The horrible branding campaign—full of trite phrases and insincere accolades—is finally complete. All the copy has been signed off on. The photo shoots are over. I’m relieved it’s behind me.

Except, apparently, it’s not.

“We need a different group of kids for the cover,” Timothy says, flinging a brochure about the Mitchell Scholars Program on my desk.

I run my tongue over my teeth, searching somewhere inside me for a calmness I don’t feel. “These are the kids who actually won the award.”

“They don’t project the image we want. And we need more diversity.”

“How much more diversity could you possibly want? We’ve got ten award winners, of whom five are minorities.”

“Well, the minorities you chose are not a good representation of the school.”

He has really picked the wrong week to piss me off. I don’t have it in me to even feign civility at the moment.

“I have no idea what you’re trying to tell me,” I snap. “And I didn’t choose them. These kids all won Mitchell Scholarships. How are they possibly not a good representation for the school?”

“Well, to be perfectly frank, none of them look that smart. And the African-American boy is too…urban.”

Patience, Erin. You are not Olivia. You are not Harper. You don’t get to lose your shit with impunity. “How exactly can someone be too urban?”

“The jeans, the T-shirt. Sneakers.” He rolls his eyes as if this is obvious, when nearly every kid featured is wearing some version of that. “I want something more like this.” He hands me a brochure for affordable housing, which features someone lighter-skinned than the kid who won the award, wearing a button down and a bow-tie.

Patience, Erin. Patience… No, fuck it. “The kid in this picture is one of the ten best students in the school, and he’s dressed exactly like the other kids. So basically what I hear you saying is that anyone other than Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air looks like a criminal to you.”

“I think you need to bring it down a notch,” he says, his nostrils flaring, bleaching the skin white around the base of his nose. “As you are well aware, you’re already skating on thin ice. And I’m not asking for your opinion, Erin. I want a new cover.”

I slide the brochure back to him. “I’m not doing it.”

“If you don’t do it,” he says, “you have no job.”

“Then I guess,” I say, standing and grabbing my purse, “that I have no job.”

I stride out of the office feeling enraged, full of indignation. It takes me only two seconds after the door’s shut behind me to wonder what the fuck I’ve done.

* * *

I spend most of the evening certain I’m having a panic attack.

“It’s going to be fine,” Harper assures me. “God, I wish I could have seen his face!”

“It’s not going to be fine,” I insist. “I have no savings, and now I’ve got no job. And no boyfriend. And no home.”

“Of course you have a home. When my roommate gets back, we’ll figure something out. And you don’t want a boyfriend. And you don’t want that job. You never did. Just wait,” she says. “This is the start of something amazing. Your life is going to be so much better.”

I guess I have to agree with her there, because I’m not sure it’s possible for things to get worse.

* * *

I wake the next day with a splitting headache, thanks to the shots Harper insisted I do. “Cheer Me Up Shots,” she called them. I’m officially adding her to the list of people I no longer take suggestions from.

I begin to look at want ads, and any enthusiasm I had for the prospect of getting a new job dims. Promoting nicotine patches, computer programs, or energy drinks holds no appeal for me. I want to care about the product. I liked promoting my alma mater.

Which leads me to wonder if I made a mistake yesterday. I know, via Harper, that Timothy’s been stopping by my cubicle all morning to see if I’ve arrived. Around mid-morning he leaves me a message saying that as long as I’m in by noon, we can move past this, though “some disciplinary action will, obviously, be necessary.”

I can’t say there isn’t part of me that glances at the clock, that doesn’t imagine rushing off to put on work clothes and pretending none of this has happened. Except that job was a lot like a long run; I reach the end certain I could keep going if necessary, but once I’ve stopped, once I’ve thrown myself down in the grass and kicked off my shoes, the idea suddenly feels impossible. If my life depended on it, I don’t think I could get up and go back to work for that man. In fact, I have no idea how or why I stayed as long as I did.

* * *

Rob asks if he can take me to dinner “as friends” after I tell him about my job. I begin to say no, and then stop myself. Whatever we might lack in excitement, Rob can be a good sounding board. Plus, being around him reminds me of a time when I wasn’t miserable, and that little reminder soothes me—if it was possible to not hurt once upon a time, it’s possible it can happen again. It’s wrong to allow Rob to ease some of the pain Brendan caused, but I allow it anyway. I’m that desperate to begin piecing myself back together.

I arrive at dinner exhausted. Both the late night calls from my father and the nightmare about the tidal wave seem to be happening more frequently. Between the two I got very little sleep last night.

