22

August 28, 2007

We meet at the graveyard. I’ve brought the bundle of letters. In my hand, as we sit on the bench beneath the maple tree, they feel like vindication. Anna told Henry she was Anastasia.

“Are there more?” he asks.

“Not that I found. And, from the sound of it, he wouldn’t have told Elsie the full story in a letter.”

“I suppose that your fiancée is a deposed Russian princess whom everyone believes is dead is the kind of news one delivers in person.”

“Elsie is the one who had her committed,” I remind him.

Evan surveys the gravestones, kicks a rock underfoot. “It’s still highly improbable, Jess. The new remains, the DNA—you have to be prepared that she wasn’t Anastasia.”

“Improbable, but not impossible. Until we have the facts . . .”

He sighs. “We can’t jump to conclusions.”

“Will you help me?” I hadn’t planned to, but I reach for his hand. “Will you help me translate the rest of the journals?”

Evan looks down at my hand holding his, a little bewildered, and gives my fingers a small squeeze. His eyes are now lake-colored, the kind of blue that goes all the way down. “Of course,” he replies. “You deserve to know how the story ends.”

“Thank you.”

“Besides, ‘Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women.’”

I smile. “Dostoevsky?”

“Tolstoy.”

“Someday I’ll get it right.”

We had left Anna in Paris, heartbroken by her friend’s betrayal, shaken by the discovery that she had been watched by Johanna all along, and reeling from yet another harrowing nighttime escape. She prepared to meet the mysterious Monsieur Gagnon, who promised to answer her questions—and ours.

From the first line of the diary’s next entry, it seems he delivered.

4.3.1920

There is no other way to tell it, so I shall tell it straight. God forgive me.

After a grueling day of waiting, as promised, M. Gagnon arrived for me at six o’clock sharp. Our destination, and the setting for our dinner, was an outwardly inconspicuous but inwardly opulent townhouse in the 1st arrondissement. My host, it is clear, is a man of means.

In addition to myself and M. Gagnon, six guests were in attendance. As my escort and I entered the salon, the room fell silent. All six turned to face me. To my shock, each man solemnly bowed his head, a gesture I have not seen in many years. It formed a lump in my throat.

My company—men of apparent rank—were reserved and exceedingly polite, though over dinner of boeuf en croute, they watched me from the corners of their eyes, as if I was a rare and curious bird. One particular guest, a younger man, observed me especially closely. I had the unsettling feeling that we had met before. Had he been following me in Berlin, like Johanna? Had my disheveled mind forgotten one of the many individuals who ferried me across Europe? At the beginning of the evening, the man had been introduced as “Monsieur Sergeyev,” though by now I knew that this was a false name.

After dinner, we were led to a fine drawing room. Cognac for the men and sherry for me. I did not tell them I had never tasted a spirit before in my life. I needed courage for what was to come.

By a window, Sergeyev stood solitarily gazing at a fine rain that had begun to fall on the street below. How did I know his face? I reached far back into my mind, into cobwebbed corners and dusty cupboards. The faces of the men from the pigsty the night of my rescue floated before me, but neither of them belonged to him. Sergeyev’s face was too narrow, his features sharp. I reached back further . . . and then I grasped it.

A cold feeling overtook my body. But it couldn’t be! My hosts had given me no reason to fear my safety.

Shaking, I slipped from Gagnon’s side and crossed to where Sergeyev stood. Outside, the rain now fell in sheets. “Monsieur.” It shook me to the core, and was a risk, but I knew I must ask.

“Grand Duchess,” he replied.

He did not blink, and under his steely gaze, my resolve nearly faltered, but I pressed on, as I have always done. “It is my sincere hope that the question I am about to ask will not jeopardize my position as a welcome guest under this roof.”

His chin tilted upward.

“Monsieur Sergeyev, were you in the service of the Red Army in Yekaterinburg?”

A thousand red-hot coals burned in my chest as I waited for his answer. “Yes, Your Imperial Highness.”

I gasped, eyes wide, but he grasped my hand. “But it is not what you think.”

It took mastery of every cell in my body to remain calm as an officer of the Bolshevik Red Army related how he had saved my life:

Pavel Pavlovich Sergeyev served in Yekaterinburg under Commandant Yakov Yurokvsky, the rat-eyed monster who, in July of the year my family was murdered, came to oversee the unfolding of the Ipatiev House’s “special purpose.” I abhorred the commandant and his pattern of cruel indifference.

