Page 5 of Promise Me Sunshine

“No kidding.” He’s frowning at the spilled batter on the counter, the dishes in the dripping sink, the opened packages of meat and cheese and bread I used to make sandwiches for dinner.

“I’ll get to it,” I say with a wave. I pull up Reese’s email and refer to pages four and five. “Ainsley, shall we start the bedtime proceedings?”

She climbs down from the table and pads back toward her end of the apartment without a single complaint. Either she’s tired or she doesn’t know me well enough to argue yet.

She takes a shower and I help with the tricky buttons on her pajamas after she brushes her teeth. She E.T.’s herself into an impressively gigantic pile of stuffies and asks if she can read for a while before bed. I hand over her bedtime book, which is calledSquirrel Genius Mystery File #48,and something tells me she’s already read the other forty-seven.

“I’ll be in the living room until Harper gets here to spend the night, but I’ll see you bright and early, okay?”

She nods solemnly, already turning toward the wall with her book, and she just looks so tiny in her PJs. I let her have her privacy and gently click the door closed behind me.

The carpet in this place is a foot and a half thick so I pad soundlessly back toward the kitchen, freezing when I hear Miles hissing into his phone in the kitchen.

“Come on, Reese. She let Ainsley watch TV all day. They ate nothing but crap. Videogames for hours. The house is a total mess. Where did you even find this girl?…She looks like she’s fresh off a week-and-a-half bender. Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, drug test her or something?”

And wow. Just like that. My love fantasy goes up in smoke.

What a total asshole.

I march into the kitchen and raise my eyebrows at him. He goes rigid, his eyes on mine, self-consciously running a hand over his hair. To my satisfaction he breaks eye contact first and leaves the room, finishing his phone call with Reese elsewhere.

In a flash I’ve got the kitchen polished to a high shine, so I gather my things and set up shop in the living room to wait for Harper.

I’m on the couch and digging through my backpack when:

“So—”

“Ah!” I jump at his sudden voice behind me. My backpack tumbles to the ground. “Quit doing that!”

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and I can’t tell which part he’s apologizing for, but either way it’s nowhere near enough. His eyes drop to my spilled backpack. My wallet and a book have skidded across the floor toward his feet. Our hands reach them at the same moment, but his freeze.

Grief and You,the title of the book blares up at us.Life after the Death of a Loved One.

I can feel his eyes flick from the book to my face and back.

I hate this book so much. If my mother hadn’t given it to me at the funeral, inscribed with her sweet, perfect handwriting, I probably would have launched it into the Hudson River by now.

“So—” Oh, God. He’s trying to talk again.

No. I’ve had enough for one night. I scramble the book into my bag.

“There are fresh-baked cupcakes in the kitchen,” I offer sweetly, beating him to the punch and watching his face scrunch in confusion at my change in tone.

I turn away from him and flick on the TV. After a moment he seems to accept that there will be no more discussion from me and wordlessly heads back into the kitchen. I cross my fingers that he’s selecting the cupcake at the top of the pyramid I engineered.

I strain toward the kitchen, turning the volume down just enough to hear him gag and cough. “What the fuck?” he mutters incredulously as he tosses the lucky cupcake in the trash.

I sigh with sweet, sweet satisfaction and settle back into the couch.

Two best friends sit facing one another on a twin bed. One of them will die too soon. The other one is me.

They are eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips and trying to figure out how life could possibly go on after unspeakable loss.

“Look…after this you’re gonna have to come back to life at some point. You can’t live dead, you know.”

“Says who.”

“Says me, your best friend.”

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