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It was a er Neither hers

She stared at both for a long time And then she went back into the bedroom and fired up her laptop It was only when she clicked on the Skype icon on her co it had been since she’d done it last So long that she hesitated before she clicked on Jessie’s name—

But she did it anyway And Jessie answered at once, despite the fact that it wasin New Orleans and she was at work That heavy thing inside of Cleo shifted in a drunken sort of tilt that made her stomach flip over, and it was hard to look at her oldest friend suddenly At those warm brown eyes that saw too much, the strawberry-blond hair that had always been in cohout their youth that Jessie wore in a sleek style befitting the high-powered attorney she was now, or the faint crease of concern in her friend’s brow

“I found the phone,” Cleo said, as much to start the conversation as to skip over the uncos she didn’t want to address, such as why she’d been out of touch for months despite all the emails Jessie had sent with those articles Cleo wasn’t supposed to read “A wedding gift, I’?”

“Are you mad at me?” Jessie leaned closer to her screen, a world away and yet it felt like she was right there with Cleo—and Cleo wanted that so laze over with emotion “It was my attempt to re-create our youth”

“Did we have secret phones? I re concert and that boy you liked, but no secret phones”

“We had pretend secret phones,” Jessie said, and sighed as if she couldn’t believe Cleo didn’t remember that “That made them particularly secret”

“Do you have a secret phone now, too?” Cleo asked “Or is it only for me?”

She’d ht and easy, but it didn’t, and she felt a luh the screen

“I always like to have an escape hatch, Cleo,” she said softly, after a long moment “You know that”

“That’s the lawyer in you, I guess”