What Yurovsky and the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet did not know, however, was that Pavel Pavlovich served two masters. In fact, he had been carefully installed by the anti-Communist White Army operating out of Omsk, to keep an eye on the imperial family and to ensure, at all costs, the survival of at least one of its members. Sergeyev was a plant, and the night of the murders the only thing that stood between us and the complete destruction of the House of Romanov.

“But how?” I asked him. “How did you save me?” Nausea as images of that horrific night flashed through my mind:

(We are woken in the night. Doctor Botkin and the servants, too. Jemmy barks in my arms as I carry him down down down. I count as we go. Twenty-three stairs.)

A dark cloud passed over Sergeyev’s face. He sighed and turned to the glistening street below. “A sacrifice was made.”

“A sacrifice?” I did not understand him.

(Mama asks for a chair. One for Alexei, too. A bare light bulb and a window crossed with iron bars. “Line up for your photograph.”)

Sergeyev’s answer was a whisper. “A girl,” he said, “a peasant girl, about your age, your height and your build.”

(A death sentence is read. “What?” my father asks. “What?” he repeats.)

“Yurovsky had given us each a name. The other Red Army officers, they didn’t want to shoot a woman—or a child. I volunteered.”

(A crack of thunder. A cloud of red.)

“When the shooting began, we were to aim for the heart. We were at close range. There was confusion, as anticipated. The others, they were only boys.”

(Smoke. Gunpowder. Screaming. Vomit.)

“My bullet grazed your arm. You fell. Quickly, I moved to stand over you. The others were screaming. The bullets, they were glancing off the jewels sewn into the women’s clothes. Yurovksy commanded us to finish it with bayonets and butts. ‘Get their faces,’ he said. It was chaos.” His voice wavered. “For fifteen years, I have been a soldier. Never have I seen anything like it.”

(Mama slumped in her chair, red blooming like a flower. Alexei beside her, arm twisted unnaturally beneath him.)

“You groaned.”

(Wet thud of metal piercing flesh. Maria cowering at the wall. Olga’s face smashed in by boots. I try to say their names, but no sound comes out.)

“The first blow knocked you unconscious. It was easier this way.”

(Tang of blood. Darkness.)

“The site had been prepared, a mine shaft in the forest. Our men would meet us on the way, a bunch of drunken peasants. In the cart, they carried the body of a girl who gave her life for yours.”

(Hands grasp. A jerk. Pine needles. Sap. Burlap pressed hard against cheek.)

I doubled in horror. “Gave it?” I asked. “Or you took it?”

Sergeyev’s jaw tightened. I thought I would be sick on my shoes. He faced me squarely. “Her life for yours. Your Imperial Highness.” He spoke as someone with nothing but scorn for those who have never made such impossible choices and yet judge those who have.

A streetlamp had been lit outside. It illuminated his face. I saw it now in a different light. The mask of death.

“Grand Duchess, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am here.”

Sometimes, the memories pull me under, boulders chained to my feet.

There was only one more question I could muster for Sergeyev. The other men in the room, they kept their distance from us, but their chatter had quieted. They knew what he was telling me, and they watched.

“Why me?” The question escaped strangled from my throat. It’s the question I have asked myself every day since awakening in a pigsty, stinking and dirty and alone.

For the first time since I’d approached him, I saw real pity in Sergeyev’s eyes.

“Why me?” I asked again, more forcefully. The question I couldn’t bring myself to ask: Why her?

When the White forces learned of Lenin’s order to exterminate us, they had only days to plan a rescue. A secret communication was sent to the tsar: If it was possible to save a child, which child? His answer should be communicated to Comrade Sergeyev in the Red Guard.

That evening, as my father passed the soldier in the narrow hallway of the Ipatiev House, the comrade stopped him, extending a small wooden toy carved by one of the local women as a gift for the imperial children. Before the new commandant, these kindnesses had once been allowed. “One of your children, Comrade Nicholas,” Sergeyev said to my father, “does this belong to them?” My father, looking the Red soldier in the eye, took the wooden horse in his hand and responded, “Yes, it is Anastasia’s.”

