Lola chewed a fry and narrowed her eyes. “Tell us about the lawyer.”
“The lawyer is fine,” Alix said and then helplessly smiled. She could feel it happening. The smile of a person who had seen something golden and couldn’t shut up about it.
Oscar leaned in. “Everything.”
Alix tried to keep her voice calm. “She’s smart and solid. She makes cafecito by feel. She can dance in heels and make it look like breathing.”
Lola and Oscar traded the kind of look that was basically a high five.
“You sound different,” Lola said. “Not like you after the first three dates with a walking red flag. Like you after a perfect haircut. Calm. Very pleased with yourself.”
Alix blushed and took a very large bite of a chunk of cheese fries.
“Is it serious?” Oscar asked, softening the question with a little tilt of his head.
Alix took a moment, considering. “It’s… new. Not nothing.” She traced a circle in the water ring on the table. “And complicated. We’re friends first, of course. And if we just stay friends, I’m okay with that. She’s in Miami.” Alix paused, thensaid the next phrase quickly before stuffing another bite of cheese fries in her mouth to avoid follow-up questions. “I am taking her to Colorado for Christmas.”
Lola slapped both palms on the table. “What? You never go home for Christmas. And now you’re bringing her?”
Alix laughed, and then the thought landed with more weight than any joke could hold. “It’s not like her Miami. My family is not her family. Her mom is loud and loving and feeds you even if you say no. My mom keeps a running list of everything I could have done differently.”
Oscar whistled through his teeth. “And you want to bring Grace into that?”
“Well, yeah,” Alix said, and the honesty surprised her ears. “She makes me feel… brave. I can face it with her.”
Lola’s expression gentled. “You want her to see you.”
“I mean,” Alix said. “That’s kind of dramatic.”
Oscar knocked his knee against hers. “This is adorable.”
They were on their second round when the door swung open and the temperature in Alix’s chest dropped out of reflex. Kirstin. Her hair as glossy as ever. The same cool-lipped smile that used to make Alix feel like she was always intruding on her time. The girl on Kirstin’s arm was tall and pretty in that breathless way of new things. Since when did Kirstin ever come to The Hollow?
It had been months since they’d ended things, but the sight still pinched in that familiar place just under her ribs. For a month or two after, Alix had pretended it hadn’t mattered, that she was fine, that casual meant painless. It hadn’t. The quiet after Kirstin left had been worse than the fights — a kind of aching shame where her confidence used to sit. Breakup Buddies had been an escape ladder thrown in haste, but it had become so much more since she’d met Grace.
Now, watching Kirstin tilt her head and laugh at something new, Alix felt the sting but not the collapse. There were other things ahead of her now. A trip. A maybe. Someone who made her want to try again, even if she wasn’t ready to name it.
Lola’s eyes cut to Alix. “We can leave.”
Oscar had already started to gather the glasses like they were under attack. His jaw was set the way it got when he was about to defend one of his people to the death in a very polite, very savage way.
“It’s fine,” Alix said. She waited. Checked in with herself like a pulse. No jealousy crawled up her throat. The sight of Kirstin made the past real and also small. Alix felt… okay. Not empty. More like a clear table where a messy one had been.
Kirstin’s gaze slid over, pausing in that familiar inventorying way. Alix lifted her beer in a tiny acknowledgment. Kirstin tipped her chin. That was the whole story. Kirstin looked away. She felt the laugh bubble at how anticlimactic it was.
“Alert the press,” Alix said. “I am healed.”
Oscar exhaled like he had been holding his breath for six months. Lola clinked her bottle against Alix’s. “Proud of you.”
“Me too,” Alix said, and was surprised to mean it.
For a second she thought about texting Grace. A small, triumphant report.Saw Kirstin. Felt nothing.She thumbed her phone awake and then stopped. It wasn’t that she wanted to keep things from Grace. It was that she wanted their conversation to live in the present, not in the archaeological dig of old hurts. There were better things to talk about. The future. Snow boots. Whether Grace could survive on diner coffee without suing the state of Colorado.
She tucked the phone away and continued on with her night.
At the salon that week, one of her regulars tilted her head as Alix sectioned off her hair, chatting about holiday plans.
Her client, a kind woman in her early fifties, asked, “What’d you do for Thanksgiving?”
