She arches a brow, waiting. I give in, pull my phone out, and tap to the picture of Miles and me, avocado smeared on my face, our mouths suspiciously close. It’s more lascivious than I remembered. My stomach flutters uncomfortably.

Ashleigh stares at it, a divot forming in her chin. “What, because you look so much like a couple in this? That’s the whole joke?”

I grimace, debating how much more to divulge. This is my problem. I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It’s depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture in my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back.

You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.

Ashleigh sets my phone aside. “Look. If you don’t want to be friends, I’m not going to make you. We’ve worked together for over a year, and I’ve managed to learn startlingly little about you in that time, and I haven’t pressed, because I can tell when someone’s a closed book—”

“I’m not a closed book,” I protest.

“—but what I can’t figure out,” she says, “is why ask me to hang out now? If this is just some Good Samaritan shtick, I would’ve rather stayed home than go on a pity outing.”

“It’s not a pity outing!” I say. “At least not on my end. And I’m sorry I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know you up front. It wasn’t you.”

She gives me a pointed look.

“Okay, maybe it was a little bit you,” I admit.

She lets out a guffaw of genuine laughter that makes me crack a smile. “What, you think I’m scary?”

“Well, yes,” I say. “But in a good way! It’s more that you’re always late.”

Another guffaw. “God, you’re not from Michigan, are you?”

“No, why?” I say.

“This honesty thing,” she says. “It’s refreshing. So you didn’t want to be friends with me because I’m always late to work.”

“And you didn’t want to be friends with me because of the gigantic stick up my ass?” I guess.

She chortles. “No, it actually wasn’t that. It was more that you were so happily coupled. The divorce is still too fresh for me to be around someone who’s got cartoon hearts in their eyes and baby birds carrying a long lace veil behind them.”

I didn’t tell anyone at work about the breakup, per se. But when you have three weeks scheduled off work for a honeymoon, then unceremoniously cancel the request, people talk.

“Well, even before my breakup,” I tell her, “I didn’t have either of those things.”

“Because of the stick?” she jokes.

My own smile widens. “Because baby birds are never on time, and it may seem trite, but when people are always late, I don’t expect them to be reliable, and I definitely don’t assume they’re interested in being close with me.”

She nods thoughtfully. “Fair. But for what it’s worth, I’m always late because I have a kid. So I’d like to think my friends can rely on me, but if it comes down to it, yeah, I choose Mulder every time.”

If I’m a closed book, bound in chains and kept under a padlock, Ashleigh Rahimi might’ve said the one thing that could function as the key.

“Also fair,” I say.

“So,” she says. “Have I earned the origin story of this ‘joke’?”

“There’s something I haven’t told everyone at the library,” I say, buying myself time. “About my breakup. Something . . . humiliating.”

Her jaw drops. “You cheated with Miles.”

“What? God! No!” I look around for eavesdroppers. If I’m going to utter this aloud one more time, I’d like it to stay in this room. “How do I know this story won’t race through the stacks at work like wildfire?”

She has the grace to not look offended. Instead she purses her lips, considering. “Let me ask you this: Have I ever told you anything about Landon?”

“Other than that you two have a betting pool about what a freak I am?”

“Let’s just say,” she replies, “when you get him to pause his My Bloody Valentine album, you’ll find how easy it would be to make a full The Crown–style television series about his family. And yet you know nothing. I’m good with secrets.”

“You could be completely making this up,” I point out.

“Sure,” she says. “But I’m not. I’m a recent divorcée who spends most of her time with an eleven-year-old. I’m not out here telling people’s secrets. I just enjoy hearing about drama! Sue me!”

“If you divulge what I’m about to tell you,” I say, “I might.”

“I’ve got it!” she cries, slapping both hands down on the bar. She swings her huge purse atop it and digs for her phone. “I currently have a horrible rash on my back. I’ll send you a picture.”

“Please don’t,” I say.

“It can be your collateral,” she says.

“What if—and stay with me here—you just, like, tell me something about yourself?” I say.

“Hm.” She narrows her gaze. “Kind of an old-fashioned ‘actually getting to know each other’ approach.”

“Precisely,” I say.

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you want to tell me,” I say.

“Well.” She sighs, looking up at the exposed beams across the ceiling as she thinks. “My kid was conceived in a parked car behind a YMCA. Does that do the trick?”

A snort of laughter escapes me.

“Oh!” She scoots forward, more animated now than I’ve yet seen her. “In sixth grade, the tissue I’d stuffed in my bra fell out of my shirt while I was at the whiteboard.”

“Oh my god,” I say. “So you’re Dante. You went all the way to the ninth circle of the Inferno.”

“What else?” Her eyes tip toward the ceiling again. “Oh! When I first had Mulder, I had no idea what to do with him ninety percent of the time while Duke was at work. So I’d bring him to the library to this moms’ group, and I’d find the calmest parent in the bunch and ask if they could watch him while I went to the bathroom. Then I’d go lock myself inside, set a timer, and sob as hard as I could for five minutes.”

“Ashleigh! That’s heartbreaking!” I cry, but she’s laughing now too.

“It was terrible!” she agrees. “Every day I’d wake up and have, like, one second of peace. Then I’d remember, Oh, shit, I’m someone’s mom. I was a wreck, for like six months. But it did convince me to go back to school to become a librarian, and Mulder’s pretty much my best friend, so all worth it.”

My heart keens at the thought of my own mother. How, even with the long hours she pulled at work, she made time to hand-sew Halloween costumes and chaperone field trips and stumble her way through helping me with algebra. She worked so hard to give me the best life she could, and I don’t take any of it for granted.