“But why?” I asked Sergeyev again. Did Papa say why he had chosen me?

“‘She has always been the bravest.’”

It is a responsibility greater than any person should ever bear.

The clock in the drawing room struck eight o’clock. “I would like to go to bed,” I told Sergeyev. An exhaustion devoid of feeling had overtaken me.

“There’s something more,” he said. I could not take more, but he continued. “You were once kind to my brother. He never forgot, Your Highness, until the day he died.”

It was then that I saw it, in the light from the street, the tiny but distinct dimple at the tip of Sergeyev’s nose. I knew why his face looked so familiar, why its proportions plucked a chord deep within me. . . . It was not a face I recognized from the darkest night of my life, but from its happiest days. “Ilya,” I whispered. His brother nodded.

Evan’s eyes are glued to the page in his hands. Finally, he raises them and turns to me. “Wow.”

My head swims with emotions, the same ones Anna probably felt—grief, betrayal, horror—but another as well: hope.

“She can write,” Evan says.

“The body they just found . . .” I take the diary from his hands. “It wasn’t hers. A girl between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, that’s what the scientists said. A girl of the same age, height, and build. A peasant girl.”

The brutality of that possibility settles over us. Evan sighs, runs his fingers through his hair.

“That means Anastasia wasn’t buried in the woods outside Yekaterinburg,” I say quietly. “It means she survived.”

After learning the gruesome truth of her rescue, Anna wrestles in the diary with what it means. She remembers her conversations with Ilya in the Tsarskoe Selo hospital, and how he so delicately tried to convey to her what the Russian workers and peasants felt: that while the tsar thrived, it was they who suffered and died for his empire. The anonymous peasant sacrificed for her survival becomes multiplied, in her mind, by millions.

“We starve,” he told me, and in his eyes, I saw that he did know hunger. “We die,” he said, and it was happening in the beds around us. I told him, as Mama had told me, “Papa feels your pain. He loves all Russians as if they were his own children.”

It sickens me now, this blathering response to his very real suffering. The naive justifications of a child. I knew nothing.

Anna’s grief over Ilya’s death is palpable. From his brother, she learned how he died: After his recovery in the infirmary, the young soldier had been reassigned to a reserve regiment garrisoned in Petrograd. The same regiment that, on February 26, 1917, was dispatched by the tsar to quell an uprising in Znamenskaya Square. As other soldiers in his regiment mutinied, Ilya was killed by a stray rock to the temple. Despite his misgivings, he’d been faithful to the end.

Newly reminded of her loneliness in the world, Anna stayed in Paris, the guest of Monsieur Gagnon. One day shortly after the dinner, he came to the apartment where she stayed. Point-blank, she asked him why the White Army had saved her and what they planned to do with her.

“You speak as if you are a captive, Grand Duchess.” Am I not? I asked him. “Of course not,” he replied, as if offended. Then, he added, “But when one has so few friends in the world, it’s wise to know the value of the ones one does have.” It was clear what he meant.

As if to prove his point, Gagnon encouraged Anna to explore the City of Lights, though always with an escort. In her diary entries, she walks the markets of Les Halles, reads in the cafés of Montmartre, strolls the banks of the Seine, spends days lost in the galleries of the Louvre, thinking, grieving.

She continues to keep the diaries that she started up again in Berlin—the only comfort of my old life not completely lost to me, and I am convinced, my only true friend in the world; without you, dear, I should go completely mad—but she hides them carefully, including from Gagnon and his minders. Even using false names, Anna knew the danger the diaries might pose if they fell into the wrong hands, and so she slid them beneath a small woodstove in her apartment. Smart, Evan and I agree, though probably a fire hazard.

On one of her outings, Anna stopped at a newspaper kiosk outside the Rue du Bac metro station. Other than the incident with the duplicitous Anna in Berlin, she seemed to avoid the papers, but a small headline in one of the British tabloids caught her eye: “Exiled Empress Lives Quietly in London.” Breathless, she stood in the street reading it.

According to the article, a society tidbit, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna was now living in London near her sister, Queen Alexandra. There, she mourned her son, Tsar Nicholas II, whose execution the Bolshevik government had announced via official statement in July 1918. The rest of the tsar’s family, including his wife, son, and four daughters, the Bolsheviks maintained, had been transferred to a safe but undisclosed location. (“Liars,” Anna hissed when she read this, causing the kiosk attendant to ask if she planned to buy the paper or just mangle it.) After a dramatic rescue mission arranged by the king’s Royal Navy, the dowager empress was enjoying a quieter life than St. Petersburg had afforded her, and refusing to talk to journalists.

