My fondest hope was that somehow the situation would resolve itself before I had a chance to contact him.

Fifteen minutes late for my beading class, I tried to sneak in through the back door of A Hill of Beads, the shop owned by my best friend since high school, Ariana Volens. She and I had gone off to different colleges, on the west coast and in Boston, respectively, but reunited as soon as we moved back to town.

I breathed in the scent of Tibetan incense. Sweet jasmine this time, Ariana’s latest favorite for calming the mind. I tiptoed to a seat at the end of a long table where six other women had gathered, but I should have known Ariana wouldn’t let me get away with a quiet entrance.

She stopped mid-demonstration and swung her long, graceful arm in my direction. “And, finally, our eminent Dr. Sophie Knowles joins us,” Ariana said, a big smile on her face. She knew she’d pay later for this drama.

Ariana’s platinum blond hair was streaked with strands of red and blue, her eye-catching, patriotic design of choice for the summer. My hair, on the other hand, won compliments without my even trying. My short dark locks were graying in a design of their own choosing-a jagged stripe of white hair about an inch wide had grown out on one side of my head. I’d learned to simply say, “Thank you” when people complimented me on my artistry.

I’d been talked into beading by Ariana.

“You need a hobby,” she’d told me a month ago.

“I already have one.”

“Making up puzzles and brainteasers doesn’t count. It’s too much like math,” she’d said. “You might as well be talking square roots.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Ariana had rolled her eyes.

I agreed to try a hobby, partly to keep Ariana quiet. It came down to beading or handwriting analysis, Ariana’s new passion, and the latter seemed a bit too woo-woo for me. I couldn’t see myself making judgments about someone’s personality based on how she drew a capital S. I, myself, wrote it differently every time, no matter what Ariana claimed.