“I don’t know,” Blue said. “If he could, wouldn’t he have tried it before now?”

“Honestly —” Adam started, and then stopped. His face changed. “Are you going to the party tonight?”

“I guess so.” Too late, she got the sense that the question meant more than the words she’d heard. “Like I said, Mom told me I was going, so …”

“With Gansey.”

“Yeah, I guess. And Ronan, if he’s going.”

“Ronan won’t go to Henry’s.”

Carefully, Blue said, “Then, yeah, I guess, with Gansey.”

Adam frowned at the edge of the table, looking at his own hand. He was taking his time with something, measuring the words, testing them before he said them. “You know, when I first met Gansey, I couldn’t figure out why he was friends with someone like Ronan. Gansey was always in class, always getting stuff done, always a teacher’s pet. And here was Ronan, like a heart attack that never stopped. I knew I couldn’t complain, ’cause I hadn’t come first. Ronan had. But one day, he’d done some stupid shit I don’t even remember, and I just couldn’t take it. And I asked why Gansey was even friends with him if he was such an asshole all the time. And I remember Gansey told me that Ronan always told the truth, and the truth was the most important thing.”

It was not at all difficult to imagine Gansey saying such a thing.

Adam looked up to Blue then, and he pinned her with his gaze. Outside, the wind chucked leaves against the glass. “Which is why I wanna know why you two won’t tell me the truth about you two.”

Now her stomach turned over the other direction. You two. Gansey and her. Her and Gansey. Blue had imagined this conversation dozens of times. Endless permutations of how she brought it up, how he reacted, how it ended. She could do this. She was ready.

No, she wasn’t.

“About us?” she said. Lamely.

His expression, if possible, turned more disdainful than it had over Henry Cheng. “Do you know what hurts the most? What this means you think of me. You didn’t even give me the chance to be OK with it. You were just so sure I’d be eaten by jealousy. That’s how you see me?”

He wasn’t wrong. But he had been a rather more brittle version of himself back when they’d first made the decision to not tell him. Saying this out loud felt rather unsporting, though, so she just tried, “You – things – were different then.”

“ ‘Then’? How long has it been going on?”

“Going on isn’t exactly what is happening,” Blue said. A relationship that was squeezed into stolen glances and secret phone calls was so drastically less than what she wanted that she refused to consider it dating. “And it’s not exactly like starting a new job. ‘The start date was x!’ I can’t tell you precisely how long it’s been going on.”

“You just said ‘going on,’ ” Adam said.

Blue’s mental state surfed the crest of a wave that divided empathy and frustration. “Don’t be impossible. I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be something, and then it was, and then I didn’t know how to say anything. I didn’t want to risk messing up our friendship.”

“So even though I might have been decent about it, some part of you thought I’d be so shittily in constant competition with Gansey that you figured it was better to just lie?”

“I didn’t lie.”

“Sure, Ronan. Lying by omission is still lying,” Adam said. He was sort of half-smiling, but in that way people did when they were annoyed rather than when anything was funny.

Outside, a couple paused by the door to read the menu attached to it; both Blue and Adam waited in irritated silence until they moved on, leaving the restaurant empty. Adam opened his hands as if he expected her to tip a satisfactory explanation into them.

The fair part of Blue was well aware that she was in the wrong and so it was her job to defuse his legitimate hurt, but the prideful part of her still would’ve preferred to point out how difficult he had been back when she and Gansey had first realized they had feelings for each other. With some effort, she went with a middle ground. “It wasn’t as calculated as you make it sound like it was.”

Adam rejected the middle ground. “But I saw you guys trying to hide it. The crazy thing is – like, I’m right here. I’m with you guys every day. Do you think I didn’t see it? He’s my best friend. You think I don’t know him?”

“Then why aren’t you having this conversation with him? He’s half of this, you know.”

He spread his hands out at the still-empty restaurant, as if he, too, was amazed by the turn this conversation had taken. “Because I was here to talk to you about how to save him from dying. Then I found out you guys were going to a party together, and I couldn’t believe how irresponsible you were being.”

Now Blue also spread her hands. It was a rather less elegant gesture than Adam’s, more like a fist clench in reverse. “Irresponsible? Excuse me?”

“Does he know about your curse?”

Her cheeks felt hot. “Oh, don’t.”

“You don’t think it’s a little relevant that the guy who is supposed to die in the next year is dating the girl who’s supposed to kill her true love with a kiss?”

She was too angry to do anything but shake her head. He merely raised an eyebrow in reply, an action that warmed the temperature of Blue’s blood by a single degree.

She snapped, “I can control myself, thanks.”

“In any circumstance? You’re not gonna fall on him, or get tricked into it, or magic’s not gonna go wrong in Cabeswater – can you guarantee? I don’t think you can.”

Now she’d definitely tipped over the crest of the wave into boiling anger. “You know what, I’ve been living with this a heck of a lot longer than you have, and I don’t really think you can come in here and tell me how to deal with it —”

“I can when it’s my best friend.”

“He’s mine as well!”

“If he really was, you wouldn’t be so damn selfish.”

“If he really was yours, you’d be happy he had someone.”

“How could I have been happy about it when I wasn’t supposed to know about it?”