His eyes shrink to accommodate his spreading smile.

“You’re thinking that all sounds pretty boring, aren’t you?” I say.

He laughs. “No,” he says, a little too vehemently. At the face I make, he relents. “Okay, a little bit. But just because that sounds boring to me doesn’t mean I think you’re boring.”

“Yeah, but you also held up your end of a fifteen-minute conversation with Craig about property taxes, so I think your social standards are exceptionally low.”

“He was a nice guy,” Miles says.

“I rest my case.”

“I like most people. Is that so bad?”

“It’s not bad at all,” I say. “It’s decidedly working in my favor. It just makes it hard for me to realistically gauge how big of a loser I am.”

“You’re not a loser at all,” he says, emphatic.

I roll my eyes. He sits up higher, his face earnest despite his visibly high pupils. “I’m serious. That asshole already took your house. Don’t let him take your self-esteem.”

“It wasn’t really my house,” I say. “It was in his name.”

“It was still your home,” he says.

That word doesn’t gut me quite so bad as usual.

The weed is filtering pleasantly through me, and the night sky is gorgeous, and the air smells like firs and smoke and fresh water, with that little snap of ginger. The truth feels more manageable. I want to manage it.

“That’s what I’m realizing, though,” I tell him, wrapping the sweatshirt more tightly around me. “It wasn’t ever my home. When you take Peter off the schedule, there isn’t really much left. Waning Bay doesn’t belong to me, like it does to him.”

“I’ll give him the house,” Miles says. “But he’s not taking this town.”

I cast a sidelong glance his way. “You’re just fine with knowing you could run into them at any point? Doesn’t it bother you that you could be buying toilet paper and Alka-Seltzer and come face-to-face with Petra’s parents?”

He shrugs. “That’d be fine.” He sits up. “Wait—are you thinking about leaving?”

“More like dreaming about it.” I check the American Library Association job portal daily.

“Would you go back to Richmond?” Miles asks.

There’s that little stab of pain that home didn’t summon.

It was my very first thought, when the dust settled. I could go back. To my old town, my old job, my old friendships.

Then, a few days after the big showdown, I finally pulled myself from the pit of despair long enough to answer one of Sadie’s phone calls.

I’m so angry with Peter I could honestly punch him in the face, she told me.

She was apologetic, comforting. But then the unspoken became spoken: You both matter to us so much. We’re not choosing sides.

Like it was a basketball game, and she and Cooper had decided not to make posters or sit in a specific section of bleachers. Like things needed to play out, and then someone would simply have won and someone else would have lost.

I told her I’d never want her to choose sides.

But honestly, I didn’t want it to even feel like a choice. I wanted her to know where she stood. The problem was, she wasn’t my best friend anymore. She and Cooper were our best friends.

They were a unit, and we were another, and that was how we’d fit.

I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done something just the two of us.

And in those days when I was mourning in a puddle, Peter was doing damage control. So if our breakup wasn’t a basketball game, maybe it was a race, and I was too slow.

Sadie and I have barely spoken since that call, and I grieved that loss as much as or more than the end of my romantic relationship.

“Not Richmond,” I tell Miles. That might feel even worse than being here, which was saying something. “Maryland, hopefully.”

Miles does that Labradoresque head tilt of his. “What’s in Maryland?”

“My mom,” I say.

“You’re really close,” he says, half observation, half question.

I pull my knees into my chest and loop my arms around them. “She and my dad split up when I was really young, so it’s always been the two of us. Not in a sad way. She’s the best. What about you? Are you close with your family?”

He scratches the back of his head and gazes out across the water. “My little sister, yeah. We text basically every day. She lives in Chicago.”

“And your parents?” I ask.

“An hour outside of Chicago.” He offers no more. It’s the first time I’ve felt like there’s something he’d rather not talk about.

I feel the tiniest bit disappointed. He makes it so easy to open up. I wish I knew how to do the same.

“Anyway,” he says, “I don’t think you should move to Maryland.”

“I won’t go until you find another roommate,” I say.

“It’s not about that,” he says. “You moved here because of Peter. Don’t let him make you move away too.”

“So you’re saying I should stay, out of spite,” I say.

“I just think it would be shitty to uproot your whole life for this guy twice,” he says.

“Miles,” I say. “I just recounted what my whole life looks like, and I watched a piece of your soul die behind your eyes.”

“That’s not what happened,” he says.

“It is,” I say.

“What about your job?”

The ember in my chest flares. “What about it?”

“You’re constantly, like, teaching kids to make bird feeders and running costume contests. It clearly means a lot to you.”

“It does mean a lot to me,” I allow. “Sometimes when I’m running Story Hour, I literally remember partway through that I’m getting paid to do something I love, and it feels like I’m dreaming. Like I might wake up and realize I’m late for my shift at the Dressbarn.

“And there’s this girl Maya, who comes in once a week. Twelve or thirteen. Perfect little weirdo. She reads everything—goes through like five books a week. And we have an informal book club, where I pick something out I think she’ll like, and it goes in the stack, and then she comes back a week later and we just talk about it for an hour while I’m doing admin stuff. She’s supersmart. Has a hard time at school, but you can just tell she’s going to be some great novelist or, like, film director someday.”

“You love it,” Miles says.

“I love it,” I admit. It’s the piece of my life that still feels right, even with Peter excised from the picture.

“Then don’t give it up,” Miles says. “Not for him.”

“Of course, there are also days when I have to spend an hour on the phone with one of our regulars because he wants me to look up a love poem and spell every single word of it for him,” I say.

“Why?” Miles says.

“Sometimes the job of a librarian is to simply not ask. Anyway, I’m keeping an eye out for job postings in other cities, but I can’t leave for eighty-five days.”

“That is . . . extremely specific,” he says.

“It’s when the Read-a-thon happens,” I explain.

“Ah.” He flashes a teasing grin. “Read-a-thon Prep Meeting: Tuesdays from two to three p.m.”

“Do you have a photographic memory?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says. “Also, it’s been a standing appointment on your calendar since you moved in.”

“You’ve been reading it,” I say, unable to hide my glee.

“Of course I have. What’s a Read-a-thon, anyway?”

“A fundraiser,” I say. “An all-night reading thing for the kids, with contests and prizes and that kind of thing. Basically an event to fund other events, because we don’t have any money. Waning Bay’s never done one, but I went to one as a kid, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve basically been working on this since I got here.”

His brow lifts. “And it’s at the end of summer?”

“Mid-August,” I confirm.

After a moment, he says, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to be your tour guide.”

“I’m not doing acid with you, Miles,” I say.

“Good to know,” he replies, “but not the kind of tour guide I’m talking about. I’m going to show you around Waning Bay. We can go out on Sundays, when we both have work off. Starting next week. And then if, by the end of July, you still want to go play Golden Girls with your mom—”