“The Green Line is the light rail. Take it toward Lechmere—”
Caroline swallowed audibly. “You’re going to have to explain this to me like I’m from Mars,” she said, voice tight with unhappiness. “I don’t have... is it a card? An app? How do I pay?”
Adrian looked out the window. The sun had set, and the snow had really started to come down.
“Where are you, exactly?” Adrian asked. “I’ll come get you.”
There was a brief pause, and she read him an address.
Adrian walked back through the living room, ignoring Tom’s quizzical look as he grabbed his jacket and started down the stairs two at a time.
“Are you safe where you are?” he asked, feet skidding a little on the new powder. “I’ll be about twenty minutes.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just on the steps outside someone’s apartment. It’s fine.”
Adrian walked faster. When he reached a section of sidewalk that had been shoveled already, he ran. Good thing he’d been hitting the gym more often with all the painting he wasn’t doing.
When he reached the address, he felt a surge of panic when he couldn’t immediately find Caroline. It was dark, the nearest streetlight several big houses down the street. Then he saw her pink coat. She was huddled on the side of the stairs, barely sheltered from the drifting snow with her hood pulled up over her head and her hands tucked into her sleeves.
She didn’t stand up when he jogged the last couple of steps on the approach, just looked up to check that it was him standing in front of her, then immediately ducked her head to wipe at her face.
When she began to struggle to her feet, Adrian sank down next to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. It was a ten-minute walk to the station, and he wanted to find out what had happened before they left.
She shook under his arm. He didn’t think it was from the cold, but he unbuttoned his wool overcoat and wrapped the edge of the lapel around her to put another layer between her and the snow.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he asked as softly as he was able to.
She pawed at her face with her palm. “Nothing. It’sreally, really stupid. I’m sorry you had to come out to get me in the snow just because I’m too dumb to figure out public transportation on my own.”
“You’re not dumb, and I’m sure it’s not stupid.”
“It’s just girl drama. You’ll think it’s—”
“Caroline. You can tell me.”
She took a deep breath. “I just thought I was going to the crew dinner after this, and I’m not, actually. That’s all it is.”
“What was the problem with the dinner?”
“Nothing, really. The stage manager told me that the crew dinner was for crew, but you know, since I’m not in the arts and sciences program, I’m not crew. So they didn’t have the budget for me.”
“She said it was the budget?”
“Yeah. I said I could pay for my own dinner, you know, but she said that wasn’t appropriate when nobody else would be...” Caroline gave a small choked laugh. “Okay, so that’s just an excuse, right? She just said that because she didn’t want me to go. And so now I’m snotting on this girl’s front porch just because I didn’t go to a dinner.”
Adrian roughly rubbed Caroline’s shoulder, wishing he could curse out someone he’d never met.
“Of course you wanted to go. You worked with these people for weeks.”
Caroline’s shoulders convulsed. “See, it’s not even that I wanted to go so bad. I’m not good with big groups, or even, I guess, people at all. But I wanted them to want me to go with them, isn’t that weird?”
“No,” he said firmly. “It’s not.”
She turned her head to wipe her face against his shoulder. “I came all the way to Boston because I was tired of being this person who was just pretty good at tennis. Youknow? That’s all there was to me. I told my grandmother I wanted to move away, so she changed her will to leave everything to me. My family didn’t want me to take her money and move away when she died, but I did it anyway. This was supposed to change my life, but I’m the same person I was back home.” She covered her face with her palms. “What’s wrong with me?”
Adrian clutched her tighter against him. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing is wrong with you. Not a thing.”
Caroline cried harder. “I thought it was that I was boring. And I thought I could fix that. I’d never been anywhere or done anything except tennis, so I was trying to spend more time with people, try new things, but that isn’t going to help, is it? I’m the problem.”
