Page 18 of What You Wish For

Even though Alice was a year younger than me—twenty-seven—she was also six inches taller than me, and so she had a big-sisterly vibe. She was engaged to her college sweetheart, Marco, who was in the navy and went on long deployments. They rented a little 1920s bungalow a few blocks down. When he was gone, I saw a lot of her—and when he was here, I saw almost nothing of her.

Fair enough.

He had shipped out a week before Max died, and though I wouldn’t want to say I was glad Alice was alone these days, let’s just say I was grateful to have a friend.

She knew me pretty well. Well enough to know something more was up than I’d confessed to the group.

“So,” she said, like she’d been waiting all night for all the other bozos to leave. “What did you leave out?”

I met her eyes, and I said, “Duncan Carpenter is the Guy.”

“What guy?”

I pursed my lips and leaned in to intensify my look. Then I said slowly, “TheGuy.”

Alice frowned a second, then said, in recognition, “The Guy?”

I gave an unmistakable nod, likeBingo.

“Thethe Guy? The one who drove you out of California?”

“I beg your pardon. I drove myself.”

“But he’s the one from your old school? That you were obsessed with?”

“Notobsessed.”

Alice squinted at me. “Pretty obsessed.”

“It was not an obsession. It was a healthy, red-blooded American crush.”

Now Alice was trying to remember. It had been a while—a lifetime, really—since we’d talked about it. “Didn’t you snoop in his diary?”

“I wasn’t snooping, I was feeding his cat while he was out of town.”

“But you read his diary.”

“Well, he left it lying open on the kitchen table. You could argue that on some unconscious level, hewantedme to read it.”

Alice gave me a second to decide if I could stand by that statement.

“Plus,” I went on, “it wasn’t a diary. It was just a notebook.”

“A notebook full of private thoughts.”

“We all have private thoughts, Alice,” I said, as if that was somehow a good point.

“You shouldn’t have taken that cat-sitting job in the first place,” she said.

“What was I supposed to do? Let his cat starve? It was declawed and missing a tail.”

“It wasn’t even his cat. It was the girlfriend’s cat.”

“I didn’t know that at the time.”

Alice gave me a look then that was part affection, part scolding, and partGive me a break.

Anyway, there was no point in continuing the denials. She knew the whole story. Ihadread his notebook that day all those years ago while he was on vacation in wine country about to get engaged—or that was the rumor anyway. And I hadn’t just read the one page that was facing up on the table, either. I had grabbed a pair of kitchen tongs from the drawer—as ifnot touching the pages with my fingerssomehow madeit less awful—and used them to turn every single page, searching for clues to his soul like some kind of love-struck Sherlock Holmes, and careful, like a crazy person, not to leave any fingerprints.

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