When he left, I picked up his phone and dialed home.

“Hi, sweetie!” Mom said.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh!” she said. “Before I forget, Dean Barton called for you a few minutes ago.”

I clung on to the kitchen counter to steady myself. “He did?”

“He said it was important, um, hold on, let me find the message.” I heard Mom rustling around, and it was all I could do not to scream at her to hurry up. “What, honey?”

“I didn’t say anything,” I snapped, before I realized she was talking to Dad.

“Yes, in the freezer in the garage.” Pause. “It’s in there.”

“Mom!” I barked.

“TifAni, relax,” Mom said. “Your father, you know how he is.”

“What did Dean say?”

“I have the message right here. Call soon as possible, about chemistry project. He left his number too. He sounded very nervous.” There was the dainty tinkle of her laugh. “He must like you.”

“Tell me the number?” I found a Post-it and a pen in Mr. Larson’s drawer and wrote it down.

“I’ll call you right back,” I said.

“Wait, TifAni, when should I pick you up?”

“I’ll call you right back!”

I hung up the phone and hurriedly dialed Dean’s number. I needed to know what this was all about before Mr. Larson got back from CVS.

Dean answered on the third ring. His hello was hostile.

“Finny!” His tone changed completely when he realized it was me. “Where the hell did you go last night? We tried to find you.”

I fed him a lie about how I ended up at the house of one of my teammates, who lives not far from Olivia.

“Good, good,” Dean said. “So listen, about what happened last night. I’m really sorry.” He laughed sheepishly. “I was really fucked up.”

“You hit me,” I said, so quietly I wasn’t even sure if I’d said it or not until Dean responded.

“I’m really sorry, Finny.” Dean’s voice caught in his squat throat. “I feel sick that I did that. Can you ever forgive me? I won’t be able to live with myself if you don’t forgive me.”

There was a desperation in Dean’s voice that I felt too—it would be so much easier if this never happened, and only we have the power to make it so.

I swallowed. “Okay.”

Dean’s breath sounded heavy on my ear. “Thank you, Finny. Thank you.”

I called Mom back after we hung up and told her I would take the train.

“And, Mom?” I asked. “Do you have any Neosporin? Olivia’s dog scratched my face while I was sleeping.” Olivia didn’t have a dog.

When Mr. Larson returned I was dressed and ready with my lies. I insisted on taking the train, insisted he didn’t understand my parents, that it would be better if I told them on my own.

“Are you sure?” Mr. Larson asked. His tone made it clear that he didn’t believe one shred of it.

I nodded apologetically. “There’s an eleven fifty-seven from Bryn Mawr. We can make it if we leave now.” I turned away from the disappointment in his face so he couldn’t see my own. I sometimes wonder if this was the decision that set everything into motion. Or if it would have happened anyway, if, like the nuns at Mt. St. Theresa’s said, God has a plan for all of us and he knows the outcome before we’re even born.

CHAPTER 9

I didn’t lie to Luke. I told him I was going to e-mail Mr. Larson a few days after we returned from Nantucket. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him, hadn’t been able to stop picturing the two of us shoulder to shoulder in a dim bar, a mixture of concern and lust on his face when I confessed my second dark secret to him: I’m not sure I can go through with this. The way he would kiss me—the restraint he would try to have at first because of his wife. Booth. Elspeth. But then he’d remember, it’s me.

Then the credits of this little fantasy roll. Mr. Larson would never do that with me. I didn’t even really want to do that with him either. I was getting married. This was just cold feet doing the same shuffle they do for every bride. And it’s normal to have cold feet, Mom reminded me when I felt her out, let it drop that maybe I wasn’t as ready to get married as I thought I was. “Guys like Luke don’t come along every day,” she warned. “Don’t mess this up, Tif. You’ll never get anyone as good as him again.”

Mr. Larson’s appeal was that he was there for it all. He saw me at my stray dog lowest and still he stood behind me, did everything he could to help me. He imagined the future I could have before I even wanted it for myself, and he was the one to push me toward it. That’s faith. Growing up, I thought faith was about believing Jesus died for us, and that if I held on to that, I’d get to meet him when I died too. But faith doesn’t mean that to me anymore. Now it means someone seeing something in you that you don’t, and not giving up until you see it too. I want that. I miss that.

“Why do you need it?” Luke argued when I asked for Mr. Larson’s e-mail address. Not suspicious. But not thrilled either.

“What do you mean why?” I spat at him, like I would at an intern who questioned the assignment I’d just given her. What about this don’t you get? “It’s insane that we ran into each other like that. He’s doing the documentary. I want to know if we’re filming at the same time. What he’s going to talk about.” Luke’s face wasn’t giving, so I went for melodramatic. “Everything, Luke. I want to talk to him about everything.”

Luke thumped his arm on the couch and groaned. “He’s my client, Ani. I just don’t want things getting . . . messy . . . like that.”

“You just don’t get it,” I sighed. Walked forlornly into the bedroom and quietly shut the door. When I asked for the e-mail address again the next day, Luke wrote me back with just that and nothing else.

With Mr. Larson’s address in the To field, I channeled my inner Prom Queen and wrote him a sweet, spirited e-mail. “I can’t believe we ran into each other the way we did! Small world, right? I’d love to catch up sometime, I feel like we have so much to talk about.”

I clicked refresh eight times before Mr. Larson’s reply appeared. I opened the e-mail, my cheeks hot with hope.

“How about coffee?” he wrote back. “Would you be comfortable with that?” My eye roll must have burned off the calories in the grapes I’d snuck. Coffee? He was still treating me like his student.

“I believe drinks would make both of us more ‘comfortable,’” I wrote.

“You had that bite even when you were a kid” came his reply, the word “kid” making me bristle. But he agreed.

On the day we were to meet, I wore an oversize leather T-shirt dress and peep-toe booties to work, thinking, This is what someone with “bite” wears in the middle of summer.

“You look fantastic,” LoLo said when she passed me in the hallway. “Did you get Botox in your forehead?”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I said, and LoLo cackled with laughter the way I knew she would. I thought we were just exchanging pleasantries, but LoLo slowed to a stop and took a few steps backward, beckoning me into a corner. “So that ‘Revenge Porn’ piece of yours is brilliant. Really brilliant.”

I’d lobbied hard for that idea, for six pages in the feature section to report on the women who had been made victims by vindictive ex-boyfriends, on the way privacy and sexual harassment laws hadn’t caught up with technology, so that, technically, there was nothing law enforcement could do to help them.

“Thank you.” I beamed.

“It’s amazing, you really can do anything,” LoLo continued. “But I think it will have more of an impact at the you know what than it will here.” Her eyebrows struggled to go higher on her forehead, then gave up.

I would play. “It’s a timely article. I wouldn’t sit on it for long.”

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll have to.” Her smile revealed a row of coffee-drinker teeth behind a coat of Chanel lipstick.