Chapter 64

April tutted softly, gnawing on the inside of her lip. Zara had barely been gone a couple of days and she already missed her salty, sassy friend. April had other friends. She had industry friends from across the country and overseas. She had friends that were still living in the city, too. None of them were...

Other than Zara, her friends from high school were settled. Two of them were married already, which until now she’d kind of thought was insane except she hadn’t ever felt like she did about Ollie before. Another one was in a long-term relationship and had two kids but no ring, which had kind of made her jaded and not very fun to talk to. And then there was Jane.

Jane was ... usually not the best person to talk to about relationship stuff.

But Zara was maybe a little too close to things that were on April’s mind, and April didn’t want to talk to the others about this stuff, and she definitely couldn’t talk to her parents about it.

Sighing, she slipped out of the house and into her car, needing some privacy. Up until dating Ollie, she’d never had a problem with living at home in between flying out to do recording sessions in LA or Houston or Montreal. Now she felt like she couldn’t do anything she wanted when she wanted. Like having her boyfriend over...

The phone rang a couple of times before Jane picked it up.

“Autism hotline, this is your local Autist. What can I overexplain for you today?”

April snorted, smirking a little. “Hey, Jane,” she said. Her friend had leaned into comedy to compensate for what she had thought of as crippling social issues. April hadn’t ever thought of her that way, and as soon as Zara had been made aware of what Jane was going through, she’d backed off and become her biggest defender. The issue at the time had been that Jane was a very high-functioning person with autism, but it impacted her affect pretty badly, so ‘learning comedy’ had been a pretty excruciating few years of bad puns and jokes delivered so flat that you had to have her repeat herself to figure out she was making a joke.

Then she’d discovered self-deprecating humour in the eleventh grade, and she’d actually gotten funny, though April had always worried Jane would go too far putting herself down.

“Oh no,” Jane said, likely hearing the tone in April’s voice. “What happened?”

“I need a sounding board on something,” April said. “Someone who isn’t going to judge me for ... choices. And stuff.”

“Then you called the right person,” Jane said. “Hold on, let me close my office door.”

The fact that Jane had graduated Magna Cum Laude from Colombia and been headhunted out of her Master’s program to work for a think tank dealing with political stuff still sort of blew April’s mind.