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Cole shook his head. “She wasn’t the one who did that, Tar.”

Back in their room, Holly pulled her in by the lapels of her shirt dress. “Hey,” she said, dropping a slow kiss on Tara’s lips. “What were you and Miriam talking about?”

Tara smiled, leaning in to prolong the kiss. “Oh, our… Cole called it a karass? What the hell is that? Did he make it up?”

“He did not, although Kurt Vonnegut did,” Holly said. “He defined it as a group of people brought together to do God’s work, but I’ve always thought of it as a sort of… spiritual caravan. A group of people predestined to travel through the human experience together.”

“That’s pretty deep for Cole,” Tara observed, pulling away and flopping on the bed.

Holly flopped down next to her, and they lay on their sides, looking at each other.

“What’s actually bothering you?” Holly asked.

Tara pushed a wave of hair out of Holly’s face. “They both keep trying to tell me that I’m loved here and it feels… hard to believe.”

“Why is it hard,” Holly asked, running a hand down Tara’s arm, “to believe that your friends like you?”

People trying to love her shouldn’t make her lungs seize up. She wanted to pick it apart, to find all the reasons she didn’t deserve their love.

Blinking, Tara tried to articulate what was patently obvious to her. She never talked about this with anyone, mostly because it seemed like saying the sky was blue. “I mean,” she said, “I’m not very likeable.”

“Who says?”

Holly’s tone wasn’t demanding, or accusatory, just curious. It made Tara give her a real answer, instead of the flippant “everyone” that was her first impulse. How did Holly keep getting real feelings out of her?

She held up the hand she wasn’t lying on, which caused the bed to shift, and she wobbled a bit before resettling. She began counting on her fingers. “One, my parents.”

“Okay, your dad would be a Civil War reenactor, on the Confederate side, if he didn’t hate grass stains; your parents are fundamentally unlikable. What else do you have?”

Tara didn’t know how Holly knew that about her dad, although it was true. She kept counting. “Two, all the kids I grew up with—”

“Except Cole,” Holly interrupted.

No one ever interrupted Tara when she was in the middle of her patented intimidating Argument Lists. It was disconcerting. Holly wasn’t intimidated by her at all.

“Except maybe Cole, but I have no way of knowing.”

Holly blinked at her this time. “You could believe him when he tells you, constantly and specifically.”

She waved this off. It was too close to what she’d been contemplating earlier, and she still couldn’t look at the thought straight on. “He’s too good, you see. At his core, he’s too good for this world, and he would never break my heart by telling me the truth.”

“Okay.” Holly sounded unconvinced. “Who else?”

Tara held up a third finger. “My law colleagues.”

“The rich old cishet white men whose entire system you want to see dismantled don’t like you? Seems like a good sign, actually.”

Tara blew out an exasperated breath. “Most people don’t like me when they first meet me, Siobhan. They think I’m cold, and prickly, and kind of a bitch.”

“Well, I like you because you’re cold and prickly and kind of a bitch,” Holly said, “but also, your friends didn’t just meet you. They’ve known you for a long time, and they’ve learned all the other wonderful things you are.”

“You like me?” Tara whispered. Her brain had caught on that part of what Holly said and wouldn’t move on.

Holly smiled a little. “I do. I like that you argue in lists, that you match your handbags to your suits, that you eviscerate bad people for money but also for fun. I like that you’re slyly funny and you don’t think anyone notices. I like that you always, always try to do the next right thing, even when I think you’re wrong about what that is.”

“I like you, too.”

“What do you like about me?” Holly asked. Her hand had moved from Tara’s arm to tracing the neckline of her dress, and it was very distracting.