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“Okay. Okay. We’re going.”

“Beau.” My mother holds on.

“Love you. We’re going.”

She lets go of one hand. Keeps the other. Looks at Sloane like she’s about to say something big, and then doesn’t, because my mother knows when something’s too big for a doorway.

“You’re a good one,” is all she says.

Something moves across Sloane’s face. I don’t get to read it. I’m already steering her toward the truck, and anyway, I’ve learned not to ask about the things that cross Sloane’s face in front of other people. She doesn’t like being asked in front of people. She doesn’t much like being asked, period. I’m getting better at the difference between what she’ll tell me and what I have to wait for.

In the rearview, all four of them are on the front step, waving, my mother with both arms, Liv doing something with her phone, my father with one hand up like he’s stopping traffic. The house gets small behind us. Sloane watches it go in the side mirror until the trees take it.

“They’re going to be impossible now,” I tell her. “You know that. My mom’s going to text you recipes. Unprompted.”

“Good,” Sloane says, to the mirror. “I’ll learn to cook.”

“You will not.”

“I will not,” she agrees, and settles back, and I point the truck at home.

We’re twenty minutes onto the Merritt before either of us says anything that counts, and it’s me who breaks first.

“That went well.”

“Your family is a lot.” Sloane’s watching the trees go by her window. “In the good way. I want to be clear it’s the good way.”

“They loved you.”

“They have generous standards.”

“They really don’t.” I check my mirror, change lanes. “My dad doesn’t like anybody. Took him a year to like my last girlfriend, which was in high school, and he never got past tolerate. He liked you in about four minutes. I timed it.”

She makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, and I take the win.

I’m running the weekend back while I drive, and every frame of it’s good. The dinner where my dad asked her about the Yale thing like it mattered, because it did. My mother teaching her the trick with the lefse that nobody outside the family knows. The twins deciding inside one afternoon that she was theirs. And last night, the part I keep not letting myself sit in because I’ll get stupid about it.

I came up here braced for it to go sideways. I came up braced to manage it. To translate Sloane to my family and my family to Sloane, to run the room the way I run a room. I didn’t have to run anything. She walked in and the room ran toward her. I just got to watch.

I don’t put anything in the GPS. I know this drive in my hands. Merritt to 91, 91 to the Pike, the Pike to the road that turns into Haven. The signs come up green and go by fast, and I don’t fight the small print on them at seventy because I don’t have to; I know every exit by the shape of the ramp and the feel of the curve. I’ve driven home from this house my whole life. Some things you don’t read. You just know where they sit.

The sun’s behind us. The road ahead’s gone long and gold, and Sloane’s got her boots up on my dash, which she’d never do if she were performing for anybody. This is the version of her nobody else gets. The one with her guard somewhere in the back seat.

“Track six,” she says, when the song changes. “Britta’s got range. This is a breakup song.”

“We’re not breaking up.”

“I’m aware. I’m just saying your sister’s an optimist about my driving companion.” She turns the volume down a notch. “She’s not wrong about the fog, though. You do go quiet.”

“I think about stuff.”

“I know you do.” She says it like it’s a thing she likes about me, which still catches me sideways every time, because for a long time being the guy who thinks about stuff was the thing I worked hardest to hide. “You’re allowed.”

We’re past Hartford when she says it.

“Can I tell you something?” Her voice has gone flat and level, the way it goes right before she says a true thing. I’ve learned that one too.

“Yeah.” I keep my eyes on the road. “Course.”