So I snapped, in the most unprofessional way.

Frankly, it’s nothing my father wouldn’t have demanded, and probably not in terms any nicer, but for some reason I feel like I’m going to hear about it.

“He deserved it. Your dad should fire him.” Christa clinks her glass against mine. “What about Kyle Miller?” Her eyebrows rise in question. “Did you have a chance to talk to security about him?”

I take a big mouthful. “Kyle is security. And he’s now Kyle Stewart.”

Christa’s blue eyes are bulging by the time I’m done explaining today’s run-in.

“Kyle is in security?” she says, her voice dripping with disbelief. “Do they give those guards guns?”

“No.”

“Tasers?”

“No.”

“I guess he can’t cause too many problems, then,” she murmurs with grim satisfaction.

“Can we please focus on how he didn’t even remember my name?” Even admitting it to Christa is embarrassing. “I mean, I could maybe understand Penny or Pepper. But Sarah?”

She shrugs through a sip of her drink. “He was, like, sixteen.”

“Seventeen.”

“Fine. Seventeen. And he’s a guy. And it was one summer, thirteen years ago,” she rationalizes. “It happens.”

I give her a flat look.

“Fine. You’re right. Kyle should at the very least remember your name,” she concedes reluctantly. “I was just trying to make you feel better.”

“Exactly. So then it’s impossible, isn’t it? That he’d forget me completely?”

Because, even after all these years, with college and boyfriends, and my career and my engagement to David, Kyle Miller has always been a sliver in my heart, a shadow in my thoughts. A lingering “what if” that I have never been able to truly shake.

“I’d say so, given you guys got fired from Wawa together,” Christa mutters. “Plus that whole thing with Eric ending up in the hospital.”

“Exactly! So . . . Sarah?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he got into drugs. Like, heavy stuff. Maybe he’s a raging crack addict,” Christa offers through a draw of her soda.

I let out a derisive snort. “Yeah, I don’t think so.” I just don’t see Kyle—the version I knew, anyway—touching that stuff.

“Okay, fine. Head injury?”

“That made him lose his memory of that entire summer? It’d have to be a serious head injury. I don’t think so. He seemed . . . perfect.”

I feel Christa’s hawkish gaze on me as I sip my wine and mull over the possibilities.

“So what if he doesn’t remember you?” she finally says. “You were always too good for him. You’re smart and beautiful and ambitious. Your family is corporate royalty. You’re up here.” Her arm stretches above us, as high as she can go. “He’s down here.” She grinds her toe into the hardwood floor, like she’s squashing a bug. “He knew it back then, too. And now look at you both. You’re going to be running the world one day and he’s basically a mall cop.”

I roll my eyes. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”

“But that’s my point! Why would you want to be? He disappeared and never called you! Why give that jerk another second’s thought?” Her face twists with a look of disgust at the very idea.

“I don’t know. Maybe I need closure?” I toy with the cocktail list, unable to summon the same level of anger. “At least he seems to have turned out okay. He has a decent job.”

“Yeah, I’m guessing he didn’t include Wawa as a referral.” Christa snorts derisively, then gives me a knowing look. “And I’m not surprised he changed his last name.”

“That’s why I could never find him.”

“I don’t know why you kept looking,” she mutters under her breath, ticking away at lines on her order chart.

I sigh. I know she’s just trying to make me feel better, in her own way. But Christa always did judge Kyle too harshly.

I’m still hung up on the disappointing possibility that I could have been so forgettable to a guy who once upon a time meant so much to me. “Maybe he was playing one of his elaborate Kyle jokes. You know how he is. Or was, back then.” How much has he changed in thirteen years, aside from his name?

“Or maybe he was pretending because he doesn’t want to remember you,” Christa says, in typical blunt, no-nonsense fashion.

“Or maybe he doesn’t want to remember me,” I echo, a thought that had already been lingering in the recesses of my mind but I didn’t want to give voice to. I tip my head back and pour half the glass of my red wine down my throat, hoping it might help me swallow that bitter pill.

“You’re in early today.” David appears out of nowhere to charge through our building’s exterior door. He holds it open for me.

I mutter my thanks, my eyes darting to the security desk, my stomach tense with nerves. Gus is there, wearing his usual wide smile, greeting employees as they swipe their badges across the pad. The seat next to him is vacant.

It’s Monday. He did say Kyle was starting today, didn’t he?

Unless Kyle walked out of here on Friday with no intention of ever coming back after discovering that I work here.

“Who are you trying to impress?” David asks.

“What?”

He shrugs. “You just look more done up than usual.”

“I’ve worn this a thousand times.” My mother brought the figure-hugging blue gingham pencil dress back from Paris a few years ago from a designer’s trunk show. It’s one of my favorites, not that David would remember that.

“Not the dress. The lipstick.” He smirks. “You always wore that cherry-red lipstick when you were trying to get my attention.”

“I did not,” I deny. “What are you doing here, anyway?” He’s not usually in the office until just before nine.

“Had to get out of there before my date woke up. I forgot what a bad idea it is to bring them back to my place.”

It’s the first time David has admitted to sleeping with another woman since our breakup. I can’t tell if he’s lying, trying to get a jealous rise out of me. If he is, he’s going to be disappointed, because all I feel is relief. “I hope she steals everything.”