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“I don’t know what you want me to do with that.”

“Nothing. I’m not here to do the thing scorned exes do.” She wanders down the poetry shelf, trailing a finger along the spines, and I notice she handles them gently, which I didn’t expect and don’t want to have noticed. “You want to know what I thought, watching it happen? I thought, that one’s going to run. I’d have put my rent on it.” She turns and looks at me, and it isn’t cruel, which is the part I’m not braced for. “A girl gets looked at like that and goes still in the face instead of soft — she’s already counting the exits. I know the look. I’ve worn it in a mirror.”

The pencil stops. I make it start again. “You don’t know me.”

“No. But I know the thing that’s on your face right now.” She lifts one shoulder. “Nobody gets loved that wide open and survives it if they’re built to bolt. It’s too much air. You go find a wall to put at your back, just so something’s solid behind you. I used to think I lost him to someone prettier. Then I watched him look at you and worked out I never had him to lose — he was always going to do that at somebody. Turned out to be you.”

“You came into a bookshop on a Saturday to tell me he loved me.” I set the pencil down on the counter. “That’s a strange errand.”

“I came to see whether you knew what you were holding.” She meets it without a flinch. “And you’ve got the face of a girl who’s decided she doesn’t. I wore that face for two years and I called it being realistic.”

“And what is it, really.”

“The word the scared ones use for quitting before the part where it could hurt.” Another shrug, and there’s the old hurt in it now, just a flicker, quickly folded away. “I should know. I held the title.”

“Why are you being kind to me?” It’s out before I can stop it, which is rare, and I hear the flat vowel try to climb into the word and I catch it right at the line.

“I’m not being kind. Kind would be telling you you dodged something.” She gathers her two books against her chest. “You didn’t dodge it. You walked out of it on your own two feet, which is a different thing entirely, and you’re the only one in this whole story who can’t tell the two apart.”

I ring her up. My hands are steady. I’m very good at steady hands while the floor does something underneath them.

“He benched himself, by the way.” She slides her card over. “That’s the part nobody at the rink can square. Boy fights for every loose puck in the building, and he just went quiet and let you walk. So I figured it had to be you who got out first. Nothing else explains a guy like that going dark.” She takes the bag and pauses at the door, and for one second Bella, who I have spent four months filing under enemy, looks at me like the only other person in town reading off the same page I am. “For what it’s worth, I hope I called it wrong. The running. He’s an idiot. But he’s the good kind, and somebody ought to get to keep him.” The bell does its half-step flat behind her, and she’s gone into the snow.

I stand at the counter with the drawer open and finally do the thing I have spent all week refusing to do, which is put the two of them down side-by-side. Evan says Beau would never keep a girl like me. Bella says I’d never let myself be kept. They despise me for opposite reasons and they’ve built me opposite cages, and the trouble with two opposite cages is that they cannot both be the true one. There is exactly one version of this where they are both wrong, and I can see it from here, with a stranger’s change going warm in my hand, clear as a lit exit sign over the door: it’s the one where I stop walking toward the door.

I close the drawer. I’m not ready for that version. I just know now that it’s there, which is worse, because you cannot un-see a door once somebody’s shown you it was unlocked the whole time.

Margo finds me upstairs the next afternoon. She has a key, because the lines between the Sailmaker and the rest of my life stopped being lines somewhere this fall and nobody bothered to redraw them.

“You’re not answering your phone.” She drops onto the end of the bed, coat still on, cheerleader posture even in a crisis. “Which, fine, finals, whatever, but Sloane.” She stops. She’s bad at the part where you slow down to hand a person something gently; Margo takes the whole world at a sprint. “Okay. I didn’t know if you already knew. I didn’t know if I was even supposed to be the one to⁠—”

“Margo.”

“Wren told me. She got it from Cash, so it’s real, it’s not Sailmaker telephone.” She rips it off like tape. “Beau had surgery.”

The radiator ticks. I set down the mug I’d been holding, carefully, on the windowsill.

“His shoulder. The one he hurt against Kingsbury — it was way worse than they put out. A tear, the kind you need a knife for. He’s done for the season, and they’re saying the draft’s an actual question mark now, not a PR question mark, a real one. It was three days ago.” Her hand finds my knee. “I didn’t know if you’d want to know. I decided you’d rather.”

Three days ago. While I was pricing a dead man’s Penguin Classics and feeling exactly nothing about Yale, two miles from here they were opening Beau’s shoulder with a knife and setting it back in an order that would hold.

“How does Wren even have Cash’s—” I start, and don’t finish, because it doesn’t matter, except it does, it’s the whole thing.

“They’ve been—” Margo waves a hand. “Orbiting. Wren keeps turning up on the Raven House porch and calling it film review. It’s a whole situation.” She drags herself back on track. “The point is there used to be two groups, and now there’s nine people who all know each other’s bad news. That’s how it got to me before it got to you. You’re in the middle of it whether you came back or not, Sloane.”

“Who’s with him?” I don’t decide to ask it. It’s just out.

“Everybody, that’s the thing.” Her voice goes careful. “His sisters came up from Greenwich. His mom’s here. The house rotates through — Wren says Cash slept in the chair the first night and won’t admit it.” She watches my face. “He’s not alone. He’s got a full room. That’s just not the same as the right person being in it.”

I look at the window, where it’s finally snowing in earnest, fat and slow through the streetlight. The Yale email is gone from my phone and its absence still doesn’t hurt, and that is the cleanest proof I own of anything: I gave up the wrong thing to keep safe. I spent twelve days congratulating myself for getting out of his way so his bright untaxed life could stay bright — and the boards found his shoulder anyway, in a corner, with my name presumably nowhere near his head, and you cannot stand far enough back from a person to keep the world from reaching them. The leaving bought him nothing. It only cost me the chair I’d have had a right to in that waiting room if I’d stayed.

“Say a word.” Margo doesn’t take her hand back. “You’ve got the face.”

“I’m glad you told me.” My sentences go clean and correct and parade-ground, the way they do when I’m performing fine, and I can hear myself doing it and I cannot stop. “Thank you. That was kind of you.”

“That is the least fine a human being has ever sounded.” She squeezes once. “You don’t have to do the voice. Not with me. I sat through the Yale thing and you did the voice then too, and I let it go, but I am not letting this one go.”

“I don’t get to go.” It comes out without the contraction, the one dropped word the only crack in the whole wall. I do not get to go. “I’m the one who left, Margo. You don’t get to leave a person and then turn up in his waiting room like the chair has your name on it.”