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“So, you going to tell me who it is?”

I grimace. She’s not going to like this part.

“It’s not just that making me happy,” I say. “Work’s going well too.”

Michelle makes a sound. “Really, Ms. I’m never working in restaurants again?”

I scowl. “I should have never told you that.”

“Of course you should have. I know you’re doing great at work, and there’s nothing wrong with working in restaurants, you know.”

For some reason, that irritates me. “I know there isn’t. You just know…”

“That it’s not what you always dreamed of.”

Shit. I’ve talked myself into a corner. Because the thing I always dreamed of was singing, and Michelle knows it. And I’m not ready to talk about that yet.

“I’m looking at real estate in California,” I say, hoping it’ll throw her off.

“You told me that last time we talked. And I told you running away isn’t a plan.”

Dammit.

“Reese, come on. Who is he?”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “It’s Eli, Mich.”

For a moment, there’s nothing but silence and the muffled noise of the kitchen on the other side of my door. “Reese,” Michelle says finally. “I don’t know what to say.”

Michelle’s was the shoulder I cried on when things ended badly with Eli last time. And I cried a lot.

“Just…don’t say anything, okay? Just listen.” Then I tell her everything. The show, Kelly, Eli’s face, and my idiotic self -volunteering to help. I tell her about our fake dates, and the real one the other night.

When she stays silent, like I asked, I blurt out the thing I wasn’t going to tell her. The thing that she’s already seen on my face in those videos. “He got me singing again, Michelle.”

Michelle gasps. Then, there’s a sound on the other side of the phone which I swear sounds like a choked kind of sob.

“Are you crying? This is why I didn’t want to say anything! It’s not a big deal, Michelle, just a little practicing.”

“No!” Michelle says. “Maybe. I’m sorry. I just… I’m so happy for you. But I’m still so mad at him for how things went down last time. Even if he didn’t mean to hurt you, he did.”

“I know,” I say, suddenly wishing I could take it all back. I used to tell Michelle everything, but now that I have, I feel like it’s too personal. Too raw.

I feel foolish, if I’m being honest, for letting Eli right back into my life when Michelle knows how hard I took the end of our stupid fling. “Listen, Michelle, I really need to get back to work.”

“Reese, you know what I found in this closet when I climbed in here?”

“What?”

“That box, full of all those letters from Simon when you were in college. The ones where he was, like, gushing about you in one sentence and then berating you in the next.”

Fuck. I knew I should have thrown those out.

“Eli’s nothing like Simon,” I say, so loudly I glance to the door, worried someone might have heard.

“I know that, Reese. It’s just…you’ve been through so much.”

I told Michelle about those letters a few years ago, when we were living in the same town. She’d been aghast. But she didn’t know how bad it had been.Ididn’t know how bad it had been, until I reread one of those when I was out of his spell, years later, to my therapist.