When I mention my half-assed job search, Rob suggests I do a different type of marketing. “Working for a non-profit is never going to make you money,” he says. “Why not do what you’re good at and make a decent living at the same time?” He starts talking about marketing for a wealth management firm like his own, and though he means well, it’s a struggle not to fall asleep listening.

If this were Brendan here, he’d be encouraging me not to settle. He’d swear somehow it would all work out. And a part of me wants that, wants to feel optimistic and hopeful about the future, excited by its possibilities. Except that sort of unrealistic thinking is just like Brendan himself: fun while it lasts, but gets me nowhere in the long run.

As he drops me off, Rob mentions that he has an event he needs to make an appearance at on Saturday. He wants me to come with him.

“It’s a grand opening. Cocktail attire. You know I hate going to those things alone.”

I hate going to those things too, but mostly I’m hard pressed to imagine how dressing up and going to an opening won’t feel like a date.

He grins. “You’re so transparent. It’s not a date, okay? I swear. It’s not a date. Just come with me, and then I’ll drive you home and shake your hand at the door. Hell, if it makes you feel better, I won’t even walk you to the door.”

I sigh. “I don’t know, Rob.”

“I won’t even fully stop the car—you can jump.”

I laugh. “You’re impossible to say no to. You know that?”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” he says, nodding toward the ring on my finger—not my engagement ring but an emerald he bought on our first anniversary. "Because maybe that ring isn’t the only thing from our past worth keeping.”

"I like lots of things from our past."

"I could have done a lot better, though. The longer I'm back, the more I’m realizing it,” he says, pulling my hands across the console into his. “If you give me another chance, I’m going to devote my entire life to making you happy.”

I walk inside, feeling much better than I did before I saw him. And if being with him makes me feel better, and Brendan only causes pain, isn’t it obvious who I should want? What Rob and I had wasn’t perfect, but at least it was real.

* * *

On Saturday I spend an inordinate amount of time getting ready. I’m wearing a dress of Harper’s—slinky and silver. "It's about time you started caring," she says as she curls my hair.

I don’t actually care, but I’m trying to make myself care. Brendan moved on. I ought to at least pretend I have too.

Rob arrives wearing a suit, reminding me how much I used to love watching him dress in the morning. I almost can’t fault the girls in his office for throwing themselves at him. Almost.

“You look unbelievable,” he says. “I’m going to be the most envied guy there.”

I warm a little inside. I was merely a small blip in Brendan’s existence, so brief and inconsequential I don’t even mark a point in his time line. So inconsequential he couldn’t even walk away from his pool game to tell me so. But that’s not the case with Rob. He’s proud to be seen with me, and he wants everything I can give.

We’ve driven for at least 10 minutes before I notice we’re heading away from the city. “Where are we going?” I ask. “There’s nothing out here.”

“It’s a vineyard. I’m a minority partner, and tonight’s the official opening.”

I release my air in small, controlled puffs. “Blue Mountain?”

He glances at me. “I’m surprised you’ve heard of it.”

“I think Brendan is friends with the owner,” I reply, my stomach knotting up. “Is he coming?”

Rob’s smile fades. “No idea. We’ve only spoken twice since I got home. I dropped by his place yesterday—have you seen it?”

It feels like a test, although maybe I’m just being paranoid. What if he saw something of mine there? God only knows what I left behind. I tell him I have, my pulse racing.

“The girl he’s dating was there, so I only saw it from the hall, but what’s up with the holes everywhere? The place looks like it needs to be demoed.”

I feel like I’ve been hit. Again. When is this thing with Brendan going to stop providing fresh sources of pain? He told me he didn’t let girls sleep over. God, I was stupid. I was so fucking stupid to believe him, to believe I was special somehow. I wonder if he’s delivering his speech about being in the bubble to this girl. Or maybe they aren’t in the bubble. Maybe she has what I did not, whatever magical properties are necessary to make Brendan want more.

We arrive, and Brendan isn’t there, which feels like the first break I’ve gotten in weeks. But I still finish my first glass of wine in two gulps. My second one goes down almost as quickly.

Rob starts introducing me to the other investors, and to the vineyard owner—who I never met with Brendan, thank God—and we fall into our familiar patterns. Bland social smiles, my hip brushing his thigh, his hand at the small of my back. This kind of event still isn’t my thing, but I don’t hate his role in it. I don’t hate the way he wants to show me off—the small, possessive things he does that Brendan never did.

Rob leans down. “Are you doing okay?” he asks, his breath grazing my ear.

I smile up at him and nod. “Yes. You?”

“I’ve never been happier than I am right now,” he says, his hand wrapping around my hip. He leans down, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “I’m gonna get us a sample of the shiraz. You’ll be okay for a second?”

