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semester kicked in. I felt old. Twenty-four and I felt old already, into my second year of grad school. Being a Resident Director was a lot like I imagined motherhood, managing too many details and far too many emotions from other people, and you’re expected to do it all with grace.
    A pang, five years old, resonated deep within. Mother.  
    “You are a mother and always will be,” my grief counselor had told me after the D&C. After I told her I’d planned to keep and raise the baby. At six weeks I’d been unsure. At nine I had panicked. And at ten weeks a calm had descended. I knew what I wanted to do, but I was grateful I also had choices.
    Losing the baby to miscarriage hadn’t been anywhere on my list of options. It took the choice away from me, and while there was a tiny layer of relief, there was so much sorrow. When the bleeding started and the cramping seized me, I realized qui c kly that no matter how much we think we’re in control, we aren’t.
    And that’s what I grieved most.
    A shadow had hung over me then. And now, here it was, re-emerging, hov er ing, blocking out the light. Liam .
    And he wanted to see me “in person.”
    Fuck you, Liam. Five years and one baby and you reject me?
    I’ll see you on my own terms.
    I logged in to my computer and began a search, finding what I needed within a minute.
    You show up unexpectedly at my job?
    One good turn deserves another.

Chapter Four
    Charlotte
    “You sure about this?” Maggie whispered furiously. For a woman with green hair and an attitude bigger than a Pats fan after a win, she seemed surprisingly meek right now.
    “Yes, I am. I’m just doing my job.” We were cruising down the Mass Pike toward downtown Boston. Random Acts of Crazy had a gig in a place that impressed me. A bar somewhere between a frat-boy pit and a condemned artist’s studio (with alcohol) . They were moving up in the world, it seemed. Even with my first paper of the semester staring me in the face like a showdown in a   Quentin Tarantino western, I was taking the time to deliver Liam’s goods to him.
    Quite publicly.
    Maggie looked nervously at the back seat. It was the twentieth time.  
    “Is she…okay back there?” Maggie asked, stretching out the word “she.”
    I smoothed my skirt over my legs and tried to formulate an answer. Instead, I just rubbed the shiny cloth of my new purple dress against my sweaty palm . Mod Cloth’s picking s were fabulous for my figure, with a small waist and a big chest and butt. Liam used to tell me I had the most luscious—
    No. No . I was n ot going to do this. I wasn’t about to let all those lovely memories of compliments sway me. Nor would I think about how he took his time inhaling deeply from my skin, or how he stroked me from toe to eyebrow, the lingering trail making me glow….
    Damn it.
    The dress tied in a red bow right behind my neck, and my hair flowed over it, curled with big rollers like the fifties pinup girls wore their hair. Mary Janes were my favorite shoes, and Maggie and I looked like some kind of Battle of the Decades reality show. She was more Marilyn Manson than Marilyn Monroe in her torn black leather and crazy hair.
    Our backseat companion wore a t-shirt someone in college had given me, one of the earlier prints for Random Acts of Crazy. “I hear they’re from your hometown,” Jared had said, beer goggles firmly on back then. He seemed to have thought that giving me a t-shirt would get him laid, but instead he got a sneer and twelve hours of sobbing from me.  
    He’d wandered out of my room and found another sophomore for a booty call. But the t-shirt remained.
    Now Esmerelda (Maggie named her) sat at a half-slump, firmly secured in her seatbelt, face in a permanent expression of surprise. We’d made her up for her first date, because Liam deserved only the best.
    Random Acts of Crazy t-shirt to show she was a groupie? Check .
    Enough make up to make her look like a Bourbon Street stripper? Check