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“We host,” I say.

Cash points at me like I've said the thing he's been waiting on. “Yes. There it is. Beau's in.”

“I’m not doing it if it's the four of us standing around our own living room pretending it's a party,” Theo says.

“Nobody's standing around. It's our house. You'll have a wall to hold up and everything.”

“Cash'll end up in a corner.”

“I stand near a corner,” Cash says. “With purpose. Different thing.”

Wyatt says, “Pasta's up in twelve minutes.”

So that's settled.

Mormor calls at six.

She does this — times the calls to catch me between practice and dinner, because she has my schedule memorized better than I do, which I’ve stopped pointing out because it only makes her smile in a way that means she knows exactly what she’s doing.

“How’s the shoulder?” she says.

My hand finds the back of my neck. “What shoulder?”

“Beau.”

“It’s fine.”

“Your mother called me.”

“My mother worries.”

“Your mother is very smart, and you should listen to her.”

“I listen to her.”

“You listen to her and then you come back to campus and skate on a shoulder that shouldn’t be skating and call it fine.”

The thing about Margaret Sorensen is that she has eighty-two years of practice at being right, and she has never once had the grace to pretend otherwise. She is four-foot-eleven, she has silver hair that she wears in the same bun she’s worn since before my mother was born, she has run the same bookshop for forty years, and she has approximately zero patience for bullshit from people she loves, which includes me.

I love her in a way that I can’t really explain to people who haven’t met her.

“The shoulder’s fine,” I say. “Tell me about the shop.”

A beat. She lets me redirect. She’s going to come back to the shoulder. We both know this.

“Busy,” she says. “End of summer is always busy. Students coming back.” A pause, and I can picture her — behind the counter, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, the shop light warm, that old brass bell over the door. “Sloane’s been wonderful this summer. She kept the whole place running while I was in Vermont.”

I grab a water bottle. “Yeah?”

“She redid the entire new arrivals wall. I told her she could, and she did it overnight on a Tuesday like it was nothing. Came in Wednesday morning and I nearly cried.”

I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say — Mormor talks about Sloane the same way she talks about the first editions she got last spring, with a quality of satisfaction that means this is mine and I know what it’s worth. She’s been doing this since I got back.

“She’s applying for the Yale MFA,” Mormor says.

“You mentioned.”

“In February. The audition.”