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“How many Maggies do you think I know?”

“You’re hanging out with Maggie again?” I can quite literally see the puppy dog energy coursing through his body. “Since when?”

“A while.”

His entire face brightens in a way I wasn’t expecting. “That’s awesome.”

I glance at him as I measure a length of elastic against the ruler taped to the edge of my work tray. “Why are you so excited?”

“Because Maggie’s a hoot.”

“A hoot? Now who sounds like Mom?”

He ignores me. “The last time I saw her, she took me for ice cream. That time you and Mom were fighting.”

My fingers slow over the elastic, because I remember that fight vividly.

It had been about Alison. Most of our fights back then were, even when they began somewhere else.

That particular one had started because I told our mom I wasn’t coming to Fausto’s birthday dinner that weekend. Alison and I already had plans. Plans I insisted we couldn’t change, and Mamá had said something about how there was always a reason I couldn’t make it lately.

I heard criticism. She’d probably meant concern.

Neither of us had been particularly good at making that distinction back then.

“You remember that?” I ask.

Fausto looks at me like I’ve asked something ridiculous. “I was seventeen, Flori.”

Right.

Sometimes the fifteen years between us does strange things to my understanding of time. I remember Fausto with missing front teeth and soccer cleats he refused to take off inside the house, and some part of me has apparently decided everything that happened before he went to college belongs to a childhood he barely remembers.

“You guys were doing that thing where you both speak Spanish really fast and pretend it means you aren’t yelling.”

A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. “That is not a thing.”

“It absolutely is. Ask Maggie.”

I thread the first aventurine bead onto the elastic. “Well, I’m sorry you had to hear it.”

“I got ice cream.” He shrugs. “I was sad when you guys stopped hanging out, though.”

Alison had never asked me to stop seeing Maggie. She never told me to miss dinners here or turn down plans or stop being available to everyone else. If she had, maybe those years would be easier to understand now. I could point to something she did and tell myself that was where I went wrong.

Instead, there had been hundreds of choices that barely felt like choices at all. When she came around, I’d spent so many years helping my mother hold everything together that when I finally had something that felt entirely mine, I held on with both hands.

I just hadn’t noticed everything else I was letting go of.

“Anyway, I’m glad you’re hanging out with Maggie again,” Fausto says. “Maybe next time I can join you for drinks.”

I look across the table at him. “Me too. And we’ll see about the drinks.”

He nods toward the bracelet in my hands. “Genevieve would probably also be glad if you finished that sometime tonight.”

I shake my head and reach for another bead. “You were much cuter when you were seven.”

“I was probably a hoot.” He snickers, completely amused at himself.