We expect this development to elate Anna—her grandmother had survived. “Maybe that’s how she got to London,” Evan observes. The reaction she actually penned surprises us.

So, she is alive, Grandmama. On the one hand a salve, on the other a fresh wound.

Of course she loves us. Papa always insisted so. But the slights behind Mama’s back—she insulted the court by withdrawing from it; the family’s duty was to Russia, not itself—we heard and felt these, too.

If I am honest with you, my dear, I loved my grandmother as a duty like all of the other ones expected of us. Where was she when they came for us? In Crimea. And if she believes that we are alive, how has she not found me?

After all this pain and sorrow, I fear I cannot bear another heartbreak, and Grandmama has never been one for mending broken hearts.

I wonder how this tale of desertion sits with Evan.

The next afternoon, Anna’s presence was requested immediately at the townhouse where she met Sergeyev and learned the full tragedy of her story. Nerves and excitement overwhelmed her as she was rushed out the door by an impatient Gagnon.

When she arrived at the townhouse, in a small library off the drawing room, a well-dressed man in a leather chair awaited her. At his elbow perched a porcelain teacup, so precariously that Anna noted in her diary she feared he might smash it to smithereens. Long-faced with a mustache and thin salt-and-pepper hair combed over a balding head, the man had a nose like a beak.

Gagnon proceeded with introductions. “May I introduce the Right Honorable Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, former British ambassador to Russia, viceroy of India, and soon-to-be ambassador to France.”

“How do you do?” I asked, mustering all the civility still within me. The man snorted. It is clear to me Lord Hardinge is not to be my friend.

The ambassador stood. He circled, slowly inspecting me as a trainer at our stables might once have inspected a new foal. His gaze felt like hands. After a minute, he stopped, pulling a photograph from the breast pocket of his vest. He held it to my face, beady eyes flicking back and forth, back and forth, between the photograph and myself, myself and the photograph. Awkwardly, I stood.

“May I see it?” I asked. He handed the photograph over to me. Immediately, I recognized it. “This was taken on the Standardt. The sun was in my eyes.”

“Yes,” he replied, “that’s clear enough.”

The ambassador’s purpose is evident; he has been sent to inspect me, to verify my identity. “May I ask who inquires?” I said. “Is it the dowager empress?” He remained silent.

A visual inspection did not satisfy him. The Lord Hardinge proceeded to barrage me with questions: about the configuration of our rooms at the Alexander Palace; about the pattern of the imperial china; about cousin Elisabeth, first and second cousin on Mother’s side and second cousin twice over by marriage on Father’s, who, yes, died on a visit to our hunting lodge in Spala at the age of eight; about the birthmark on my sister’s thigh (a trick question, as she had none). He asked the name of my dog—Tatiana’s dog, I told him, the very one that yipped at my feet as the photograph in his pocket was taken. He even asked about the color of mother’s boudoir. Lilac, I told him.

Each query struck me like a bullet. As the interrogation continued, M. Gagnon paced the room and stroked his mustache.

Finally, after no less than an hour of questioning, the ambassador tired. He watched me over the rampart of his nose. Then, as if suddenly bored with his inquisition, he inclined himself toward me from his chair. “I must confess, Miss . . . Haase, that I am weary of this ever-growing list of pretenders.”

It was unclear whether I was to take this as an apology or a dismissal. I looked at Gagnon, whose expression had turned sour. Would I be denied my identity, even my own name, once again?

“Take me to my journals,” I demanded in a sudden whirlwind of anger. “They were in the shipment of our belongings sent to England before we were taken to Tobolsk. Bring me to them, and I will tell you what is in them. If I am right, you will take me to my grandmother. If I am wrong, you can leave me on the streets with the rest of the impostors.” I challenged his hawk-eyed gaze.

A sound issued from the ambassador’s flabby neck, a phlegmy chortle. Rocking to his feet, he said to Gagnon, “I’ll be in touch.” The latter scurried out after him.

