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“I’m sure he’d like that,” said her mom. She leaned in and lowered her voice as if she didn’t want anyone to hear her. “Joe said he was having a tough go of it.”

“You talk to Leo’s dad now?” Shira asked. Her parents had been just as scandalized and appalled by his behavior as she had been back in the day.

Her mom shrugged. “He’s my neighbor, and it’s been a long time. We don’t have to be best friends to say hi when he’s walking the dog or giving me his doorbell footage so I can figure out who egged my car.”

Okay, fine. “So wait, Leo’s having a tough time, he said? Why?”

She shrugged again. “Not sure. I didn’t get any details.” She sounded vaguely disappointed, which meant she’d tried to get some and failed. When it came to digging for details in her phone conversations with Shira, she was like a star paleontologist, able to piece together an entire ancient organism from shards of bone and fossilized skin, able somehow to tell that Shira had had a disappointing blind date from her purposefully vague hints about how the food at the bar she’d gone to the other night hadn’t been great. “I got to tell him all about you. How you’re living in LA and how you’re working at one of the biggest art galleries in the country and how you’re getting interest in your own art. He seemed very impressed.”

Shira couldn’t help it: Her chest puffed up like a proud pigeon’s. At twenty-two, she was already living the dream. She’d worked hard, of course, but she’d also gotten lucky when her senior portfolio got noticed by the right person at the right gallery, a big, fancy one that represented a lot of big, fancy artists and that somehow now also represented her. Maybe by next holiday she’d have put on her debut show with them, and—dream big, she always told herself—all her work would receive rave reviews and sell to major collectors and maybe even get her featured in a big museum or a world biennale. And the owner of the gallery where she worked—a different one than the one who represented her, because Shira hadn’t wanted to make things awkward with her boss asking if he would be interested in her own work (the thought of him declining and then having to work with him every day gave her hives)—would have to take notice and wonder, Why is this extremely talented painter doing my admin work when I should be trying to poach her for my own even bigger and more impressive gallery, whose name would get her noticed by even bigger and more impressive collectors and venues? And then—

“I also told him about your terrace,” her mom said proudly.

Shira bit back a sigh. Her tiny studio, which hosted a Murphy bed in the combined living room/bedroom and barely had enough space in the kitchen to open the oven, did indeed have a terrace. It was rickety and always covered in bird shit, but it looked great when properly filtered on social media. “Right, okay,” she said. “But did you see—”

“Shira, hurry up!” Talia hollered from up ahead. “It’s cold!”

Shira sighed. “Coming.”

She stole one last glance into Leo’s window before moving on. There was a flash of movement in the corner, maybe a curtain fluttering. Probably the dog had run past and stirred it, but she lingered there for an extra second anyway. Just in case.

The next morning, Shira woke up to a bunch of texts in the group chat; they’d been buzzing deep into the night on West Coast time, while Shira, despite the minor jet lag, had passed out at nine thirty, to Talia’s enormous eye roll. She scrolled through the messages she’d missed, knowing that by now it would probably be too late to respond to the political news they were horrified about with anything but an angry emoji, but she was still glad to be included.

Shira had met the three of them shortly after her arrival in LA. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; she’d known Danica fairly well in college, where they’d both taken classes in the art department, but they didn’t truly become best friends until they realized they were the most talented painters in their art program (what was the point of being modest when you knew the truth?), and then they’d both landed gallery representation around graduation, a major coup. Ellery had interned at the same gallery as Shira over the summer, and then the three of them had chatted with Nora at a networking event and they’d all just vibed. Now they met almost weekly for drinks and bitching about art, and the group chat was always abuzz.

Shira missed the connection a little bit when she was far away. She texted Danica, I’ve gotten zero work done this break. It’s like I revert to blob form as soon as I get home. Booooo

Danica responded immediately, up early, or maybe still up late from last night. Perfect stunning blob

Shira bit back a laugh, then wondered why she was biting back a laugh in the privacy of her own room, where she could show her teeth as much as she wanted, even the crooked ones on the bottom. But by then the moment had passed, so she didn’t try to force the laugh. Sometimes she didn’t know what she’d do all the way out there on the other side of the country without her best friends.

Speaking of which. She switched over to the group chat. Guys did I ever tell you that I had a guy best friend as a kid? He moved away when we were fourteen and I haven’t seen him since. Apparently he just moved back??

Unsurprisingly, Ellery and Nora didn’t respond, considering they were likely (hopefully) asleep. Danica was the only one to answer, and she did so immediately. Have you been teleported into a rom-com?

You know perfectly well I don’t have time for either romance or comedy, Shira texted back, cracking a smile.

They’d gone over this several weeks ago when the four of them were having brunch at the local English tearoom, the only one in Los Angeles. It was cozy and always warm, full of mismatched tableware and teacups, and while the scones were usually dry, the servers made up for it with buckets of clotted cream and jam. Shira and her friends had been sitting at their table, elbow to elbow with the people beside them, bitching about the art world and how, despite calls for diversity, it was still a white cis man’s world, then sipping their tea and making up the notes of flavor that they found, ketchup and cigarette and grass, when Shira stopped for a moment and looked around and smiled—not just a crack of one, but a real one, a big and toothy one she rarely let loose.

“What’s so funny?” Danica had asked, her big dark eyes wide. Though Shira wasn’t exactly tall or fat, she always felt she was when compared to Danica, who was tiny and slender as a bird.

“Nothing’s funny,” Shira said. A lump rose in her throat out of nowhere, and she took a sip of her tea so that she wouldn’t unexpectedly cry. She didn’t even like tea that much, not even this one, which was supposed to taste like roses, but somehow drinking it made her feel more adult than sipping a glass of wine did. “I’m just thinking about how lucky I am, to be here, at this moment.”

“To be drinking tea that tastes like roses instead of cigarettes,” Danica said, raising her cup.

“No, I’m serious,” she said. “I don’t know what more I could want.”

“How about to get an exhibit at the Whitney?” Ellery suggested.

Nora added, “Or an apartment with more than one room?”

“Some romance?” Danica said, waggling her eyebrows.

Okay, those were all true. But Shira said, “I don’t have time for romance right now, really. But I would like to have a show at the Whitney.” She nudged Danica with her elbow. “At the same time as you, obviously. Then maybe you’ll tell me what your show is about.”

“It’s too personal,” Danica said, nudging Shira right back. She must have misjudged the force of her elbow, because Shira almost dropped her teacup into her lap. “I’ll share when it’s ready to go. I’m too superstitious.”

“Fair,” said Nora. “I wish the artist I worked with felt that way.” She was the assistant to a famous contemporary artist whose primary claim to fame was a series he’d done of massive, shiny sculptures of various Happy Meal toys from the nineties. “Sometimes he calls in the middle of the night with a burst of inspiration like, ‘Should I try knitting something out of pubic hair?’ and I’m like, ‘It’s three in the morning, I’m half asleep, I do not have the mental capacity to talk you down from your terrible concept while making you think it’s all your idea.’ ”