“Step away from the bed, Piper.”

Shit. Totally busted. I hug the last pillow to my chest and shake my head, refusing to turn around. Maybe if I can’t see her, she’ll go away.

“Drop the pillow and nobody gets hurt,” Natalie says. She’s trying to sound stern, but the girl’s been my best friend for years. I can tell when she’s fighting back a laugh. Which, fair enough. I told her last week that Adam’s room was ready, but she’s found me in here most days since, following up on some little detail that nobody else would think of.

“Drop. It,” Natalie says. “The room is fine, Piper. Adam’s going to love it.”

It’s nowhere near my idea of ready. I’ve done my best, but that mostly meant stacking years’ worth of boxes against the wall in order to clear a path to the bed. If I had a few more weeks, I could move some things to the garage, maybe rip those old snowboarding posters off the walls and put up a fresh coat of paint. I could make it perfect if I had the chance.

“Seriously, Piper. Let it go.”

I slowly and deliberately finish shaking the pillow into its case, then put it down at the head of the bed and smooth out the wrinkles. Only then do I turn and face Natalie, who’s leaning against the doorframe with a smirk that looks awfully damn familiar.

“You look exactly like Ben right now,” I grumble. “It’s creepy the way you guys are morphing into each other.”

She winks. “Must be all the hot sex we keep having. Maybe it’s fusing our DNA.”

“That’s totally not how DNA works. And I thought we agreed that my brother’s dick was off limits as a conversational topic.”

“Fair enough. I thought we also agreed that you were done fussing around in Adam’s room, yet here you are.” She raises an eyebrow and looks at the world’s smoothest pillow. Seriously, mice could run a curling competition on that surface. I do good work.

“I’m not fussing,” I say. “Adam’s been gone fifteen months. I’m just making sure everything is ready for him, that’s all. I’d do the same for any friend.”

Nat glances around the room. “So you’d buy any random friend new flannel sheets and a matching duvet cover?”

I cross my arms. “Of course.”

“And you’d drive all the way to Denver to pick up a special balance board for any of your buddies?”

“If they might need it for rehab, sure.”

Nat doesn’t respond, but the look she gives me speaks volumes. I know she and Ben have been talking about me in the last few weeks. I even considered eavesdropping on one of their conversations the other night, but I chickened out at the last minute. For the simple reason that eavesdropping is wrong, of course. Not because I was worried about hearing what they had to say.

See, my brother has this thing about me always needing to fix people. But sometimes people need a helping hand, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to welcome Adam home by throwing a ratty set of sheets on his bed and calling it done. Not when he’s still recovering from the injury that left him in a coma and killed his snowboarding career.

Ben says “control freak,” I say “caring citizen.”

And I don’t hear him bitching when my “fixer fetish” takes the form of alerting him to the perfect opportunity to surprise his girlfriend with a kick-ass party to celebrate her book being published while we’re all in Korea for the Olympics. He’s all “stop, Piper,” when I remind him to eat enough protein, but his mouth shuts pretty damn fast when I’m making hotel reservations and trying to order “congratulations, Natalie!” balloons from a guy halfway across the world who only speaks Korean.

Brothers suck.

Nat strolls over to the desk and picks up the value pack of post-it notes I put there yesterday, pretending to struggle to lift it. “Does Adam have a secret stationary fetish?”

“Those are in case he’s still having trouble remembering things. He can leave himself notes.”

Before Adam left he was having trouble with sequences. He’d put shampoo in his hair but forget to wash it out before he got out of the shower and dried himself off. Stuff like that. He put little notes all around his apartment to remind him of things.

Of course, I have no idea if he’s still having the same troubles since he hasn’t bothered to contact me since he texted me goodbye and vanished. I haven’t set eyes on him since, unless you count the pictures on his Instagram account.

Which I am totally not stalking.

Nat’s smile fades and she walks over and puts her arm around me, then gently pulls me down to sit next to her on the bed.

“It’s really sweet of you to do all this, Piper, but I’m going to be straight: it freaks me out a little. You really and truly know he’s not staying, right? He’s only coming back so he can do this Olympics gig, then he’s heading back to endless summer.”

I nod. Ben has already had this conversation with me. Of course, he looked a hell of a lot more awkward and he kept mumbling something about elephants in the room, but the gist was the same. As the reigning gold medalist in the Olympic half-pipe event, Adam was offered a huge payday to be the face of snowboarding for Big Air, a new internet streaming channel focusing on extreme sports. The billionaire guy who owns it was determined to get Adam, and Ben didn’t give me the exact figure, but it’s apparently in the “never have to work again” ballpark.

It would have to be, to lure Adam back to winter. Snowboarding was the love of his life, and now that he’s never allowed to ride again I guess winter is too painful.

And so is Colorado, apparently, because we had record-breaking temperatures here all summer but there was still no sign of the elusive Mr. Westlake.

