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“I’ll find our waiter for the check,” Simon said, standing as well.

Roy let out a low groan as Alannah shoved a glass of water at him.

“Parched from all that monologuing, darling?” she asked with faux sweetness.

Roy raised his hands in defense. “What? There was no monologuing. I was just answering questions—”

“Yes, because Bishop was clearly trying to keep the conversation going so Molly didn’t feel uncomfortable. You might have tried to loop some of the rest of us in at any point.” Alannah turned to Molly. “And you,” she started. “Are you going to follow him or not?”

“I’m sure Simon can find our waiter on his own—”

“Seriously? Not my brother. Bishop.”

Oh. Of course.

“I doubt he wants to see me right now,” Molly said, embarrassment creeping hot up her neck.

“Probably not,” Alannah agreed. “But you should go anyway. And you should think about apologizing for ogling Simon. Shit, you should apologize to Rachel too.”

“It’s alright,” Rachel said, hand resting atop her baby bump. “Really. We knew this would be a little weird.”

“Who was ogling Simon?” Roy asked. “You don’t mean Molly? That was her deep thinking face. It’s completely different from her ogling face. I’ve seen both. You have too.”

“Sure looked like an ogle to me,” Alannah said, downing the last of her wine.

“No, her mouth was closed,” Roy countered. “Mouth closed, thinking. Mouth open, ogling. Trust me, we went through puberty together.”

“You know what, you’re right. I should find Bishop,” Molly said in a rush. Her pride could only take so much in a single evening. And gushing about preteen crushes to Roy after school wasn’t a time she especially wanted to revisit. He’d mostly thrown a baseball around while she sat in the grass and imagined herself living a great romance.

“I’m sorry, Molly,” Roy offered, picking at the leftover piece of bread sitting on his plate. “I wanted us to have a nice time. Like it used to be.”

She offered him a weak smile, holding in the unkind thing she wanted to say, knowing it would hurt her just as much as it would hurt him.

Things might never be the same again.

By the time she found Bishop hunched at the far end of the mostly empty restaurant bar, he already had both a half-consumed tumbler and an entire bottle of liquor sitting in front of him. He knocked back the rest of his drink when Molly quietly slid into the seat beside him.

He didn’t look at her, eyes locked on the glass in his hands instead. The lighting was dim here, and Molly strained to see his expression, desperate to know how much damage she’d done.

“Careful,” he said in an almost inaudible voice. He gestured to a broken glass sitting atop a paper napkin in front of her.

“I dropped it,” he added. “I didn’t—I didn’t throw it or anything. My hands were . . .” he trailed off.

“Bishop, I—”

“Don’t,” he snapped. She knew that tone. It was the same kind of curtness, the same venom-laced articulation that she’d heard in classrooms, social outings, and cafeterias for years. Its reemergence caught her off guard. She’d apparently grown accustomed to a civil Bishop without realizing it.

But his voice had already softened by the time he spoke again. “I needed some space. I shouldn’t have stormed off. But I—I don’t think I can talk to you right now.” He refilled his drink and downed the entire thing in a series of quick, determined motions.

Molly bit hard at the inside of her bottom lip, wincing at the coppery tang of blood as her teeth cut through flesh. It wasn’t what he thought. She hadn’t been ogling. This was absolutely a conversation they could have. She hadn’t meant to hurt him, and the thought struck her, sudden and tasting like the blood in her mouth, how much it mattered to her that she had.

“You can though. If you’d just listen for a minute.”

He barked a cruel laugh. “Some things never fucking change, then, do they?” He set his tumbler down on the bar top. “I need space when I’m upset. We’ve already had a fair few fights when you ignored that. And I don’t want to do it again. Please.” His sincerity was tinged with a sneer, as if he couldn’t quite help himself. “I don’t want to upset you.”

“This isn’t a fight,” Molly insisted. It didn’t have to be. “Just an apology. I know what it looked like I was doing, but I wasn’t.”

“I told you,” he said. Whatever control he had over his tone had begun to waver with the bleeding edge of his anger. “I told you exactly what I didn’t want to witness, and I had to witness it anyway.”