Snoqualmie Falls and the Coldplay concert. Doesn’t your girlfriend want you to herself?”
Matty turned a shade that looked familiar because he was often turning such a shade—deep scarlet—in high school.
“Oh!” he said. “You go on Facebook now?”
Cleo smiled. “Not really. But I had to see what else MaryAnne was saying about me. And I had to verify that this so-called girlfriend was real. I mean . . . twenty-seven? You?”
Matty laughed. “I know. Who’d have thought?”
Cleo hugged him. “I bet a lot of people did, Matty. I wish I had too.”
Cleo begged off dinner because she had other plans. She made sure that Lucas was settled and knew how to get to the coffee shop (“oh my God, Mooooooom,” he’d whined before he slipped under his sheets for a nap), then hailed an Uber outside the hotel.
She pressed her forehead against the car window as they wound through the wide, beautiful streets of Broadmoor, the spaces of her memory plugged with nostalgia. She thanked the driver and stood outside MaryAnne’s house and stared up at the cloud-streaked sky and remembered how braided they’d been, the two of them, their own peas in a pod, until Cleo detonated it. And for that, she owed MaryAnne an apology. Cleo couldn’t know if she’d ruined MaryAnne’s life, if her decision to sabotage her essay or undermine her for the school paper position or any of that stuff had thrown her off her anointed course, if instead of being president of her country club she’d be mayor or serving in Congress alongside Cleo. Life happens, Cleo thought. You make a million decisions in the moment that may change your trajectory. And sometimes you get lucky, like when Cleo got Lucas, and sometimes you don’t, like when MaryAnne chose to listen to Cleo’s truly terrible advice to write her internship essay about her dead dog or when Cleo gave in to her petty jealousy of MaryAnne’s blue-blood connections and offered her that advice to begin with and wrecked their friendship. The point of life wasn’t to go back and litigate all those mistakes. The point, Cleo supposed, was to do better.
So here she was. At MaryAnne Newman’s literal doorstep. Trying to do better.
She rapped the brass knocker against the red door three times, then stepped back and waited. A Range Rover was in the driveway, so she figured MaryAnne was home, and if not, Cleo knew she’d be at the club. But before she had to reassess, however, she heard footsteps, and then the door swung open, and then her old ex-friend stood in front of her, speechless.
“Hi, MaryAnne,” Cleo said. “I’m back.”
“What are you . . . ?” MaryAnne was dressed down in yoga pants and a tank top, with a messy bun atop her head. She looked more like Cleo remembered her than when she was made-up and tailored at the club. MaryAnne peered over Cleo’s shoulder. “Are you filming me again? Is that what this is?”
“No, could I, can I . . . would it be OK if I came in?”
MaryAnne took a second long look around the front yard, as if she couldn’t take Cleo at her word, which, frankly, was fair. “Fine,” she huffed. “But I was working out, so you have, like, a minute.”
MaryAnne had redone the house since her parents lived there. Their walls used to be bright yellow and the wood a rich mahogany. Now it was all crisp white, even the couches, even the rugs. But the bones were the same, the high beams and the arched doorways, and Cleo felt as if she were stepping back in time. She realized how it must feel to MaryAnne—to never, literally, have left home. Not that staying home was a wrong decision for plenty of people—Cleo wasn’t judging. But for MaryAnne, with her ambitions, maybe it had been, and Cleo could see why MaryAnne blamed her, though we all make our choices, and even with Cleo’s misdeed, MaryAnne chose to stay. She couldn’t hold Cleo accountable for that. The world was pretty vast, and even if it had been the harder path, MaryAnne could have gone anywhere, done anything.
MaryAnne sat at her kitchen table and stared; then, because she was a debutante even all these years later, she exhaled and said, “I suppose I should offer you some lemonade.”
“I’ll get it,” Cleo said, and MaryAnne didn’t protest, so Cleo found the glasses exactly where she knew they would be, and she found the pitcher in the refrigerator, and