“Larson residence.” The voice that answered could have cracked your skull in half.

“Hi.” I stood and began to pace. But I’d forgotten about the cord, how short it was, and the receiver crashed to the floor behind me, wrenching the phone out of my hand. “Shit!” I hissed, dropping to the ground to grab it.

“Hello?” the voice demanded from the floor. “Hello?”

“Hi,” I said again, “sorry. Is Mr. Larson there?”

“Speaking.”

“Sorry, Andrew Larson.”

“This is he. To whom am I speaking?”

I wanted to hang up. It would have been easier if I had. But muscle memory took over and my knuckles went white on the phone. “This is Ani FaNelli. I’m trying to get ahold of your son.” Adding, so this request didn’t seem indecent, “I was one of his students.”

There were a few surly blasts of Mr. Larson Senior’s breath. Then, “My God, girl, I thought you were one of those crank callers.” The connection crackled with his laugh. “Just a second.”

He put the phone down. There were muffled voices in the background. Agonizing moments of silence before Andrew Larson Jr. was saying, “TifAni?”

I forgot all about the posturing and the excuses. I just told him the truth. Today was hard, and I was alone.

Andrew hadn’t brought Whitney with him for the weekend. When I heard that, I caught my breath, hoping he would suggest we grab a drink instead of meeting at Peace A Pizza, my idea, but he just said, “Peace A Pizza. I haven’t been there in years. Forty minutes?”

I placed the phone in its receiver with an accusing click. Pizza. At a time so early the sun still taunted me in the sky. There wasn’t anything indecent about this. Relief and disappointment went to battle. I felt the gritty determination of both.

I’d washed off the camera makeup the moment I entered the hotel room, averting my eyes from the places the fluorescent lights pointed out, the powder and foundation gathered in creases around my eyes and mouth. Twenty-eight, and, thanks to my slick olive skin, I was often mistaken for just out of college, but it was impossible to tell how much longer that would last. I’d seen aging overcome people like a fast-growing cancer. Not enough antioxidants in the world to ward it off.

I went to work again—tinted moisturizer, concealer, bronzer, mascara, lip stain. Luke is always amazed at the weight of my makeup bag. “Do you actually use all of this crap?” he asked me once. It was a compliment because yes, I did.

It was 6:50 when I climbed into Luke’s Jeep. Fourteen minutes. That’s how long it took to drive just two miles into Bryn Mawr. That terrified crawl—it wasn’t just so I could be the right amount of late. I was genuinely afraid that I’d pushed my luck too far now. That the universe had no choice but to intervene, point its finger at a mean-eyed luxury-make SUV and drag it into my lane, pinning me between its polished body and the median, the steering wheel cracking my sternum into bony splinters, one of which would puncture a heart or a lung. Proving what a falsehood it was that I got out of that cafeteria because great things were ahead for me, things the five were never meant to accomplish anyway. Which is what I sometimes tell myself when I fall into a depressed slump, when all I can see is the open nut of Ansilee’s head in my mind’s eye, and the day doesn’t seem like it will ever turn tonight.

I didn’t know what kind of car Andrew drove, so there was no way for me to scan for it in the packed parking lot before I entered. That one drink on an empty stomach had induced a brave haze, but anxiety was still stronger. The place was teeming with teenage limbs, gangly legs too long and restless to squash underneath the table, and, like Nell’s, they sprawled into the open aisles, a series of overturned pogo sticks. No Andrew. I backed into a corner and waited.

I had that feeling like I didn’t know what to do with my arms—fold them, hold one elbow with one hand?—when the doors opened and a whoosh of crisp air ushered Andrew in. He was wearing a fine knit sweater and good jeans, jeans picked out by a magnificently thin stylist at Barneys.

I gave him a little wave, and he made his way over to me.

Andrew whistled. “This place is packed.” I agreed, hoping again he would suggest we go somewhere else, but then he said, “I guess we should get in line.”

When I was in high school, novelty pizzas were still high concept. Macaroni and cheese pizza, bacon cheeseburger pizza, penne alla vodka pizza—it had been so wild to me. Now all I think is carbs on top of carbs. No wonder I was such a porker.

I said as much to Andrew, and he laughed. “You were never a porker.” He patted his brawny middle. “This guy on the other hand.” It was true. There had been a playful, frat boy roundness to him back then. I still can’t believe Andrew was twenty-four years old when he was my teacher. Twenty-four that night in his bedroom, when he woke me up from my bad dream and I begged him to stay. There had been so much sadness in his face before he agreed. For a long time I thought it was because he felt sorry for me, but now I wonder if it was something else. If maybe he was mourning the great divide between us, what could have been if our age difference was just five years less.

Through the glass partition, the pies gleamed high with toppings that, on their own, were more than I was eating at my meals these days. My stomach yawned.

I ordered a slice of margarita. A safe choice, I reasoned, because no flair meant no flair caught in my teeth. Andrew ordered a slice of the Mediterranean salad.

There were no open tables, only open chairs, and if this was all the time I had with Andrew, I wasn’t about to waste it next to a pair of rawboned gigglers, napkins over their laps in the event of an untimely erection. I nodded at the door. “Want to sit outside?”

There were two benches in the front, but those were occupied, so Andrew and I went around the side and sat on the curb, paper plates balanced gingerly on our thighs, the gravel pocking our skin through our jeans.

I took a bite. “Oh my God,” I moaned.

“Not better than New York,” Andrew said.

“Better than anything.” I held up my finger. “Wedding diet.”

Andrew nodded. “Whitney went crazy with that too.” A portly artichoke rolled off his slice and hit the ground with a wet thud. I thought about Ansilee’s head and had to place the paper plate on my lap. Like that, the tomato sauce had taken on the consistency of blood. This happens to me occasionally with ketchup too, usually when I go through a bout of thinking about Peyton. There are times I see the mangled destruction on his face all day and no red food is safe. Neither is meat. Just the thought. I held a napkin to my mouth and forced myself to swallow the last bite I’d taken.

“So today wasn’t easy, huh?”

Andrew was sitting close to me but not so close that there could be an innocuous brush of our thighs. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his scruff was golden over the summer tan that clung on. He was heartbreaking to look at.

“Not because I had to talk about it,” I said. “That I don’t care about. I care about people believing me.” I leaned back on my hands, something I never would have done on a New York City street corner. “I looked around at the crew after we were done, and I just wondered, Do they really believe me? I don’t know what to do to make people believe me.” I watched the cars pass each other on the road. “I’ll do anything.” I took a deep breath, that old desperation flaming in me like a pull on a cigarette. It makes me capable of things I don’t want to be capable of, and if I don’t watch myself with militant supervision, my blade could very easily slip, cut Luke too deep, sever me from the life I’ve worked so hard to assemble. But when I stand next to Andrew and see how my head just barely reaches the place where his shoulder starts to pitch, when I think how big he is and how hard it must be to control himself, I wonder if he would be the one thing that’s worth my exile from the tartan tribe.