Just for a second, what looks like the ghost of a reaction—surprise? Jealousy?—flares across Gabe’s achingly handsome face. Then he grins, and just like that he’s the King of Funtown, same as he always was back at home. “Wow, good to meet you, dude,” he says easily, reaching his hand out for Ian’s. “This is my girlfriend, Sadie.” He turns to the blonde, lays a confident palm against her back. “Molly’s from Star Lake,” he explains smoothly. “She dated Patrick forever, way back in the Stone Age.”
I blink. He’s not wrong, certainly—I did date Gabe’s brother, Patrick, forever—but that’s definitely not our only connection. By the end of last summer he was the only Donnelly I had any interest in giving my heart to at all.
“Oh wow, hi,” Sadie says. She’s tall and toned, with a long waterfall of hair braided into a fishtail over one golden shoulder. Her handshake is firm as a bear trap. “It’s so cool to meet you. How wild is this, right?”
“Seriously wild.” I smile what I hope is the smile of a normal person and not an escaped convict whose haunted past is flashing before her eyes three thousand miles from the scene of the crime. It occurs to me that if we hustle, maybe Ian and I can still make our reservation at the chicken-under-a-brick place. Hell, maybe we can hop a flight to Burundi. Anything to get out of here.
I’m about to make an excuse—a migraine, a phone call, explosive uncontrollable diarrhea—when the hostess interrupts. “Any parties of four waiting for a table over here?” she calls, popping up on her toes and shouting over the din in the bar. “I could take a quad right now.”
The chatter in the crowd gets more purposeful then, everybody peering around to see who’s going to claim it. But there don’t actually seem to be any four-person parties waiting; it’s all couples like Ian and me—or Gabe and Sadie, I think with shocking sourness—and big, raucous groups. The quizzical hesitation is palpable as we look at each other, the four of us coming to the same obvious, horrifying conclusion at once.
Sadie’s the one who says it. “Do you two want to double up?” she asks cautiously. There’s a low midwestern lilt to her voice, Kansas maybe; it makes me think of wide-open spaces, of long afternoons running around in the grass. “I mean, were you waiting for a table?”
“Totally,” Ian says. “Let’s do it.” He glances at me for confirmation, apparently oblivious to the panic and dread I’m sure must be radiating off me in a thick, noxious cloud. “That’s cool, right? Honestly, I just want to sit down someplace. I’m about to eat my shoe.”
“Um.” I purposely don’t look in Gabe’s direction, same as I can tell he’s purposely not looking at me; it feels like one stray second of eye contact might give up the game here, lay our whole sloppy history out for everyone to see. The last thing I want is to have dinner with him. I don’t see how I can have dinner with him without one or the other of us somehow plowing up the past I’ve spent the last year keeping buried for everyone’s benefit. I don’t trust myself not to lose my head and start screaming, to demand an explanation for why he ghosted like he did. I needed you last fall, I want to tell him. I needed you, and you made sure I knew I didn’t matter.
It’s that last thought that has my spine straightening: after all, if Gabe can act like there’s never been anything worth remembering between us, then so can I. “Sure,” I say brightly, tucking my hair behind my ears and smiling. “Absolutely.”
Gabe looks shocked, then slightly irritated, like he was counting on me to come up with a plan for emergency evacuation and—just like always—I’ve let him down. Well, screw him, I think. At least one of us has to be a damn adult here. “Sounds like a plan” is all he says, raising his hand at the hostess and smiling his dazzling politician smile. “We’re four.”
The hostess nods briskly and leads us through the clusters of tables to one of the booths at the back; I slide in next to Ian and across from Gabe, still careful not to make eye contact.
“So when was the last time you guys saw each other?” Sadie asks as we get ourselves settled. She’s got sharp blue eyes and a faint spray of freckles across her nose, with pale eyebrows and the kind of deep, even tan that tells the story of a summer spent outdoors. “Molly, is your family still in Star Lake?”
“Um, my mom is,” I admit, glancing down at the menu, “but I don’t get back there too often. We haven’t seen each other since last year.”
“Long time,” Gabe agrees, scanning the beer list. Neither one of us volunteers any other details.
“Actually, dude,” Ian says, nodding his chin at Gabe across the table, “you’re exactly the right person to clear this up for me. Your town can’t possibly be as bad as Molly makes it out to be, right? Whenever she talks about Star Lake, it’s like it’s situated directly on top of a hellmouth.”
I wince. He’s ribbing me, doing a little comedy routine for my benefit, but I definitely don’t want Gabe, who’s basically the mayor of Star Lake, to think I go around trash-talking it—especially considering the holy havoc I wreaked there last year. “I never said that,” I protest.
“Oh, really?” Ian gives me a look like, come on; Gabe is eyeing me from across the table, all long eyelashes and inscrutable expression. “I think the exact words you used were—”
“Okay, okay, but Star Lake talk is boring,” I interrupt, then turn to Sadie. “So are you also at Notre Dame?”
“Guilty as charged,” she says, lifting her backpack off the booth to reveal a Fighting Irish water bottle hooked to one strap by a carabiner. She’s premed just like Gabe, she tells us; they met in their organic chemistry class freshman year but didn’t connect until last fall, when they were in the same Shakespeare gen-ed requirement they’d put off as long as humanly possible. “So there we were, these two science nerds trying to figure out what on earth was going on in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Sadie recalls. “It was comical, really.”
“Hey, speak for yourself,” Gabe says, smiling the first genuine smile I’ve seen out of him since our eyes locked in the bar; the sight of it sends a pang through my body. Of course he’s smiling at her, I remind myself sharply. She’s his girlfriend. I bury myself in my menu, mumbling something inane about shepherd’s pie.
Sadie asks what we’ve seen in London so far and Ian gives her the rundown, thankfully only stopping to tease me a little about what a tight schedule I’ve got us on. “What about you guys?” he finishes, reaching for his pint glass. “When did you get into town?”
“Just a couple of days ago,” Sadie says. They took the train out to Buckingham Palace yesterday, she continues, then snagged student rush tickets to a show in the West End. “We were in Scotland before that,” she finishes. “We spent a few days hiking and camping near Edinburgh.”
I look at Gabe in surprise: “Since when are you into hiking?” I blurt, before I can stop myself.
Gabe’s eyes widen, just slightly. “Since always,” he says, shrugging over his beer bottle and looking irritated. “I used to go all the time back home.”