“You mean Mr. Hard-On?” Andrew grinned, and it wiped the fourteen years off his face.

I stopped walking. “You knew that’s what we called him?”

“Tif, the entire teaching staff called him that. His name was literally Mr. Hard-On.” He tipped his chin at me, an ask for more credit. “It was a logical leap to make.”

My laugh somersaulted down the empty hallway, hit the seven steps to the old mansion. Ascend them and the cafeteria was to the right and the English wing was to the left. I thought about that sound ricocheting in the space the Shark and I had crossed, after we’d lost Liam, and immediately wished I could reel it back.

The computer lab appeared on our right, once such a throwaway room, now stocked with iPads mounted on futuristic looking stands. The dark room held our image in the glass, looking in.

Andrew pressed his knuckles into the pane. “I can’t even imagine what everyone said about me.”

“They didn’t say anything. Everyone loved you. We were all crushed when you left.”

The glass caught Andrew dropping his head to his chest. “Those Bartons, they play dirty.” He eyed me in our reflection. “It would have been my last year anyway. Teaching was always a layover for me until I grew up a little. I just wasn’t ready to get a real job after I graduated. Though”—he swished his mouth side to side, considering—“I probably would have stayed on longer after what happened. At least another year to help you guys out.”

This had never even occurred to me, that I could have had him for more time than I did. Anger tightened my chest as I realized how Mr. Larson was just one more thing Dean had taken from me.

We continued down the hallway, arriving at the entrance of the Junior and Senior Lounge. I stepped inside, the space still intimidating in its unfamiliarity. I’d rarely spent time there, not even as a senior. There was an exclusive code to the place even when you were of age, and it wasn’t a spot where the marginalized could enjoy a free period. It wasn’t like I was completely friendless for my remaining years at Bradley. I had the Shark. We’d been really close, but we lost touch once we got to college. I still regret that. I also had some of the girls on the cross-country team, which I continued to sign up for every year. I really did love running before I made it into something torturous and hard, something I did to impress Luke. There was a solace that settled in me as I collected the miles beneath my feet, a total absence of self-doubt.

Andrew lingered in the open doorway. He was so tall he could rest his hands against the arch in the ceiling. He leaned forward, his broad chest stretching even wider, his body blocking the way. I used to play this game when I first began to toe the line of adolescence, when my boobs came in and I was hungry for the boys my age to catch up: I’d scan the damp basement room containing whatever seventh-grade party I was attending, and wonder which boy was strong enough to overtake me. Whoever he was, no matter how pimpled and squeaky, if he was big enough to hurt me, I wanted him. It’s something I’ve come to understand about myself—I want someone who can hurt me but won’t. Luke has failed me there. I know Andrew wouldn’t.

“Do you think about Arthur ever?” I asked him.

Andrew slipped his hands—all but his thumbs—into his pockets. The body language expert at The Women’s Magazine told me that when someone puts his hands in his pockets, he’s feeling shy—unless he continues to reveal his thumbs, in which case it’s a sign of confidence. “A lot actually, yes.”

I nodded. “I do too.”

Andrew took a few steps into the lounge, closing the distance between us and setting off all my signals like an airplane in distress. If he wanted to cross this line, he could, this place had ground what remained of my steely resolve fine as flour. There was nothing left of the day but gray, and with the white of the room bruising all around us, we could have been in a black-and-white movie. “What do you think about when you think about him?”

I traced the arch of his rib cage with my eyes while I considered the question. “I think about how smart he was. Savvy smart. Arthur understood people in a way I never will. He could really read them. I wish I could do that.”

Andrew took a few more steps closer, until he was right in front of me, resting his elbow on the high ledge of the window. There was just the slightest curl to his top lip. “You don’t think you can read people?”

“I try.” I smiled, pleased. Was this flirting?

“You’re very grounded, Tif.” He pointed right at my gut. “Don’t ever doubt this.”

I looked down at his finger, inches from my body. “You know what else?” I asked.

Andrew waited for me to continue.

“He was funny.” I looked out the window, at the low frame of the quad. “Arthur was funny.” I said that to Luke once, and he recoiled from me.

Andrew’s eyes crinkled at an old memory of Arthur. “He could be very funny.”

“But I don’t feel bad,” I said, quietly. “Is that bad? I don’t feel bad about what I did to him. I feel nothing.” I slid my hand from left to right—this is how flat it all is. “I feel neutral when I imagine killing him.” I sucked in a breath and released it, the sound like blowing on a hot bite of food. “My best friend thinks I’m still in shock over it. That I’ve blocked out any emotion to spare myself the trauma.” I shook my head. “I wish that was it, but I don’t think it is.”

Andrew pinched his eyebrows together and waited for me to say more. When I didn’t, he asked, “So what do you think it is then?”

“That, maybe”—I sunk my incisors into my lip—“I’m a cold person.” I rushed out the next part. “That I’m selfish and that I’m only capable of feeling about things that benefit me.”

“Tif,” Andrew said, “you are not selfish. You’re the bravest person I know. To go through what you went through at your age—and not just go through it, but survive it and thrive like you have—it’s remarkable.”

I was holding back tears now, terrified I would scare him off with what I was about to say next. “I can stab my friend to death but I can’t admit I’m about to marry the wrong guy.”

Andrew looked sick. “Is that true?”

I thought about it before I did it, there was still time to take it back and excuse away all the doubt, like I always did to myself, but I nodded.

“Then what are you doing? Why not just walk away?” Andrew sounded so disturbed it only made me feel worse. I thought everyone, on some level, felt some reserve about the person they were with.

I shrugged. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

I fixed on a spot beyond Andrew’s shoulder and tried to think of a way to explain. “With Luke, I feel this . . . this crushing loneliness sometimes. And it’s not his fault”—I swiped a finger under my eye—“he’s not a bad person, he just doesn’t get it. But then I think, Well, who would? Get this nasty piece of my life? I’m not easy, and maybe this is the best I can hope for. Because there are a lot of good things there too. Being with him is insurance in its own way.”

Andrew’s face pinched. “Insurance?”

“I have this thing in my head”—I brought my fingers to my temple and tapped—“no one can hurt me if I’m Ani Harrison. TifAni FaNelli is the type of girl who gets squashed, maybe, but not an Ani Harrison.”

Andrew hunched down so that he was eye to eye with me. “I don’t remember anyone squashing TifAni FaNelli.”

I held my thumb and index finger an inch apart. “But they did. To this small.”

Andrew sighed, and then his smart-looking sweater was scratching my face, his fingers curled into the back of my head. We had touched so few times in our lives, and it broke me, really, that I didn’t know his smell and his skin better than I did. An inexplicable sorrow swelled up at Luke, at Whitney, at his beautifully named children, all the hearts invested that would keep us apart, caught them all in its pit and came crashing down.