On “Same Old Love,” a pop song gone gritty, Gomez seems to be shedding the skin of past relationships.

"Take away your things and go / You can’t take back what you said… / I'm not spending any time, wasting tonight on you."

Everyone on Earth has already concluded that the song is about Bieber. Gomez insists it’s about getting rid of everything toxic in her life. “You can try to work on things and fix them, but at the end of the day, you have to accept what is in front of you, and that's sometimes hard to do,” she says. “I think there are people who have been in my life who are seasonal. Even people who I have dated have been just that. It's part of growing up.”

Okay, now we are talking about Bieber…right?

“I think people really wanted to see me fail,” Gomez says, staring at me blankly, then sighing and looking away. This is not an easy subject for her. “I'd sit down in an interview and get the most harshly asked questions. Of course I got my heart broken. Of course I was pissed about it. There, everybody has it. I was so disappointed, because I never wanted my career to be a tabloid story.”

I ask her if she has any final words on the matter, so we can pack it away and move on — as she’s been begging to do since last November, when she released “The Heart Wants What It Wants,” her raw confessional about being imperfect in love. “Ha, I wish,” she laughs, shaking her head.

“At this point, there is no anger. There's closure in a very good, healthy way,” she says. “We’ve seen each other. I'm always encouraging and I am proud of his journey. I think people are making it out to be something that is more tragic than it really was. We grew up together. We both made mistakes. That's it.”