Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,167

had made it her mission in life not to become them, and yet somehow, still, she’d done just that.

The hardest lessons were the ones you had to learn over and over again. So again, she was going to try. She’d deactivated her membership to BK Mamas, then deleted her Facebook account altogether. She had no idea whether Sam had taken the job in Brooklyn, or gone to London to be with Clive, and no intention of finding out. Best to seal off this past year in her mind and move forward.

Sam had often spoken of her summer abroad. A time out of time, in between, when she became some other version of herself. Elisabeth had started to think of the months they spent together in this same way. There was no other year of life when the two of them could have grown so close, or fallen out so spectacularly. Secrets that ought to remain hers alone would move about the world inside of Sam now too. Sam had the power to tell them, or not.

Elisabeth glanced at a stack of library books on George’s desk: Workers’ Rights as Human Rights; Labor’s Untold Story; Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Another thing Sam had been right about. Elisabeth and Andrew didn’t dismiss the Hollow Tree because it was silly and obvious, as they always said, but because it implicated them. They had been blind to something. They’d chosen to be blind.

What would you give anything to stop thinking about? her agent had said.

Her shame and anxiety about her family’s wealth made her never want to discuss it, as if by not mentioning money, she could make all the complexity go away. The same could be said of the conveniences they relied upon to get through a day, a week, a year.

That was why she’d never asked him to elaborate. Because it might be too painful.

Elisabeth put her hand on top of the books.

“George,” she said. “Tell me.”

* * *

—

They stayed late that night.

They took photos in Andrew’s childhood bedroom. He showed Gil where he’d carved a shamrock into the floor of his closet, and where he used to stand and sink baskets on the hoop attached to the back of the door.

His parents’ voices drifted up from downstairs. Elisabeth thought of what it must have been like to be a little boy alone here, listening.

A pang of remorse shot through her.

Eventually, Gil rubbed his eyes, and Andrew picked him up, carried him over to the window. They rocked back and forth, the baby’s head on his shoulder.

“That’s the Big Dipper,” Andrew whispered. “The really bright one is Venus. And I think that one over there is the one I paid to have named after my girlfriend freshman year of high school. Got a certificate and everything.”

Elisabeth sometimes wondered if she belonged in her own life, a strange sensation. She still didn’t think she was very good at it. But she cherished the little family she had made beyond reason. For years to come, she would remember this sight: her Gil and her Andrew, staring out at a sky full of stars.

EPILOGUE

2025

IT WAS ISABELLA WHO INSISTED they go to their tenth reunion. Neither of them had attended the fifth, feeling that five years were too few for anything significant to have happened to anyone.

But ten years felt impossible. How could so much time have passed so quickly?

“Do you think everyone will be married with children?” Sam said on the phone.

“Only the tragically boring people,” said Isabella, who was herself married with two boys under three.

“Will you bring Steve and the kids?”

“No way. This is for us.”

“We could go somewhere on our own,” Sam said.

They did this once a year, met up in Jamaica or San Francisco or Maine for three or four nights. Years had passed since they spoke often. In their first jobs, they exchanged several emails a day, paragraphs long, about how busy they were. Now they were too busy to do anything like that. But when they saw each other in person, they clicked right back into place and talked nonstop until it was time to part ways, making up for all the lost conversations they should have had.

“Sam, you look incredible, and you’re probably in the top three percent of successful members of our class,” Isabella said. “You’re going to the reunion.”

So Sam sent in her check and her forms, and even got a little bit excited about staying in the dorm for