“Yeah, from Sweden. The girls picked her up from O’Hare earlier. Dinner tonight with the whole crew.” He takes a sip of my chai, realizes it’s my chai, and hands it back. “Bennett, Layla, Caleb, Serena. You know, the inner circle.”
She’s back.
She’shere.
Three months. Three months of silence, of wondering, of replaying that moment in her apartment over and over until it’s worn grooves into my brain. Three months of writing scripts for conversations I’d never have. Building a chatbot to practice apologies on. Lying awake at night trying to figure out how to explain something I don’t fully understand myself.
And she’s back. In Chicago. Right now.
“Logan?” Dominic is looking at me with something that might be concern. “You OK? You just went somewhere else.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure? Because you’ve got that look.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You absolutely have a look. It’s the same look you had when you tried to explain blockchain to my grandmother when I brought her as my date to the Mercer Christmas party. Very intense. Slightly unhinged.”
“She asked how cryptocurrency worked. I was being helpful.”
“You made her cry, Logan.”
“Those were tears of comprehension.”
“She said, and I quote, ‘That young man was frighteningly intense.’”
I force myself to breathe. To think. To process this information like data instead of like a grenade going off in my chest.
Audrey is back. There’s a welcome-home dinner. I wasn’t invited.
Of course, I wasn’t invited. Why would I be invited? I’m the reason she left. I’m the one who blocked her kiss and watched her face crumple. I couldn’t find the words to explain that it wasn’t her. It was never her. It was me and my complete inability to function like a regular person.
She probably hates me. She should hate me.
“Who’s at the dinner?” I ask. My voice sounds distant. Like it belongs to someone else.
“I told you. Bennett, Layla, Caleb, Serena. Audrey.” Dominic shrugs. “Why, you want to crash it? I’ll come. Give me an excuse to avoid the mountain of emails I haven’t responded to.”
“No. Don’t crash it.”
“You sure? I give excellent moral support. I can run interference if things get awkward. Create a diversion. Spill wine on someone.”
“Things aren’t going to get awkward because I’m not going to be there.” I say it flatly. A fact. A variable that’s already been assigned. “I wasn’t invited.”
Something shifts in Dominic’s expression. The joking falls away, and underneath is something softer. Something that makes my shoulders tighten.
“Logan—”
“It’s fine. It makes sense.” I’m already moving toward the door. “She doesn’t want to see me. I wouldn’t want to see me either.”
“That’s not—come on, man. Don’t spiral.”
“I don’t spiral.”
“You absolutely spiral. You spiral so hard you create your own gravitational field.” He catches my arm. “Look, I’m sure they just wanted to keep it small. Give her space to readjust. It’s not personal.”
Space.Right. Because I’m the thing she needs space from. The variable that broke the equation. The bug in the system that everyone’s been quietly working around for three months.
