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Wil was gone by then, of course. In college. Three years and thousands of miles away from the Wil who Katie had known, somewhere in the middle of her junior year, living a college life Katie had only seen—and wasn’t that ironic, wasn’t that funny?—in the movies.
Wil had pulled up to the intersection that fed into the loop in front of their old high school and waited for the light to change. She pulled into the loop, followed it, and then parked in a spot where they were facing the front of the building. Wil unbuckled her seat belt and turned to face Katie. There were lights all around the school filtering into the cab. “Did you get my care package?”
Oh.
Katie had to draw on her training to school her expression when what she wanted to do was close her eyes. Lean her forehead against the cold passenger window.
That care package was the last thing she’d had of Wil before she didn’t have her anymore.
It arrived in Chicago a few weeks after Katie did, the smallest Priority Mail box you could get from the post office, with Katie’s name and address printed in Wil’s handwriting. There was a staff member for the summer stock program who passed out the mail, who handed Katie the package when there was a whole group of other actors standing together, joking, laughing, and of course they asked her who it was from, wanting to know if she had a person back home, but their teasing had an edge to it.
The package came the morning after Katie had said yes to Ben. As muchyesas an eighteen-year-old girl could give a thirty-year-old acclaimed actor who had just been namedPeople’s Sexiest Man Alive. Already, her peers that summer had stepped away from her at the same rate Ben stepped to her. She didn’t have anyone to tell what had happened. She could hardly admit it to herself.
Inside the box, there was a wide, intricate green-and-pinkfriendship bracelet knotted with the words KATIEKAT.It had a button clasp with a bead shaped like a cat’s head, and there was a scribbled note from Wil on a piece of misprinted law office stationery that Beanie kept in a box in the kitchen for scratch paper.
Katie didn’t remember what the note had said. She remembered the paper. She remembered Wil’s handwriting. She remembered the catch in her throat and the feeling that she was lost, and it wasn’t just that she’d graduated and left home, it was more.
She waslost.
She’d put the bracelet on in the middle of the room where all of them were waiting for Ben, her throat thick and her eyes burning, and she’d wanted more than anything to be on one of her late-night drives with Wil, pretending to investigate Mr. Cook, but really talking, just like they were now.
Katie hadn’t thanked Wil for the package. She hadn’t even texted her that whole summer. She’d wanted to, but Ben was so preoccupying. Everything was so, so much. And when she thought about texting or calling Wil, she felt like she wasn’t even the Katie who Wil knew.
Or that Wil wouldn’t understand.
Now, Katie smiled. “Yes. I did. I wore the bracelet every single day until I left it at Ben’s accidentally, and he claimed to have never seen it when I asked for it back. Maybe he didn’t, but he knew how I felt about that bracelet, and no cleaner would throw something so obviously personal away.”
Katie touched her left wrist compulsively.
She’d even called Ben’s brother, a man who had always been kind to her, to ask Ben for it back, more than once. But it was gone.
Or it would be a prize if she’d get back together with Ben.
“Was it… Are you okay?” Wil pushed up the sleeves of her Henley and turned down the blasting heater.
She was so pretty, so Wil. Gorgeous and blond wrapped up inboots and waffle weave, minty and self-assured and thinky, wanting to know. Always wanting to know.
“It was the worst, and I’m okay,” Katie said. Then she changed the subject. “And you went to the University of Michigan like you planned.”
Wil nodded. “I did.”
“What did you major in?”
“Pre-law.”
Katie leaned forward and smiled, giving Wil her fulltell me everythingtreatment. It made Wil roll her eyes and squirm in a way that shot Katie through with tingles.
Wil was the same in this way, too. Forthcoming until you hit on something. Until Wil didn’t know theanswerto something. Katie had spent so much of her time trying to stump Wil like this, just so they could go deeper.
“I got into Michigan Law,” Wil said. She obviously couldn’t hold Katie’s gaze, so she looked out the windshield at the high school. “I got the adjuster job the summer before. They had a temp program that was a decent bit of cash, and I thought it would be good starter money. I moved into the place I live now. Itwasgood money. The job had so many of the types of people and fixing problems and tiny details that attracted me to law, and maybe… It was hard. I felt like Beanie couldn’t be alone. I was tired, I think. Because, you know, I had lost my dad at the end of college, when I was away. So I deferred for a year. Then I couldn’t defer again. If I reapplied, I’d have first consideration, but I haven’t.”
Katie had been in Paris when Jasper Greene died. The apartment they were shooting in was one that had been owned by a minor aristocratic family until they fled the German occupation and never returned. It became the lavish set of the intimate marital drama that was the first big project April found for Katie, within the year after she left Ben, and Katie’s costar—an intense, seriousmethod actor who never broke character—would not have tolerated Katie’s leaving the set to attend a funeral in Wisconsin.
Diana had called her the day after and described everything in detail, because Katie had wanted to feel as though she’d been there. But she hadn’t been there.
“Do you want to reapply?”
Wil looked back at Katie. The blue of her eyes was always so interesting with her pale brows and lashes. Under her left eye, Wil had a new patch of freckles—evidence, along with the sharper bones of her face and the lushness of her body, that she was older.