“Go sit,” she said.
I obeyed, toeing off my shoes before dropping my backpack where I stood. Before my butt could hit the sofa, Nia pushed a mug of tea into my hands. I sniffed it.
“Earl Grey,” I said.
“Your favorite,” Nia said in a singsongy voice. She lifted her own mug to her lips. I stared at her for a long moment, still shocked to see her here, in the flesh, sitting on the couch we’d bought together. Somehow, I expected her to look different, but she was still the same Nia I had always known, down to the last freckle.
“You’re a bit early,” she confessed, giving me a shy smile. “I wasn’t prepared for that. I can usually count on you to show up thirty minutes after you say you will.”
“Yeah,” I said lamely. Then: “I memorized all of your friends’ names.”
The second the words escaped, I wanted to snatch them back. My ears burned with mortification, and I opened my mouth to explain—but Nia had already thrown her head back in laughter.
“Girl, what?” she said when her cackles finally died. “You memorized their names?” Then, she straightened, pointing at me with her mug. “Okay then. Prove it.”
I rattled off what I had learned during my study sessions with Ricky, interweaving my responses with my opinions about each member of the Lesbrigade’s sense of style, comedic timing as observed during their performances at the improv show, and lastly, a rating of how deserving they were of my best friend’s time, on a scale of one to ten. By the end, both Nia and I were doubled over with laughter, holding our mugs in viselike grips to keep from spilling hot tea down our fronts.
“You creep,” Nia said when we had finally caught our breath. “Where did you even source all of this info?”
“Excuse me, they all have very stalkable Instagrams,” I said. “And, well, Ricky helped.”
“Oh yeah, Ricky. I heard about that,” Nia said, nudging me with her knee. “I lost twenty bucks on that bet, by the way. I could have sworn you would hold out for at least another week.”
In the last few minutes, we’d managed to fall back onto our age-old habits, but the reminder that Nia hadn’t been around for the evolution of my relationship hit me like a splash of cold water.
“Yeah well,” I said. “I guess we don’t know everything about each other.”
Nia made a small, soft sound of complaint. Then she placed her mug on the coffee table and stood.
“Wait here,” she said. I nodded, watching errant tea leaves swirl around in my mug as she sprang into the kitchen on light feet. From the other side of the wall, there was a clink of glass, the slam of cabinet doors being shut. When I looked up from my mug, Nia was standing in front of me, holding a white ceramic serving tray. On it were two squares of cake, each one three layers and covered with a shimmering mirror glaze. Atop them was a small spiral of spun sugar.
“Whoa,” I said as she lowered the tray onto our coffee table. “Someone’s been watching The Great British Bake Off.”
Nia laughed.
“You could say that,” she said. She nudged a plate toward me. “Try it.”
Holding her gaze, I used the teaspoon she provided to scoop a bite into my mouth. My eyes nearly rolled to the back of my head. The cake had all the richness of Nia’s double chocolate fudge surprise without the heaviness, and there was a familiar floral taste to it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was divine.
“Will you make this every time we fight?” I teased. I spooned a second bite into my mouth, then chased it with a sip of tea. The moment I did, Nia’s alteration became obvious—she’d added bergamot. Genius. “Because, Jesus Christ, Nia, this is delicious. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the double chocolate fudge surprise is good at baseline, but this is next level.”
Nia looked down at her lap, smiling bashfully.
“Better be,” she said. “Considering I’m getting professional training now.”
I placed my mug down on the coffee table so firmly that I had to check to make sure I hadn’t cracked the glass. Nia snorted, chagrined, as I composed myself.
“Professional training?” I sputtered.
“More of an informal apprenticeship,” she qualified. Then she launched into a description of her new job, at a bakery called Le Menagerie, a small family-owned patisserie run by the matriarch, a seventy-two-year-old woman named Annette. A month ago, Nia had been scoping out the area around Shae’s apartment in search of a place to mark papers when she had come across La Menagerie and struck up a conversation with Annette. They’d spent forty-five minutes discussing Annette’s foolproof way of making a pate à choux, and somehow that conversation had turned into an invitation for Nia to join her in her kitchen.