“It’s called knowing the territory.”

“You have to memorize them all?”

“I’ve been working on it ever since I got the job. I’ve got flash cards. Maps.”

She nodded, sighing with resignation.

I took my plate to the sink, rinsed it, and put it in the dishwasher. She watched me the whole time. Did she really think I’d come here to crochet? Or watch rom-coms? This was exactly what I’d feared. She wanted to bond. But I didn’t bond. With anyone.

I walked toward the staircase.

She followed me.

“It’s not going very well, is it?” she said, as I started up.

“What?” I asked.

“This. Now. Tonight.”

“It’s an odd situation. We’re suddenly living together after ten years of…” What to call it? “Not living together.”

“Feels kind of like a first date or something. An awkward one.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said then, hoping to shut the conversation down. “I don’t go on dates.”

She peered at me. “What does that mean?”

Oh God. Now I’d started a conversation. “My generation doesn’t really date,” I said.

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “I guess it just seems kind of artificial.”

“What do you do instead?”

I kept thinking each answer I gave would be the last one, and then I’d be released to go on up. But she kept stopping me—snagging me there on the staircase. “We hang out. Usually in groups.”

“But then how do you ever get close to anybody?”

“I guess it depends on how you define close.”

“How do you have conversations? Get to know each other? Fall in love?”

“I told you,” I said. “I don’t fall in love.”

“Surely you do, a little bit.”

“Nope,” I said. “Love is for girls.”

“You are a girl,” Diana pointed out.

I didn’t even try to hide the scorn in my voice. “That doesn’t mean I have to be girly.”

Did we really have to have this conversation? I lifted my foot to the next step. I just wanted to go memorize fire hydrants. I sure as hell didn’t know how to explain it to her if she didn’t get it already. “Love makes people stupid,” I said at last, hoping to cut to the chase, “and I’m not interested in being stupid.”

“Not always,” she said.

“Women especially,” I added, not bothering to hide my impatience. “It makes them needy and sad and pathetic. And robs them of their independence.”

“Independence is overrated,” my mom said.

“Love is overrated,” I countered. Then my notes from Captain Harris popped into my head, and I added, slapping the banister for emphasis, “Love is for the weak.”

I needed that on a bumper sticker.

She wasn’t letting that stand. “Love is not weak,” she said, like I couldn’t have shocked her more. “It’s the opposite.”

I took another step up. “We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.”

But she wasn’t releasing me. The wind creaked the house. “Choosing to love—despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love anyway … That’s not weakness. That’s courage.”

I have to give myself credit here for not snorting and saying, We can talk about courage after you’ve walked through actual fire. She wanted to talk about courage? I could talk about courage all day. And you weren’t going to find it in a rom-com.

But I really just wanted to go to my room. “Okay,” I said in a pleasant voice. “Whatever you say.”

Now she pinned me with her stare. “It’s my fault,” she said, after a second. “For leaving.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, but there was that anger again, swirling itself into the mix. It kind of was her fault. She had been the first person to show me how terrible love could be.

The first, but certainly not the last.

She nodded now, like she’d figured something out. “You were fifteen when I moved out—”

“Sixteen,” I corrected again. “It was my sixteenth birthday, the night you left.”

Who does that, by the way? Who leaves her husband—her family—on her daughter’s birthday? One of the great unanswered questions of my life, but I wasn’t asking it now. We’d be here all night.

“You were so infatuated with that boy you liked. What was his name? Hank? Harold?”

“No one in my generation is named Harold,” I said. “It’s like asking if his name was Egbert.”

She was squinting at me now, like she had me cornered. She snapped her fingers at me. “What was his name, though?”

I sighed. We had to do this? Right now? “His name,” I said, ready to get it over with, “was Heath Thompson.”

Saying it released a funny, acidic sting in my chest. The second person who had ruined love for me. Also on my sixteenth birthday, as luck would have it, on the very same night in a spectacular one-two punch of abandonment. My sixteenth birthday. The night I’d spent pretty much the rest of my life trying to recover from.

She barely even remembered it.

But I was not—not—going to get into that. I glanced up the stairs like I was late for an appointment or something.

“You were in love with him. I could tell. You doodled his name constantly.”

I held very still.

She pointed at me like she was winning, like we were reminiscing about something pleasant. “I thought you were going to give yourself carpal tunnel.”

“That wasn’t love,” I said, totally poker-faced. “That was delusion.”

But she looked pleased with herself, like we were really getting somewhere. “Whatever happened with him?”

I took a second to marvel at the question.

I knew, of course, that there was no way she could be aware of “whatever happened” with Heath Thompson. I never told her. I never told anyone. In fairness, I couldn’t resent her for that. But something about the chitchatty tone of her voice as she asked about it, like she was just getting the update on some friend’s vacation plans or something—maybe even the idea that she could just not know, could have spent the past ten years obliviously making tea and watering hydrangea beds in this stupidly cute town—that, suddenly, really pissed me off.

I looked at her, so polite and friendly in that goofy calico eye patch.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing ever happened with him.”

She responded slowly, like she somehow knew I was lying. “Oh,” she said. “That’s too bad.”

“Not really,” I said. “He turned out to be a dick.”

The language made her blink. “Did he?” she said.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of mimicking a normal conversation—until I realized I was shaking. Not trembling, the way your fingers do when it’s cold, but rumbling deep inside my core, as if my emotions were colliding with each other in plate tectonics.