Page 174 of ClickBack

“It’s difficult to explain.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me.” She rests her forearms on the table. “I saw people talking about that girl like she had walked into it knowing everything you know now.”

“I wasn’t stupid.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“I knew things. I made choices.”

Bellamy looks at me without impatience. “We were girls, Giselle.”

The answer I am preparing disappears. I look toward the walkway, where the girl in orange has stopped with her friends to take a picture. One of them fixes her jacket before she steps into place. They are still laughing.

“We were,” I say.

Bellamy lets me sit with that. She doesn’t tell me to forgive anybody. She finishes the last of her ice cream and carries both cups to the trash.

When she comes back, I have picked up my bag.

“I want to try on the dress.”

“Then let’s go.”

It is still on the rack. This time I take it into the fitting room before I can start calculating all the places I would never wear it. The back is low. The front fits beautifully. I turn in the mirror and look over my shoulder.

I like it.

When I come out, Bellamy lowers her phone.

“Well?” I ask.

“Turn around.”

I do. She smiles, and I find myself smiling back at her in the larger mirror.

“Yes,” she says. “That one.”

I pay for the dress with my own card. On the way out, a pair of sculpted gold earrings catches my attention. They curve close to the ear, smaller than my usual hoops. I hold one up beside my face.

“Those would work with it,” Bellamy says.

“They would work with several things.”

The saleswoman gives me the price. I take out my wallet and move my own card aside to reach Jarrett’s.

Bellamy looks down at her phone. She is trying too hard not to smile.

“You can stop that,” I tell her.

“Stop what?”

“Acting like you haven’t noticed.”

She laughs. The saleswoman wraps the earrings, and I take the little bag without explaining myself to either of them.

The audience is gone when we return to Jawn. Two crew members are loading the last cases into a van. Nina points us toward the rear stairs before Bellamy can ask where everybody went.

“Up there. Your husband has decided he knows his way around my grill.”