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I pull the refrigerator open. There’s nothing in it I want. There’s nothing in it at all, really, beyond the six blocks of cheese and the beer and the Tupperware none of us is going to open. I look at it anyway, because looking at the inside of a refrigerator is a thing you can do with your face when you’d rather not be doing anything with it, and then I close it.

“No,” I say.

“Interesting.”

“It’s not interesting.”

“You stepped in for someone you don’t know.” He says it lightly, turning the cup in his hand, but Cash’s lightest sentences are the ones with the most underneath them, and I’ve known him long enough to hear the floor under this one.

“He was hurting her arm.” Which is the whole of it, as far as I’m willing to look at it standing in my kitchen at eleven at night with Cash reading my face like a box score. The guy had her by the arm and she’d told him twice to let go and he hadn’t, and I’d crossed the room before I’d decided to cross the room, which is the part I notice now, after the fact, the way I notice most things about myself — a beat late, once it’s already done.

“Sure.” Cash tips the drink toward me. “And you specifically stepped in.”

“I was the closest person.”

“Wyatt was also close.” He lets that sit. “Wyatt was closer, actually. Wyatt was right there by the wall. Wyatt could’ve handled it without breaking stride and you know it, and you went anyway, fast, like the building was on fire.”

“Wyatt—” I stop.

The thing about Cash is that he’s not wrong, and the worse thing about Cash is that he knows he’s not wrong, and the worst thing of all is that he’ll wait — patient, grinning, drink in hand — for as long as it takes me to arrive at whatever he’s already figured out. He does this. He’s done it since freshman year. He throws something out sideways and then just stands there being right at me until I catch up.

“Why are you like this?” I ask.

Cash grins. It’s the grin he deploys when he has already won an argument and is just waiting for the other person to catch up. “Her name’s Sloane Beckett. She’s Wren’s roommate. Theater BFA, junior year, manages a bookshop on Main.” He pauses, with the timing of someone who has been saving the best part. “She works for your grandmother.”

I look at him.

“Has for two years,” Cash continues, with the pleasant air of someone reading a welcome packet. “Which means Margaret has known exactly who she is for two years. Which means every single time Margaret has mentioned⁠—”

“Don’t.”

“—the girl at the shop⁠—”

“Cash.”

“—the wonderful, talented, very impressive girl at the shop who is applying to Yale and who restocked the new arrivals wall and who Margaret would describe, if asked, as⁠—”

“I will actually end you.”

“—like a granddaughter to me, Beau, you’d love her, Beau⁠—”

“I’m going to the porch.”

“She’s been setting you up,” Cash calls after me, with the satisfied energy of someone completing a thesis statement, “for two years.”

I go to the porch.

It’s quieter out here. The party has thinned to the back end of itself — small groups on their way out, the sound of a house winding down filtering through the screen door. The maples are dark against the sky and the lamppost at the foot of the path is throwing its usual yellow circle on the pavement, and I stand at the railing and breathe out and try to think about something else.

I’m not thinking about something else.

I’m thinking about the way she said we broke up this afternoon, in front of the entire party, in the same tone she’d use to state the square root of sixteen. No heat, no damage in it. Just a fact, delivered to a person who had grabbed her arm and was apparently expecting a different reaction, which he did not get.

I’m thinking about you don’t get to tell me where we do this.

I’m thinking about her spine straightening — a small, involuntary thing, over in a second, but I was standing close enough to see it, and it was the most honest thing that happened in that whole exchange, this one physical tell in the middle of all that controlled composure, and I can’t entirely explain why I’m still thinking about it.

Margaret’s Sloane, I said.