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He laughs — the real one. I hold onto the sound of it. I don’t think about Nationals or the test in my nightstand or the countdown running underneath everything. Not for these five minutes. I just let myself have this. Him, loose and easy, the girl who talks to my dad and my ex-boyfriend with equal fearlessness now sitting quietly on a step in Boston, absorbing every last detail of a house I already love.

“She’s going to worry about you now,” he says, after a while. “Fair warning. Once my mom decides she likes someone, she doesn’t do it halfway.”

“I don’t mind being worried about.”

“You say that now.” He glances down at me. “She’ll call. She’ll ask questions. She remembers everything anyone’s ever told her, forever, and she’ll bring it up months later like no time passed.”

“I look forward to it.” And I do — the specific novelty of being someone’s concern instead of someone managing everyone else’s, even hypothetically, even from a woman I’ve known for two hours.

Laney hugs me a beat longer than a polite goodbye requires, at the door, Theo already halfway to the truck with a container of something that smells incredible.

“Come back,” she says. Simple. Certain. Not a suggestion — an instruction, delivered the way she probably delivers most things that matter to her. “Anytime. You don’t need him to bring you. You can come see me on your own, if you ever need to.”

Something in that lands harder than I expect it to. “I will.”

“I mean it.” She squeezes my arm once, the specific gesture I’ve come to recognize as Theo’s inheritance too — brief, grounding, meant to communicate more than the words around it. “Whatever you’re carrying, honey. You don’t have to carry all of it alone. Not with us.”

I look at her. She holds my eyes, warm and steady and entirely unpushing. I understand that she’s not fishing. Not asking me to confirm anything. Just leaving the door open, the way good mothers do, in case I ever want to walk through it.

“Thank you,” I say. It comes out rougher than I mean it to.

“Drive safe,” she says, to both of us. I walk down to the truck with her words sitting somewhere warm and complicated in my chest. I don’t look back at the house. If I do, I think I might actually cry.

We’re twenty minutes into the drive home before either of us says much.

“She liked you,” Theo says, eyes on the road.

“I liked her more.” I look out the window at the highway opening up gold in the late afternoon light. “She’s remarkable, Theo. What she built, with what she had. What she built you out of.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Just reaches over and finds my hand on the console, the same way he did on the way there, and holds on the rest of the drive.

“You okay?” he asks, eventually. “You got quiet back there. Toward the end.”

I consider lying. It would be easy — I’ve gotten so good at it these past five weeks that the lie would probably slide out smoother than the truth ever could. But this is the drive home from meeting his mother, the woman who just told me I don’t have to carry things alone, and lying to him right now feels like it would cost more than it saves.

“Just thinking,” I say. Which is true, technically, even if it’s not the whole truth. “It was a lot. In a good way.”

“Yeah.” He squeezes my hand. “It was a lot for me too.”

I think about the whole afternoon — the house, the photos, the two mismatched chairs, the specific unguarded version of him I got to watch exist for a few hours. I think about Laney’s eyes on me over coffee, the you eating enough, honey that landed like a hand on my shoulder in the dark. I think about her at the door, telling me I didn’t have to carry it alone.

I think about the specific quality of being seen by someone equipped to actually see, and how different that felt from every other version of being looked at that I’ve experienced in the last five weeks — Kara’s concern at practice, Priya’s careful patience, Theo’s own restraint, all of them circling something they can sense but can’t name. Laney got closer than any of them, in one afternoon, over coffee, without even trying particularly hard. That should terrify me more than it does. Instead it just sits in my chest like a door someone left unlocked, waiting for me to decide whether I’m ready to walk through it.

I’ve been carrying it alone for five weeks now. Sitting in this truck, his hand in mine, the house on Birch Street already fading into the rearview, I feel the specific weight of that choice pressing harder than it has in days.

The exit for Haven comes up faster than I expect it to. Theo takes it without a word, the truck settling back into the familiar rhythm of streets I know better than almost any others, and somewhere underneath the quiet of the last twenty minutes of the drive I do the count I’ve been avoiding all day.

Nationals is eleven days away.

I don’t know if I’m going to make it that long. I’m starting to think I don’t want to.

Chapter 28

Margo

It’s the smell of the candle that does it.

June’s lit one of hers in the kitchen — something with cinnamon in it, autumn-scented despite it being nowhere near autumn, which is very on-brand for June and her stockpile of candles that has nothing to do with the season — and the second it hits me I have to grip the counter and breathe through my mouth until the wave passes.