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“Hike,” I repeat. Mei holds up a thin stack of papers and wiggles them in front of me.

“From the check-in questionnaire? Everyone said yes.”

I press my eyes shut and shake my head once, hard, to clear it. “Shit, yeah. Sorry—um, is everyone ready, or should I go up and rally the troops?”

Mei tilts her head. “Are you okay? I’ve never heard you use the phraserally the troopsand it feels decidedly un-Lou of you.”

“I’m okay,” I say, drawing a deep breath. “It’s just—”

“Nate?” Her eyes soften with understanding. I know Mei’smissing Andy; our rooms share a wall, and I still hear her sniffling in the dark after everyone’s gone to sleep. Being hung up on Nate would make sense, and I’m not sure I could explain the truth to Mei anyway: my mother, the acidity of her voice as she told me I was letting the best thing in my life walk away. As if I have no chance of amounting to anything at all without him.

I know it’s not true. That my mother’s the last person I should be taking dating advice from. But she’s still my mother—and her disapproval cuts as deeply as it ever has, regardless of how much time’s passed since we last spoke.

“Nate,” I confirm now. Mei reaches for my hand on the counter, and I let her squeeze it. Yesterday I shut myself in my bedroom for hours, raking through Reddit threads from other people who failed their National Counselor Examination. I’ve felt alone in my failure—but the internet always reminds me that I’m not. It’s right there for me to read through: other recent grads, panicking, begging an invisible void of strangers to reassure them they’ll be okay. They’ll be okay. I’ll be okay—whether my mother believes it or not.

I failed the NCE the way you miss a step on the way down the stairs: with heart-dropping, breath-stealing unexpectedness. It never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t pass the exam. I’d always been a good student—never the best, never near the worst—always perfectly decent. It was something I was proud of, even, that I didn’t feel the insatiable urge to be best. I grew up watching it eat my sister alive. I’d figured out the secret to a good life, I thought: I was absolutely content being just fine. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t even fine.

I wanted to blame it on my lackadaisical attitude—that I assumed things would go all right, as they always had before. Istudied. Not so much that I didn’t have time for a full life, but enough. Plenty. I’d completed thousands of clinical hours. I was already out there in the world, a therapist. This was a box to check—and then I missed all four of its lines entirely.

But it wasn’t about my attitude. It wasn’t about the hour I spent doing a sugar scrub in the bath when I could have been watching one more YouTube practice video. It was—as with so much else—about Nate.

I took the exam on a late-April Friday, the morning after Say It Now’s last show on the European leg of their tour. Nate had been gone for a month; while I got into bed for an early night before my test, he was still standing on a stage in Stockholm. It was nearly dawn there. The post was up on Say It Now’s social channels so briefly you’d have missed it—unless, like me, you were scrolling through your feed before you turned out the lights. Unless you were wide awake, staring straight into the pixels, the moment the photo went live.

It stayed up for all of ninety seconds, which was plenty long to take a screenshot. The photo was of Kenji and Abe backstage before the show, Kenji on Abe’s back with his drumsticks thrust triumphantly into the air. There was a whole mess of people moving around them: stage crew with cords draped over their arms, Mateo tuning an electric guitar, Roger on his cell phone in the corner of the frame. And then, just the sliver of the face I knew best: Nate, kissing an unfamiliar woman, his hand raised to her cheek. Leather bracelet I’d made for him slung around his lifted wrist.

It was Estelle, of course. A name I know now, and didn’t then. I sent Nate the screenshot and lay in our dark bedroom with my heart like a clenched fist. He didn’t reply for nearlyfifteen hours, long after I’d finished my exam. I didn’t sleep one single minute. I took the exam on autopilot, trusting myself to pass it on muscle memory. I did not.

When Nate called me from the Stockholm airport, I was already halfway back to Estes Park. I put him on speakerphone and stayed silent until his miserable voice filled my entire car:She surprised me, she came out of nowhere, I don’t even know her, she’s no one, no one,no one.I love you, he promised.I’m a fool.

He was. But no bigger a fool than me, who believed him. Who let his nonsensical story make sense because I didn’t want to face what it would mean for it to be a lie. And then, hardly two weeks later, I’d called him, flat voiced and furious, to say I failed my NCE because I’d spent the entire night prior sleepless and sick over that goddamn photograph. Nate apologized. And then he brought Estelle to a hometown show he knew I’d be at and let it all fall apart right in front of my face.

He’s still the only one who knows I failed the test. A secret I trusted him with long after he’d stopped giving me reasons to trust him with anything at all.

Yesterday afternoon, scrolling through Reddit, I resolved myself to end this. To draw a line in the sand for myself to step over, to finally book my exam. But two weeks into October, all the autumn dates at the testing center in Estes Park were already booked up. Between the inn and the lingering specter of my own shame, I was terrified I’d bungled it all over again—but managed to find an exam administrator in Fort Collins offering dates into the winter. I booked the furthest one out: December 16. By then, I’ll be looming closer and closer to my March 1 deadline for the rentals; by then, I’ll need to start figuring out my next step regardless.

It’s not so far, really.

Close enough that no one else will ever have to know that I failed.

“Is Henry here yet?” Rashad’sthe last one downstairs, a vision in plaid flannel and leather hiking boots. Everyone turns to look at him: Nan, walking poles gripped in both hands; Bea and Kim in their matching Carhartt beanies; Mei, who promptly raises her eyebrows at me.

“Is H—” I stutter, brow scrunching together. “Why would Henry be here?”

“Because I invited him,” Rashad says, smiling sweetly. He pulls a granola bar from one pocket and rips it open. “I Googled him—did you know he’s a vet? He was easy to find.”

“Rashad,no,” I say before I can stop myself. If I keep bothering Henry with drunken mishaps and broken showers and guests calling his office, he’s going to shut down this entire operation and I’ll be out on my ass before I can even take the exam in December. Not to mention my criminally unprofessional feelings about that strip of his stomach on the bathroom floor—about his soft mouth and the dark flash of his blue eyes as he said my name in the basement,Louisa.

“What?” Rashad says. He scans the other guests’ faces like they could back him up. “I love looking at him. I’m here to get over my ex, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” I say, folding my jacket sleeve. “But Henry isn’t part of the Comeback Inn, okay? Please don’t bug him.”

“I wasn’tbugginghim.” Rashad splays one hand over his heart. “He was perfectly happy to join us.”

“Perfectly happy,” I repeat. I can’t think of a combination of wordslesssuited to Henry’s opinion of the inn. “What did he actually say?”

“He said ‘sure.’ ”

I spin around at the sound of Henry’s voice, low and dry as ever. As we stand huddled around the kitchen island he comes down the front hallway, wearing that same utility jacket from when the power went out, the one I slid my hand under in the close dark of the basement. I’m getting used to the sight of him here, in my house. I try not to think about how much I like it, or what that means.