Gagnon had closed the library’s heavy door on his way out, but I went to stand behind it, cupping my ear to the wood. I could just make out what the two men said. Their whispered voices were agitated.

“All this trouble for the wild daughter of a naive incompetent and a criminal lunatic.” It was Hardinge’s voice.

Gagnon replied through his thick French accent, “Well, if that incompetent and lunatic had not been denied asylum by your king, then we wouldn’t be in this predicament now, would we? The Romanovs would all be safe and alive eating pease pudding in Shropshire.”

“Good sir, they do not eat pease pudding in Shropshire.” I heard laughter and smelled cigar smoke. They mingled with my rage.

They are pigs, both of them, but they might prove useful pigs, and I am accustomed now to sleeping in pigsties.

Yours,

A

“Coffee.” Evan stretches. “I need coffee.”

It’s almost sunset, and the graveyard has taken on a peach glow. “Food,” I say. “I need food.” In the excitement of sharing Uncle Henry’s letters, I’d barely eaten before meeting Evan.

He checks his watch. The hair on the right side of his head sticks out at an odd angle from all the tugging he’s done over the last two hours. “If you’re hungry, I have a dinner date in fifteen minutes.”

I’m confused and also—I hope not clearly—jealous. “You have a date?”

“A standing one.” He’s pleased with himself. “Tuesday night’s poker night. With Stuart, Amit, and Russell. Afterward, we go to Lindy’s for pancakes.”

“Afterward . . . Did I make you miss poker night?” I’m a jerk. When I called about the letters, I hadn’t even asked if Evan had other plans.

“I don’t mind. This was better.”

My cheeks feel warm. “You know, I’ve been wondering something: How is it that you’re so good at poker? Poker requires lying.”

“Don’t believe anything Sonya tells you,” he says, slinging the messenger bag of diaries over his shoulder and pulling me from the bench. “I lose every time.”

“So, Evan is hanging there, half of him on one side of the fence . . .” I am laughing so hard my side is cramping. “. . . and half of him on the other, his belt loop caught on the chain-link fence, and he looks like he might upchuck. ‘Son,’ says the cop, ‘we can do this one of two ways: the easy way or the hard way.’”

Across the table inlaid with restaurant memorabilia, Amit and Russell collapse over their chocolate chip pancakes. Russell’s laughter sounds like an owl hooting.

In the long banquette at the back of Lindy’s Diner, Evan’s friend Stuart is telling the story of last year’s campus-wide Halloween “Humans vs. Zombies” game, which had been broken up by the police. Stuart, of LARPing fame, is a sophomore like Evan but looks about fourteen. He has a high, nasal voice, which he uses to imitate others when he’s telling stories.

Amit is a junior majoring in computer science with a minor in philosophy, and Russell is a sophomore and the procurer of my aunt’s psychiatric files from the historical society. Whether he knows they were for me or not he doesn’t let on. He spends the first fifteen minutes of dinner making the case that, if time is the fourth dimension, then technically he should be able to travel back and prevent Red Sox owner Jack Frazee from trading Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918.

There are no two ways about it: Evan’s friends are Nerds with a capital N. They celebrate their nerdery. They revel in it. They jump in and do the backstroke in it, swimming cap on, nose plug in. They aren’t uniform in their nerdiness. Each one has his thing, and I can tell they humor each other’s quirks. Plus, they’re sweet. Russell has a girlfriend in Boston, and Amit has a new “female acquaintance” he met on something called a “subreddit,” but I have a feeling they don’t typically slay with the female crowd. I suspect they like having a girl around, especially if it means they can give Evan a hard time.

“So, what did you do?” I ask, relishing this glimpse at an Evan less serious than the one I know, one who trespasses on the college president’s lawn while pursuing a “zombie” with a marshmallow blaster.

“He took his pants off, of course.” Amit is one of those loud talkers who occasionally bang their fists on the table to make a point. I wonder briefly if Katie and Amit might hit it off. “That’s why they call him Evan the Terrible.”

“You call me Evan the Terrible, Amit,” Evan interjects.

“What did Sonya say?” I try to imagine her shock—and riotous laughter—at a police officer showing up at her door with a pants-less Evan in tow.

“You’ve met Baba?” Russell wonders. He’s tall like Evan but with hair to his shoulders and wire-rimmed glasses.