Five guys swore they saw Bigfoot in Rocky Mountain National Park, but nobody spotted Adam.

“I know he’s not staying,” I tell Nat.

“Do you?”

I sigh. “Yes. I get it. Trust me, Ben drilled his schedule into my brain. He’ll be here a few weeks, then go with you guys to Mammoth to cover the athletes at training camp, then head to Korea with the team. A long-term stay is not in the cards.”

“So why are you doing all of this? What do you want to happen when he walks in that door?”

Nat’s voice is soft, like I’m some sort of invalid, which would bug the hell out of me if it was anyone except her. I generally hate people taking care of me or seeing me being vulnerable, but I’ll accept it from Natalie. In small doses, anyway.

I’m quiet for a moment, choosing my words, and Nat sits there, waiting patiently. It’s hard for me to explain what I want from Adam Westlake, because to be honest I’m not really sure. Or at least not sure I want to admit it to Natalie.

I want to fix him.

“I want my future back,” I finally say. My voice is croaky. “I want move on. I graduated, and it’s always been in the back of my mind that Adam and I would get it together by now. But that’s not going to happen, and I need my heart and my mind to catch up to reality, because I can’t keep feeling this anymore.”

It’s the truth, but not the whole truth. I know damn well I need to get over my Adamly Ever After fantasy, but before we part ways for good I want to take that wild-eyed broken boy I last saw and smooth his rough edges, bring his smile back. Give him peace.

If I can do that, then maybe we’ll be even. Maybe I’ll mean as much to him as he means to me. Because Adam is the love of my life, but it’s obvious that he doesn’t care about me that way. If he did, he never could have left, and he definitely wouldn’t have cut me out of his life ever since.

I’m going to have to keep seeing him. At Ben’s wedding someday. At parties and reunions and tons of other little gatherings that bring people like us together even after we’ve torn ourselves apart. And it’s probably shallow, but I don’t want his eyes to drift over me when he spots me across those future rooms. I can handle anything but his indifference. I want him to get a jolt when he sees me, the same quick pang of longing that I get just thinking about him even now. I want to matter to him.

“I need to figure out a way to look at him and see my past instead of my future,” I tell Nat. “I want us to be friends.”

Friends who value their past in equal measure, so I’m not the only lovelorn dope singing Adele songs in my head every time we run into each other.

She nods. “You know I love Adam but speaking as your best friend and the girl who would gladly kick anyone’s ass for you, I’m not sure he deserves your friendship at this point. I know he had his reasons, but he’s been a huge dick to you. Like, mutant donkey dick huge. Are you sure you even want to go there?”

“I’m not going anywhere near his mutant donkey dick,” I promise. “And I hear you about the friend thing, but there’s a lot of history between us, and I think I need to try. He’s not the only one who made mistakes.”

Nat looks skeptical, but she doesn’t know the whole story. Not really. She knows about that last summer, but she wasn’t around when we broke up the first time.

“Just don’t let him hold you back, okay? You tried really hard to be his friend when he was in the hospital. He’s the one who left.”

And didn’t write. Or call. Or tag me on social media. Or send a smoke signal or a frickin’ carrier pigeon.

“456 days ago,” I reply. “But who’s counting?”

“You. Which is probably not a good sign, by the way.”

“Well, after today I’m not going to count anymore. He’ll be here in a couple hours, we’ll make awkward small talk about the drive from the airport, I’ll tell him I want to be friends, and in a few days I’ll head over to Mom and Dad’s place for my surgery.”

I’ll get my eyes lasered, let my mom shove leftover Christmas cookies down my throat, and help my dad organize his nuts and bolts by size. Adam will come over with Nat and Ben for dinner, and we’ll drink beer and talk about the Broncos, or whatever friends who used to fuck talk about. It’ll be swell.

“You’ll tell him you want to be friends and that’ll be it, huh?”

“Yup. Easy peasy lemon squeazy.”

“I don’t know, Piper. You may have to prepare yourself for it to be a little harder than that.”

Nope. I need it to be exactly that easy. I need this to work because I am beyond ready to move on. I’ve got an internship in Europe lined up, traveling with the Swiss Women’s snowboarding team and assisting their physical therapist. Then I’ll hopefully be starting the Doctor of Physical Therapy program at the medical school in Denver next fall. I had an admission interview last week, and I didn’t spit coffee all over myself or tell the panel that I sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” under my breath while evaluating client injuries, so I think it went well. Hopefully the internship will make me stand out from the other candidates.

They’re sending out acceptance letters on the exact day that Ben competes for the gold medal in Korea, so that should be an interesting twenty-four hours for the Easton family. No pressure.

The point is, I’ve got my future mapped out, and there’s no place for Adam in it.

Friends. That’s all we can ever be.