I’ve conveniently left outwhenthat first visit to StoryTime happened because adrenaline’s wiped my memory.
“I couldn’t believe it who it was!” I tell them. Clasping Alex’s hand, I squeeze. My breath catches when he squeezes back, his hand, warm and solid, wrapped around mine. “It was Alex, my long-lost friend.”
Alex tugs me close and says, “Aw, Ted.”
I bounce into him and blink, surprised by the maneuver, wondering who Ted is. Then I realize that’s what he’s callingme.
“No need to downplay it,” Alex murmurs, still loud enough for Jen and Ethan to hear. “Justold friends?” He glances their way and grins. “We were each other’s firstlove.”
CHAPTER 3THEN
July 17, two summers ago
I’m perched on Alex’s back stoop, palms pressed against the cool concrete, eyes shut, as I replay the most surreal evening of my life. It feels like a chapter of a book that caught me so off guard, I need a reread to be sure I know what actually happened.
Thea Meyer stood at the foot of her old home’s porch, spiraling as Alex Bruscato took her astronomical lie and blew it up to planetary proportions.
As he did, Thea decided it was a good thing she was looking at Alex rather than their exes, because her eyes widening to saucers was hopefully much less noticeable in profile than it would have been head-on.
A stunned silence followed, before Jen said, “Oh… I see.” Ethan said nothing.
Somehow, Thea managed not to go even more bug-eyed when Alex smoothly fibbed that she and Mia were heading back to his place for dinner, so they had to get going.
And then, mercifully, Thea and Alex made their exit—Argos by theleash held tight in Thea’s hand, Mia in Alex’s arms, her small yellow backpack thrown over his shoulder.
I flop onto the stoop, the concrete cool against my sweaty back and arms, as the little narrator in my head continues,
Fifteen minutes later, after a car ride filled with Mia’s one-sided chatter with Argos making up for Thea’s and Alex’s incredibly awkward silence, Thea found herself walking through a fenced-in backyard leading to a quaint redbrick and cream-trim Craftsman bungalow. Mia skipped ahead, clutching Argos’s leash as he dashed across the grass.
Thea turned to Alex and said, “I really don’t have to stay for dinner.”
And Alex said to her, “No, you don’t. But you’re welcome to.”
Inside Alex’s tidy kitchen, Thea sat, watching Alex make Mia dinner—the fanciest grilled cheese she’d ever seen, a fruit and veggie smiley face of hummus and carrot-coin eyes, a grape nose, a mouth of green and black olives, and raspberry hair.
Mia’s meal finished, a homemade frozen-yogurt popsicle for dessert, chased by a few yawns, Mia told Thea good night as Alex carried her up the stairs. Then, five minutes later, Thea found herself coming up the stairs, too, at the request of a certain overtired four-year-old who wanted her to sing the “I Am Here” StoryTime song so she could fall asleep. Halfway through her third encore, Thea watched Mia’s eyelids droop, then peacefully drift shut.
It had been a truly bad day, but singing a sweet little girl to sleep hadn’t been a bad way to end it.
I open my eyes slowly, returning to reality, the crickets singing, the intermittent whir of cars passing on the street, Argos’s happy snuffle as he pokes around the yard, finally worn out from an hour of zoomies.
“It all really happened,” I mutter to the sky.
“It did indeed,” Alex says.
I glance his way as he lowers beside me, a baby monitor in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“I was doing a reread,” I tell him.
Understandably, he seems confused.
Sitting up, I brush off the tiny concrete pebbles stuck to my palms, and explain, “I had to double-check that everything I thought happened actually did.”
“Ah,” he says, placing the cigarette in his mouth and lighting it. “Trying to wake up from the nightmare?”
“I just… needed to process, I guess.”
He peers my way, exhaling out of the far side of his mouth, so the smoke doesn’t come toward me. “Fair enough.” After a beat of silence, he says, “Sure you’re not hungry?”