She fought the urge to laugh. How was she?
Well-rehearsed. That’s how she was.
“Fine. You?”
“Hanna,” he snorted. He lowered his eyes to hers, a stinging within them she tried not to choke on. “How are you, really?”
She took a deep breath and a long sip of whatever strange cocktail she’d thrown together. It was not good. It did not matter.
“I’m surviving,” she finally said.
Logan reached for two red Solo cups. “You haven’t returned a single one of my calls.”
“Correct.”
“I’ve been worried about you.”
Hanna rolled her eyes. “Don’t do this, please. I don’t need a white knight to worry about me.”
Logan stepped closer. “You know what I mean. I knew Lisa for ten years?—”
“Don’t,” she snapped. It was instant, the burning at the back of her neck. The tears threatened to make a spectacle if she didn’t get him the fuck away from her. “You don’t get to do that.”
“Hanna,” he started, but she held up a hand.
“I can’t do this here. It’s not fair to Sara or your brother.”
Logan blocked her path as she attempted to circumvent him.
“Then when? Can we meet up later? I’m here through the weekend.”
She wanted to tell him absolutely not. She wanted to tell him to get fucked. But his eyes dropped into that boyish puppy-dog expression she knew so well.
“I don’t know. I’ll… I’ll think about it.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
Hanna sighed again, the prickling in her spine crawling into a suffocating heat.
“That’s not all you’re asking,” she said. She moved as quickly as she could to get inside without alarming the guests and headed toward the safety of Sara's childhood bedroom. Each step pushed her farther from the breakdown she felt coming, giving her the air she needed to stuff it all back down. She fell onto Sara’s perfectly made bed, counting the boy band posters they’d stuck to the walls with putty in high school. Everything buzzing against her lips drifted back into the quiet hum she’d gotten used to, the white noise of her grief nearly comforting.
“Hanna?”
For a moment, she thought it was Sara’s voice coming from the hallway, but it wasn’t quite familiar.
Oh.
Sloane poked her head through the door and, for a brief second, Hanna considered how hard it would be to break the window to her right.
“Is it okay if I come in?”
“Uhhh, sure?” she replied, annoyed at her own betrayal. Sloane perched on the edge of Sara’s desk and Hanna waited for her to speak.
She waited for a while.
Sloane’s lips finally parted after a silence so painful she thought they both might implode.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. About everything.”
