And I guess I was protective of her. As often happens with female friendships—especially with a dynamic like that—we bickered. A lot. But we also had so much fun it sometimes felt illegal—and sometimes itwas.
In Molly, I had found a soul sister. Someone I could share everything with—how it felt losing my mom at such a young age, the challenges of raising my younger sister, and then, when I started dating, how much boys—and later, men—sucked.
When I walked Nolan through the betrayal, I also shared with him that things with Molly had felt rocky for a while. She had made new friends in college—not that I faulted her for it, I had, too—but some of them were…less-than-stellar influences. She suddenly spent a lot of time partying and blowing off class. And then, eventually, maybe a month or so after Colin Wakelin’s class began, things felt…different. She became distant, and consistently cranky.
I was so used to Molly being a firecracker; not in the angry way that she is now, but in a joyful, passionate way.
Those final few months of our friendship had felt flat. I admit, I had been struggling with things in my family—being away from them was beginning to take its toll on Dad and Kyla, and I was traveling home every weekend to help out. So, after Molly’s betrayal, our friendship already felt so threadbare that walking away was easier than breathing life back into a seemingly doomed relationship.
“So, you hadn’t seen her since then, until she showed up on the ship?” Nolan asks.
“Yup. And, as it turns out, she knew I was going to be here.”
“Interesting…” I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t.
“What’s interesting about that?”
“Well, it just seems obvious that she wanted to see you.” He flicks his eyes away from the road to me, and I narrow my gaze—not in anger, but in confusion.
“No…she was hoping I wouldn’t be here.”
“Are you sure about that?” he asks, holding my gaze for another beat before turning his attention back to the road.
“What do you… Yes, of course. Why would she want to see me?”
“Well…haveyouthought about her over the years?”
I ponder his question for a while.
Truthfully, I thought about her nearly every day of the four years that followed graduation. Then less after that. But there were still moments, like when I turned on the television in a Parisian hotel andTwilighthad been playing—in English, no less—and I felt the overwhelming urge to send her a message.
And when Dad died…I almost sent that message. I’d gotten her number from a mutual friend, a former classmate. I’d fully intended to text her but chickened out at the last minute.
“Yeah,” I eventually admit. “A lot, actually.”
“So, maybe she did, too. And maybe she finally decided she was done not being friends, and wanted to fix things.”
“But then why did she look at me like she wanted to pounce on me when I first spotted her?”
“Who knows why any of us do anything? Maybe she thought things would be different when she saw you.”
He has a point. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see her, and the response my body had to the sight of her was something akin to shock and terror. Yes, she had a heads-up that I would be there, but maybe seeing me in person brought back all the same memories I’d been flooded with, and she realized she still had unresolved feelings.
“You’re pretty good at that, you know,” I say, twisting to face Nolan.
“What’s that?”
“Seeing things from every angle. Seeing the good first, instead of the bad.”
“Oh, yeah?” he chuckles. I nod, a slight smile curling at my lips.
“It’s why I feel drawn to you.”
“I’m not always like that,” he says. “I have a bad habit of acting first and asking questions later.”
“Is that why you sent me a love letter the first—no, second time we met?”
He throws his head back and laughs.
