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"What would you do?"
"Honestly?"
"Yeah." I take another sip. Fail to find understanding in my coffee drink.
"If I stumbled on Oliver's online journal?"
"Yeah."
"Before we were really together or now?"
"Now."
"I'd read it, see what he says about me, if he's hiding anything, if he's drinking in secret."
"That was fast."
"I don't lie to myself," she says.
"Do you think most people would do the same?"
"I think we're curious and we're used to the idea of anything online being fair game."
"You're people smart for a nerd."
"I'm not a nerd," she says. "But thanks."
"Would it be wrong if you read Ollie's online journal?"
"Yeah."
"But you'd do it anyway?"
"I love him," she says. "But there's so much in that love. In that trust even. The desire for honesty and the nagging at the back of my head—what if he's not being honest? What if he's hiding something? Maybe I don't read him as well as I think I do. Maybe it's different for other people. Maybe I'm weak or maybe it's his alcoholism. He didn't share it with me for a while. And that was his right, but it still…"
"Made you wonder?"
"Everyone has something."
"And you had Daisy too," I say.
"It's not the same as your sister. I'd never say it is." She opens her bar of chocolate and offers me a piece.
I take it. "How is it different?"
"We had a happy ending. So I can barely imagine how you feel. Because I asked myself all the same questions. What did I miss? How did I influence her? Was it my fault?"
Daisy, her best friend, wasn't depressed or suicidal. Not exactly. She had an eating disorder. One she denied for a long time.
I only know the rough sketch. She is Oliver's sister, after all, and I've known him a long time. She's younger. And when she was at her worst, she was young. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. I was younger too, but still too old to gawk at a fifteen-year-old girl.
If I caught myself checking her out, I averted my eyes.
But I still noticed the changes in her. She was always uptight and shy—the type of girl who would rather read than go to a party—but she sank into herself. Started dressing in baggy black clothes, avoiding our bullshit as often as possible.
I barely knew her. She was just my friend's kid sister and I noticed. Luna was, is, her best friend.
"Your chocolate is melting." Luna motions to the brown goo spreading over my fingers. "It melts at body temperature."