I nod, and watch him depart.

An older woman leans toward me. “The two of you are adorable,” she says. “Newlyweds?”

“Oh, uh…no. It’s not… No.” Well done, Erin. That made complete sense.

“Well, you should be,” she says with a fond smile. “You’d have beautiful children.”

There’s a low, unhappy laugh behind me. A laugh I could identify anywhere in the world, under any circumstances.

“She’s right,” Brendan drawls. “You’re so adorable.”

I turn slowly, bracing myself. His face is the only thing I’ve wanted to see for the past three weeks. I want to weep for how badly I’ve missed the sight of him: that sharp jaw and those slightly flushed cheekbones, eyes the palest possible blue against his tan. I’ve stared at that photo of him in a suit at Olivia’s wedding a thousand times, but tonight he puts that to shame. He is so beautiful that he breaks my heart all over again.

“Hey, man, I didn’t know you’d be here,” Rob says, coming up behind me. “You know Chris?”

Brendan’s eyes fall to Rob’s hand as it wraps around my waist, and I get a glimpse of that sneer of his. It’s a look I know well—I’ve seen it far too many times over the past few years.

“Yeah,” Brendan replies. “You?”

“Only recently. I invested in this place a while back.”

I see a hint of tightness in Brendan’s jaw, a small twitch, and then he forces it to relax. A girl comes up to the three of us, handing Brendan a glass of red. She is beautiful, curvier than me, and I hate her on sight. I hate her ample cleavage, her leather dress, her perfect hair. I loathe everything about her.

“Crystal,” he says, looking only from her to Rob, as if I’m not there, “this is my friend Rob and his fiancée.” I don’t even get a name now, apparently. Maybe he’s already forgotten.

Crystal immediately starts gushing over my ring with the precise level of enthusiasm you'd expect from a 16-year-old. "I love it!” she squeals. “Diamond engagement rings are so over.”

Rob and I exchange an awkward glance.

"It’s just a ring,” I reply. “We’re not engaged."

"Oh." She looks up at Brendan with a cute little expression of complete confusion—an expression I bet she has a lot. "You just said they were engaged."

"We were engaged, and now we're just figuring things out," says Rob.

"Well, that ring is fufleek either way," she tells me.

"Fufleek?" I ask, thinking I've misheard her. I'd assume she was just pulling from another language entirely except…come on, Crystal doesn't speak another language.

"Yeah, you know. Fleek as hell. Fucking fleek."

"Ah, of course," I say, casting a shaming glance at Brendan. "Yes, that's what I wanted. A ring that's fucking fleek. We went into Tiffany, and that's what I said. 'Take us right to your fucking fleek section'."

Brendan glares at me, but Crystal just giggles. Because of course she does.

"Right on, girl. Have you thought about music?" she asks.

"Music?"

"For your wedding."

What does this girl not understand about what Rob just told her? "I...no, not really. Like Rob said, we're not engaged."

“Because this is a good song for a wedding,” she says, pointing at the small trio playing music in the corner. “I don’t know what it’s called, though. Classical music should have words, you know?"

"It’s called ‘Fur Elise’,” says Rob. “It’s Beethoven."

She looks appalled. "What the fuck? You mean like a fir tree or fur you wear?"

"It was actually titled 'For Elise', but someone misread Beethoven’s handwriting," Rob explains. "He wrote it for one of his pupils."

"Good," she says with a sigh of relief. "Because I'm sorry, but I couldn't get behind a song about fur. I love all animals, even the mean ones like foxes. Killing them just so you can look good is wrong."

Holy shit. This girl is so fucking dumb I almost feel bad for hating her as much as I do. Almost. "You're wearing a leather dress,” I point out.

She looks down at her dress and back to me, her face completely blank. “Yeah? What's wrong with that? There's no fur on it."

My mouth twitches, the merest hint of the bitter smile I want to shoot at Brendan. He sees it, and he’s pissed.

“Have you guys been down by the lake yet?” he asks, holding my eye. “It’s the perfect place for a picnic.”

Our picnic. I can’t believe he’s bringing it up.

Crystal says that sounds romantic, while I cross my arms over my chest.

“Picnics are overrated,” I counter. “Who wants to eat with bugs crawling everywhere?”

“You’d love it,” Brendan says, smirking. “I bet you’d swallow everything.”

I narrow my eyes. “Sounds like picnics are more memorable for you than they are for me, Brendan. I’ve never been to one that was worth my time.”

Rob glances between us. “I thought you two were finally getting along?”