“Well, well, she does exist,” Stuart squeaks, and the others chuckle.

I must look confused, because Amit explains, running a forkful of pancake through a puddle of imitation maple syrup, “We were starting to imagine something Norman Bates–esque.”

“She’s delightful! She offered me pie.”

“Technically, I offered you pie,” Evan corrects me.

“Jess gets baked goods, and we don’t?” Amit cries.

“Evan’s never invited us to his house,” explains Stuart. “For all we know, he lives under an overpass.”

“Well, he didn’t really invite me, either,” I say quickly. “I kind of invited myself.” I glance at Evan.

“Baba doesn’t really love visitors,” he says.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Russell chimes in. “All those years in ‘witness protection.’” He makes air quotes.

“No, it’s true!” I protest. “Her father defected from the Soviet Union.”

“Maybe if you halfwits knew how to behave yourselves”—Evan balls up a syrupy paper napkin—“you would get some apple pie.” He lobs it at Amit.

“Apple?” Amit cries, as if wounded. “That’s my favorite!”

I am laughing so hard I don’t notice them until they are almost standing over us.

“Jess?” It’s Lila . . . and Ryan.

“Lila,” I say, taken off guard. “Hey.”

Ryan won’t meet my eyes. Scarlet creeps up his neck. “Hey.”

It’s a miserable moment, and suddenly, I regret yelling at him in the parking lot of a Burger King. I regret not fully explaining why I was hurt and that it wasn’t all his fault, because I’d never really let him in. I do not, however, regret breaking up with him.

“Who are your hot friends?” Lila asks. Her voice has that singsong quality it gets when she’s drunk. It’s not nine o’clock yet.

I look at the guys, who have no idea what’s going on. “This is Amit, Stuart, Russell, and . . . Evan.” My voice falters at his name. I’m scared Ryan will recognize Evan from the shoe store.

Lila smells it, like blood in the water: uncertainty, weakness.

“Evan.” She tilts her head so her hair falls over one kohled eye. “Is that the guy I saw going into your house the other day?”

She asks it casually, but she knows she has me pinned. Ryan’s eyes flash to me, a look of confusion.

My heart starts beating fast. “Um, yeah, probably. He’s helping me with a project.”

“Your ‘family project’?” There’s an actual sneer on Ryan’s face. The red continues to creep up his cheeks. Has he been drinking, too?

“Yeah, that one.” I finally find some strength in my voice.

“The one for extra credit in Ass-tin’s class?” Lila is smug. “I heard about that. You got an A-minus, but it wasn’t good enough for you.”

There’s a cruel sparkle in her eye. This feels personal. But why? Have I hurt Ryan that bad, and why would Lila care so much?

“It was a B-minus, actually. And no, that’s not good enough for me. Some of us have goals, Lila. Other than taking over the Curl Up and Dye on Route Nine.” My own eyes have narrowed to slits.

“What does this nerd with a foot fetish know about your family?” Ryan is definitely slurring his words. He shoots daggers at Evan, while Lila looks confused by the foot comment.

Evan clears his throat. “I don’t believe you know the nature of my personal expertise,” he says, “nor my carnal inclinations, though I do appreciate a good loafer when I see it.”

Amit chortles.

“He’s not a nerd,” I state.

“In fact,” Evan says—he turns in the booth to face Ryan—“I am.” He holds out his hand. “Evan Nikolai Hermann. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

He’s not helping.

“Look, nerd,” Ryan says, like the villain from a bad eighties movie. He bends so his face is inches from Evan’s. “I’ll tell you when I’m talking to you.”

Where am I? Worse than the eighties, this feels like drag races and fisticuffs. I have to act, but since Ryan and Lila appeared, something’s been bugging me.

“Where’s Josh?” I ask. “Or Doug?”

Ryan and Lila are friends, but I’ve never known them to hang out alone. In my experience, they travel as a pack. The gears in my brain are whirring. Ryan’s panic the other night when I confronted him in the parking lot, Lila’s behavior now, the flirtation, all those “training” sessions, taking his grandma to dinner, the sweatshirt that wasn’t mine . . .

Lila isn’t mad at me because she feels sorry for Ryan that I’ve broken his heart; she’s finishing me off because she wants Ryan for herself, because she already has him.

