Neither of them even knows that I know, and I don’t know if Dad knows that Mom knows either.”

“That is messy as fuck,” Tommy said, but he wasn’t teasing. He seemed genuinely sad. “Who else knows?”

“Savannah, and now you guys.”

“Do you think your mom has told any of her friends?” Tommy asked.

“I don’t think she has any. Not really,” Avery said.

“Seems kinda brutal,” Harper said.

Avery hastened to explain. “I just meant she doesn’t have friends that aren’t, like, couple friends. Everyone is Dad’s friend too. And it’s not like she talks to her brother more than once a year or so, so yeah, I think she’s on her own.”

“It does explain why she—you know,” Tommy said, shrugging.

“Kinda sucks?” Grace supplied. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Avery said, and took another sip of her mocha. “She is . . . tough.”

“I can’t believe your dad would be that shitty,” Tommy said. “He’s always been so fun.”

That was Avery’s problem too. It had taken a second long talk with Savannah for her to be able to untangle her complicated feelings about her parents, and while she wasn’t exactly feeling warm and fuzzy toward her mom—Kelly had been difficult in other ways too—she was at least working toward putting anger in the right place, as Savannah explained it.

Apparently, Savannah’s parents had hired an excellent therapist, who she saw for years after the divorce, and she claimed to be so thoroughly therapized that she was basically a therapist herself. Avery had asked why Savannah wasn’t majoring in psych if she liked that so much, and she had shrugged and said it was because her parents would probably both keel over from aneurysms if she became a social worker, or something else touchy-feely, rather than a killer lawyer. Long story short, that night they had agreed to each try a class way outside their chosen major just to see what it was like, which was how Savannah ended up in Marriage and Family 159 in the spring semester and Avery found herself registering for Poetry 135. She wasn’t sure if she even liked poetry, but she’d signed up for it out of a spirit of solidarity.

“Yeah, I can’t believe it either,” Avery agreed.

Grace frowned. “When you say no one else knows, does that mean Theo doesn’t know?”

“What else would it mean?”

“We’re pretty used to you saying ‘no one else knows’ when what you really mean is ‘no one else except for Theo knows,’” Harper explained.

“Yeah, well, we haven’t talked. I tried, but he didn’t respond.” She wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to say to him, but she knew she had to say something. She stared down into her cup and decided she wasn’t going to keep trying to drink it just for Tommy’s sake. “Have any of you guys talked to him?”

They all exchanged a look. Tommy appeared to designate himself the spokesperson. “We have, yeah.”

“And?”

“And if he didn’t respond to you, then . . .” he shrugged.

“He means we don’t really feel like getting between you two again,” Harper clarified.

“That’s understandable,” Avery said, although she was desperate for at least some sort of information about Theo. “Is he okay, though?”