Josh is reeling. “Wh-what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I don’t see myself in your future.”

“Isla.” His voice shakes. “Are you…are you breaking up with me?”

And there it is. The question that, once spoken aloud, is always inevitably its own undoing.

“You don’t love me like you think you love me,” I whisper.

Now he’s crying, too. “Why are you doing this?”

My entire world is crumbling, but I have to finish the destruction. I have to destroy what’s left of my heart before he can do it for me. “Because if it hurts us this much now,” I say, “I can’t imagine how much it’ll hurt when you come to this realization yourself.”

I’m as shocked by my words as he is.

I don’t understand how this could happen in one car ride, but as a deathly sombre Brian pulls over in front of Kismet, I already know that I’m getting out. And Josh isn’t.

Chapter twenty-seven

“Isla? Are you okay?” Kurt’s dad is watching me on the camera installed outside their building. I ran all three blocks from Kismet.

“Let me in. Please let me in!”

The door buzzes open and then slams shut behind me. I race up the two flights of stairs to their apartment, and Scott and Sabine are already in the hall. Kurt’s parents refuse to let me call them Mr. and Mrs. Bacon, because they refuse to believe that they’re old. “What happened? Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Their questions all come at once.

“Is Kurt here?” I ask.

“Of course he is here,” Sabine says in a French accent. She ushers me inside with a slender, gentle arm. “He went to bed an hour ago, but he is probably awake. What happened? Why are you dressed up like this?”

I blurt it out. “I’ve broken up with my boyfriend, and I don’t want to go home.”

Their bodies tense.

“Did he hurt you?” Scott undergoes a Hulk-like transformation, which looks peculiar on his strung-out ex-rocker body.

“Yes!”

Scott’s body completes the Hulk transformation.

“No.” I sob hysterically. “Emotionally.”

Scott shrinks back into his natural form. Sabine exchanges a look with him. “Of course you can stay,” she says.

“Will you call my parents? I don’t want to have to explain. Not tonight.”

She leads me to Kurt’s bedroom. “I’ll call your maman right now.” She hugs me, and the comforting familiarity of her violet perfume keeps me in her arms, crying.

Kurt opens his door. “What’s going— Oh. What happened?”

Sabine releases me into his care. I flop onto his unmade bed, and he closes the door behind me. “It’s…it’s over!” I say.

Kurt places a solid hand on my back as I emit huge, gut-wrenching sobs. “Josh broke up with you?”

“No. I broke up with him.”

He’s quiet for nearly a minute. “I don’t get it,” he finally says.

I tell him the story to the best of my current ability, and when I’m done, he scratches his head. “So you broke up with Josh before he could break up with you.”

“No.” My head is swimming. “It wasn’t like that. Or… it was more than that. I don’t know.”

“You’ve never been able to believe that he could like you as much as you like him. You were afraid he’d dump you. So you picked those fights to get a conversation going in which you could dump him first.”

“No,” I say again. But something awful and truth-y stings inside of me.

Still. That doesn’t mean it was wrong to break up with him. I do believe that Josh would have left me, most likely before college even began. But maybe he wouldn’t have until after we were already in New England, already living together. Which would’ve been even worse. My heart couldn’t take it – moving someplace new and strange and then losing the person who’d brought me there. Because eventually, no matter what the circumstances, he would see the real me. Josh is a beautiful, messy, passionate work of art, and I’m…a blank canvas.

There’s nothing here to love.

“You told him that you’re a placeholder in his life,” Kurt says. “So does that make me or Josh the placeholder in yours?”

My attention jerks back to him. “Huh?”

“Now that Josh is gone, you came straight to me. In his place.”

The word gone is a sucker punch, but what he’s suggesting is even worse. “That’s not the same thing. Not at all. You guys don’t…share the same space. You don’t” – I struggle to put it in terms he’d understand – “perform the same function in my life.”

“Because you and I aren’t romantically involved?”

“Exactly.”

“Josh and I don’t perform the same function,” Kurt agrees, “but we do take up the same amount of your time. And you gave him the time that you used to give to me.”

The guilt. I can’t deal with it on top of everything else. A shrill ring from inside the jewelled clutch saves me from having to reply. We sit up, alert. My phone rings again. Kurt pulls it out and examines the screen. “It’s a Manhattan number. Do you want me to answer it?”

I shake my head.

“It’s probably Josh.”

“I know.”

“He’s probably using Brian’s phone.”

“I know.”

“You told me that I should always answer it if I think it might be Josh.”

“That’s not valid any more.”

“Okay.”

The phone stops ringing. A minute later, it blips with a voicemail. I turn off the volume, but I see the Manhattan number call me again. And then again. Kurt throws my phone underneath his bed to curb my temptation to answer it.

“I’m tired,” he says. “Go brush your teeth.”

I brush them with his toothpaste and an index finger, and I wash off my make-up with his liquid hand-soap. My face is a blotchy mess. I ditch my dress and replace it with one of the worn T-shirts from the pile on his bathroom floor. When I return to his room, he’s asleep. I tuck myself up against him, and – all night long – I lie awake and watch the green light of my phone flashing out from underneath his bed.