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The look on her face. Quick — a half-second of something before the composure came back up. I placed her at the same moment she placed me, which means my grandmother has been talking about both of us to both of us and we’ve been having parallel one-sided conversations about the same person for two years without knowing it, which is the kind of thing Margaret thinks is romantic and which is actually just extremely Margaret.

The screen door opens behind me.

“She’s going to take him back,” a voice says, from the other end of the porch.

I go still.

Two girls have come out through the side door — I didn’t hear it over the music, and the far end of the porch is dark enough that they haven’t noticed me at the railing. They settle into the chairs down there with the ease of people claiming a private space, voices dropping to the register of a conversation they don’t want overheard.

“She’s not going to take him back,” the second voice says. “Did you see her face?”

“She’ll take him back. She always does.”

“They literally just broke up⁠—”

“Evan says she just needs space. He’s going to give her a week and then show up with flowers and she’ll fold.” A pause. The sound of a drink being set down. “She’s got no one else. He knows that.”

I know the first voice. It takes me a second longer than it should, which is probably the company I’ve been in for the last twenty minutes, but I get there.

Bella.

I breathe out slowly through my nose.

I should go back inside. This is genuinely not my situation and nothing about it is my business and I have enough going on with my own shoulder and my own preseason and my own grandmother’s matchmaking agenda without adding someone else’s post-breakup drama to the inventory.

I should absolutely go back inside.

“Evan’s delusional,” the second girl says. “She walked in on him with Vivienne Park. That’s not flowers-and-forgiveness territory, that’s⁠—”

“Evan’s going to be fine.” Bella’s voice has the flatness of someone who is less interested in Evan’s situation than in the point she’s making about the person adjacent to it. “Sloane Beckett has been at Whitmore for two years and her entire social life is those three roommates and an old woman’s bookshop. She’s not exactly swimming in options.”

I press my thumb into the heel of my palm.

“And the hockey captain?” the second girl asks.

A pause.

“Beau was just being Beau,” Bella says, and something in her voice has shifted — still flat, but with an edge underneath it now. “He steps in for people. It’s the captain thing. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“He looked pretty⁠—”

“It doesn’t mean anything.” Cleaner this time. Final. “Give him a week. He’ll be texting me again.”

I hear the scrape of chairs. Then footsteps, and the side door, and they’re gone.

I stand at the railing for a long moment.

She’s got no one else. He knows that.

Give him a week.

The lamppost throws its yellow circle on the pavement and I look at it and I think about Evan’s hand on her arm, the way his grip tightened when she tried to pull away, the very deliberate way he said she’s my girlfriend to a room full of people while she was standing right there telling him she wasn’t. I think about a week and then flowers and she’ll fold, delivered with the confidence of someone who has watched a pattern repeat enough times to rely on it.

She was going to break up with him tonight. She told me that. Came over for dinner, was planning to end it in person — which is a decent thing to do, a generous thing to do, and he showed up at my party two hours later with his team and his plan and his certainty that she’d come around.

He’s going to keep coming.

The thing about that kind of certainty is that it feeds itself. He shows up, she holds the line, he shows up again, and everyone around her watches it and decides it means something about what she’s willing to accept, and that’s the story that sticks, and I know how that story goes because I’ve watched it go that way before and I’ve never been close enough to do anything about it.