I go to answer him but I can’t, because I want to cry and scream in equal parts. I can’t stomach another minute of watching Brendan with that girl, of having him taunt me.

I excuse myself and hurry to the bathroom. Inside, I shut the door behind me and press my face to the cool tiles, flushed by both anger and distress. I reapply my lipstick, willing my breath to slow, my hands to steady. And when I finally step back outside, Brendan is waiting.

I’m not sure if I want to laugh or cry at how little anything has changed. The last time we spoke outside a bathroom it was an identical situation, wasn’t it? He’d brought someone hot and dumb then too, and I was blindingly jealous, just like I am now.

"Nice choice,” I sneer. “But maybe next time you should look for some quality other than bra size.”

"And maybe you should look for some quality other than the size of his wallet."

"Fuck you, Brendan,” I say, as my hands curl into fists. “You know that's never been the reason I was with Rob."

"Oh right. It's probably everything else,” he smirks. “It must get you so hot the way he immediately recognizes songs by Beethoven and can tell us all the story behind them."

"At least he'd realized by the time he hit his 20s that leather came from animals."

He looks at me in disgust. "I knew you were going to bring that up."

"Sorry, it's just so completely unsurprising. I should have known you'd wind up with some vapid little girl with a big rack."

"I haven't wound up with anyone," he snaps. "Unlike you, I don't move right from fucking someone like I’m never going to get it again to being all over someone else. I mean, how long did it take before you got back together with him?” he demands. “An hour? A day?”

“Does it matter? As I recall, you were ‘so happy’ for me.”

“I just don’t know what you’re doing with him. The only thing that guy gets hard for is the closing of the stock market."

"Yes, it's so terrible the way he makes tons of money and wants to be a good provider," I reply. "Women hate that."

"Yeah, well if you loved it so much, why were you getting naked for me 20 seconds after he left?”

"Maybe I just wanted to see if it could be better with someone else,” I fire back. “It wasn’t.”

He closes the space between us until he is pressed up against me. His muscles are coiled and under the starch of his shirt, I smell him—skin and soap and heat. His pupils are so large that the blue is a mere shadow, his mouth slightly ajar, his body tense.

“You’re so full of shit,” he hisses, his mouth a breath away from mine. “Let’s go in the bathroom right now. I’ll prove it.”

I won’t do that to Rob. But I wouldn’t do it anyway. Brendan has wounded me endlessly and unforgivably over the past three weeks. He’s turned me back into the girl I was in high school and after Olivia’s wedding, the one so overwhelmed by grief she could barely get through the day.

I shove him hard and push away. “Move on, Brendan. I have.”

* * *

I’d planned to ask Rob to take me home, but Crystal won’t let anyone get a word in edgewise. She’s too busy trying to explain how being a Broncos cheerleader is really “the exact same” as being a prima ballerina. It’s not until Brendan returns that she finally stops babbling.

“Where were you?” she whines.

“I ran into this girl I know,” he says, glancing at me. “I’d forgotten what a liar she is. I’m not sure she tells the truth about anything.”

My throat closes in at his words. I know he’s just trying to make me angry, but he’s right. I’m not even sure which lies he’s accusing me of: the one I’m telling Rob by omission, or the ones I’ve been telling for a long time—about my family, what I want from life. I do nothing but pretend. It’s all I know how to do.

The realization exhausts me. I’m so tired of the effort it takes to lie, to be this person Rob thinks I am, to pretend I’m not heartbroken. I tell Rob I’m sick and I need to leave. At least this lie feels true.

* * *

“What was going on back there?” Rob asks on the way home. “With you and Brendan. He seemed like he was mad at you.”

I tell him Brendan was just angry that I was being a bitch to Crystal. I can picture him sneering, calling me a liar, even as I say the words.

He pauses. “Why were you?” The quiet in the car feels ominous, as if the question is asking so much more.

“Because she’s an idiot.”

He could counter that it’s unfair to blame her for being an idiot, or that there’s no reason to ridicule her for it to her face, but he says nothing.

We reach Harper’s house, and he walks me to the door. He watches my face. He wants to kiss me, is wondering if I’ll let him.

I do. And just like everything else with him, it is lovely and familiar and eases something inside of me.

“I fly out pretty early in the morning,” he says slowly, holding my gaze as if these words are important. “But I’m home on Saturday. You know that I want you back, and I think you’re ready to give me a chance, but before I go, I want to make something clear: I don’t care what you did or who you were with while I was gone. I just need to know it’s over.”

There’s something in the way he says it, in the way he’s looking at me. It’s almost as if he knows I was with Brendan.