I pull the cork from the half-empty chardonnay bottle with my teeth since one hand’s holding my cellphone, the other’s buried in the box of Wheat Thins that is my dinner.

“I love that idea, Brandi, I do,” I tell my sister. “The only part I’m not clear on is, if I tell you all of that before I throw myself on top of a kitchen knife or after. I’m not sure which would hurt less.”

My sister doesn’t even pause, bloodthirsty wench. “How can you move past it if you won’t even talk about it? It’s been what, a week?”

Nine days.

My new job? Fabulous. New apartment? Starting to feel like home.

My heart? In shards.

I don’t want to move past it. I want to wallow in the memories of me and Reece together.

But…but…this is why I called tough-love Brandi. I have a couple of high school friends who know Reece, a bunch of college friends who don’t, but nobody besides my sister knows the whole story.

“It was pretty much like you’d expect,” I say glumly, washing down a cracker with the creamy wine. “He told me he more or less manufactured the entire mess with Abby back in the day because he didn’t have the balls to break up with me directly.”

“Sooooooo, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that those weren’t his precise words?” Brandi asks.

I throw myself onto the couch. “I may be paraphrasing. But the gist is the same. He’s a big coward who couldn’t handle the fact that I was going to college, so he ditched me before I could ditch him. Fast-forward a few years. Repeat.”

“But you weren’t going to ditch him, then or now,” Brandi says reasonably. “Right?”

“Not even close,” I say quietly. “I mean, I knew we’d have to do long distance, but I also thought I was going to marry him. It took me close to a year to get over him. It’ll take me even longer now that I know the man’s even better than the boy.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“It took him just as long to get over you.”

I roll my eyes. “I doubt that.”

“You doubt that, but you don’t know that. Honestly, Lucy, you don’t know anything because you haven’t asked him. Nor have you told him how you felt then, or how you feel now.”

“I don’t know how I feel now.”

Brandi’s voice is kinder than I expect, but also a little disappointed. “Lucy.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and stay silent.

“Luce…do you love him?”

Just hearing the words, even through my iPhone, from someone on the other side of the country, makes my stomach flip.

Love and Reece…they go together almost as well as the words hate and Reece. Hurt and Reece. Anger and Reece…

“Luce?”

“Yes, I love him. Okay? Happy?”

Boom.

I’d thought I’d feel better once the words were out, but I don’t. Because I’m not saying them to the right person.

And Brandi doesn’t give an inch. “You’re hideous right now. You need to get him back.”

I sit up. “What? No! He needs to get me back. He’s the one who messed everything up back then, letting me think he cheated. He’s the one who pushed me away.”

“And you let him.”

“What do you want me to do, chase him down? Fall on my knees and beg him to love me?”

“No, but how about you have a rational conversation with the guy, lay it all out there, because you’re an adult? And crazy in love with the one guy who’s always been the only guy?”

I scratch my nose. My little sister is super annoying when she’s right.

And yet, I can’t stop thinking of the look on his face when he stepped away from me. It was so…final.

I don’t doubt that Reece cares for me. And I know that he wants me, or at least he did when I was within easy reach.

But love?

I’m not even sure Reece Sullivan knows what it means.

“Has anyone heard from him?” I ask, hating myself for being so desperate to hear something about him. Anything.

“Nope, no way,” Brandi says. “Sorry, but I’m not making this that easy for you. You want to know how he is, you want to know where his head’s at, you go to him.”

“I can’t. I don’t know what I’d say.”

“So figure it out,” my sister says, her voice gentling. “You and Reece belong together. I know you were gone for a while, but I was here more often, and I saw him with the girlfriends he had while you two were apart. He barely even looked at them.”

I wince at the thought of Reece and other girls. “Can we not go there?”

“If you guys are going to make this work, you’ll have to come to grips with what happened when you were together, as well as when you weren’t,” Brandi says, sounding way wiser than she has any right to. “And besides, you had boyfriends in the meantime.”

“I know,” I say, nibbling on a fingernail. “Reece oh so kindly reminded me of that the other night, as though he gets to be jealous after what he pulled with Abby back in the day.”

“Well to be fair, you did make him drive to Miami to meet that Oscar dude.”

“It wasn’t even Oscar that had him all riled,” I say, swirling my wine. “It was Matt Terry, of all people.”

“Who?”

“Exactly!” I say, lifting my glass emphatically, almost swishing some over the side.