“Wait, what the fuck?” The words spring from my mouth. “What the fucking fuck?” Stuart quickly slides out of the booth so I can stand in front of Ryan, whose eyes have gone wide. Busted.

“You.” I poke at his chest. “I almost felt sorry.”

His breath smells of cinnamon, and not the pleasant cinnamon of apple pie but the artificial burn of Goldschläger, the bottle his parents keep at the back of their liquor cabinet.

“You’ve been cheating on me. With Lila.” I don’t know which is worse: that Ryan has been lying to me or that he’s been lying to me about being with Lila. All this time I’d been folding myself into a human pretzel to be the person I thought he wanted. And this was it?

“He loves me,” Lila says. Her arms are crossed over her chest, and her face is white, sweaty with booze.

“I’m sure he does,” Russell cracks from the table. From my peripheral vision, I see Evan give him the cut it out look. He senses my bubbling rage.

A waitress slips over to refresh our coffees. “You okay, hon?” she asks me directly, her eyes flitting to Ryan.

“Yep,” I say, meeting her gaze. “I’ve got this. Thank you.”

Happy, she winks and sidles to another table to see if they wanted hash browns.

“Lila . . .” Once the shock has worn off, I’m not even mad, just exhausted. “You can have him.”

Before they leave, Russell, Amit, and Stuart invite me to next week’s poker game, although I don’t have the vaguest idea how to play. “I’ll teach you,” Evan says.

“Maybe I want someone who wins to teach me,” I tease.

“Oooooooh!” Amit and Russell hoot.

Now Evan and I sit on the hood of my car in the diner’s parking lot. Stars wink from the sky, diamonds in a field of velvet. Lying back against the windshield, I tilt my head to see them better. Evan tries to recline next to me, and the metal of the hood makes a thunkety-thunk. He springs from the car. “Sorry!”

I laugh and roll my head to look at him. “It’s okay.” I sit up. “I’m the one who needs to apologize.” He looks perplexed. “I’m sorry my ex-boyfriend was a jerk just now. And I know you don’t care, but I’m sorry I was rude at the shoe store, because I do care what you think of me.”

The pained look on his face says he regrets the other day’s choice of words.

I’m on a roll. “I’m sorry I freaked out about the hospital records, when you were just making sure we had all the information. And I’m sorry that I ever judged you. . . . I guess I’d just gotten so used to judging myself.”

What draws me to Evan is that there’s never any pretending for him. He’ll always make the terrible joke, linger a beat too long, say “shall” when any normal person would say “will” . . . because that’s him. And it gives you the courage to be you.

In sixth grade, MASH was Katie’s and my favorite game to play on the school bus. This was before I’d met Ryan, so he didn’t enter into the picture. After the house and the car and the number of children, we’d create a list of those qualities we most wanted in a spouse: pretty eyes, smart, nice, sense of humor, good butt (that was Katie’s). “Think of it this way,” she’d say, glitter pen poised above the page, “what is it you’re most looking for in a soul mate?”

This—to wholly, unapologetically, with every proud fiber of their being be the person they are—is the most attractive trait I’ve ever found in a person.

“Two Truths and a Lie?” I ask Evan. He’s sitting on the bumper now, and I slide down next to him. With fall around the corner, the evenings are getting chilly, and it’s nice to feel his warmth next to mine.

“Oh no,” he says, but then he takes in my pleading face. “All right.”

I start. “One: I’m also deathly afraid of spiders.” He grins. “Two: Three times I’ve competed in the Kentucky Derby.” I am counting on my fingers. “And three: I like you, Evan Hermann.”

He’s surprised but maybe not surprised. “Like, you like me like me?” he says. I nod, and he takes my chin in his hand.

We kiss tentatively at first, in an unpracticed way, and then like we’ve been doing it for a long, long time. His fingers brush the nape of my neck; they play me like an instrument.

The lights in the diner flicker off and then on and then off again. The waitress.

“Wait,” Evan says, pulling away for a moment, “that wasn’t the lie, was it?”

“You are terrible at this game.”

“You have not competed in the Kentucky Derby?” I roll my eyes. “And it’s not one of those half-lies, is it, where it’s a lie because you’ve only competed once?”

“Are you going to make me regret this?” I ask.

“No,” he says definitively. “Because I like you, too.” Full stop.