Page 24

There it is — the resignation of a person who loves someone and has accepted that love includes being meddled with. I recognize it because I wear it myself, on a weekly basis, every time Margaret drops his name into a sentence that didn’t need it.

We stand there for a moment in the middle of his living room, the party moving around us, the music still going, Evan presumably somewhere behind me being consoled by his teammates.

I should say something gracious and leave.

“I should find my friends,” I say instead.

“Yeah.” He nods once. “Okay.”

He doesn’t move. Neither do I, for approximately one beat longer than the conversation requires.

Then I do the sensible thing.

I go find my friends.

Margo sees my face before I reach her.

This is the thing about Margo Ashby — she has the emotional radar of someone who grew up in a house where everyone performed fine and learned early to read the performance. She spots me from ten feet away, mid-dance, and her expression shifts by a single degree that only I would catch.

She lets June finish her sentence. Then she drifts toward the edge of the dance floor in my direction, which she makes look completely natural, which it isn’t.

“What happened,” she says, not a question.

“Evan’s here.”

Her eyes go flat in the way Margo’s do when she is angry on someone else’s behalf and is deciding how to use it. “Where?”

“Football guys, by the door. Don’t—” I touch her arm, lightly. “Don’t. He’s already made enough of a scene.”

“Did he⁠—”

“I’m fine.”

She looks at my arm.

I don’t look at my arm.

“Margo.”

“I’m just looking.”

“Stop looking at my arm and look at my face.”

She looks at my face. Studies it with the attention she gives to things she’s decided to be worried about, the same attention that in four hours will have converted into a detailed plan she’ll present to the group over tea. I know this about her. I love this about her in a way I’m not going to say out loud right now.

“Okay,” she says, finally. “Are we leaving?”

“Where’s June?”

“Right here,” June says, appearing at Margo’s shoulder with the timing of someone who has been hovering within earshot for the past thirty seconds.

“We need to get Wren,” I say.

Margo glances toward the far wall, where Wren is still in what appears to be the same argument she was in twenty minutes ago, now with two additional hockey players having joined what was presumably already an efficient disagreement. “What’s happening over there?”

“I haven’t gotten to it yet.”

“Should we be concerned?”