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I’m the one who leaves. That’s the system, and the system’s never once failed me — I’m gone first, every time, on my own terms, before the other person gets the chance to make it mean something. You don’t get left if you’re already at the door.

Margo beat me to the door.

And I mind. That’s the first thing wrong with this morning. I mind that she’s gone, then I mind that I mind, and it isn’t even seven.

Here’s the thing I keep circling. Up until last night, I wasn’t sure we even liked each other. We don’t talk, we argue — three months of it, her bright and barbed, me dry and meaner, the two of us going at it in kitchens and hallways like a couple that’s been married forty years and stayed together out of pure spite. Sloane referees. Beau finds it hilarious. I found it like a stone in my boot: the one person at every party I couldn’t size up and set down, because every single time I had her boxed, she said something that knocked the lid clean off. She’d float into a room doing the whole act — the smile, the management, the refilling of drinks nobody asked her to refill — and I’d get her sorted in under a minute, and then she’d catch me watching and not look away, and the sorting would come apart in my hands.

It was annoying. I told myself it was annoying for three months.

Two weeks ago she reorganized the Sailmaker spice rack at a pregame because it “offended” her, and I told her nobody on earth alphabetizes paprika, and she told me a man who tapes his stick the exact same way every single night doesn’t get to call anybody else particular. She was right. I hated that she was right. We argued about it for twenty minutes while Sloane and Beau watched like a show they’d already seen the ending of. That’s us. A running argument neither of us wins and neither of us walks away from — which should’ve been my first warning, because walking away is the one thing I’m genuinely reliable at.

So I don’t know what I expected, taking her upstairs at midnight with the countdown still going in the den. Something to get her out of my system, maybe. A grudge with the volume turned all the way up.

Not that. Never that.

I let myself think about it, because there’s no one here to catch me at it. The sound she made when I got my mouth on her — quiet at first, careful, like even coming apart she was curating the room, and then not careful at all. Her hand fisting in my hair. The way she went still and then went off, my name out of her like it surprised her, like she hadn’t planned on it and couldn’t get it back. And the beard — three, four days of it I keep meaning to deal with and don’t. The noise she made when I dragged it up the inside of her thigh, half a laugh and half a curse. Her hips chasing the scrape like the rough of my face was the best thing that had happened to her all year.

She liked that. I tucked it away somewhere I’ve got no business keeping notes, and I’m going to be thinking about it in the shower for a week.

But that’s not even the part that’s got me on my back at seven a.m. staring at the ceiling. The part I keep coming back to is the part where she stopped managing. Margo runs every room she walks into — I’ve watched her do it for three months, handling people before they’ve registered they’re being handled — and somewhere in the middle of it, with my hands on her, she just quit. Stopped curating. Went real. And I don’t think she meant to let me see it. I’m the last guy in that house she’d have picked to show it to. I’m the one who got it. I’ve turned that over a hundred times since the light came up, and I still can’t make it mean anything except the thing I don’t want it to mean.

Then, after — the part I’m not supposed to still be holding — she let me pull her in. Didn’t flip it around and start managing me, which I’d have bet real money she’d do, because that’s her whole engine, take care of the room so the room can’t take care of her. She didn’t. She let me hold her. Went quiet against my chest, and for about a minute neither of us was running anything, and it was the most peace I’ve had in a year.

Then she said one night, light and easy, in the voice she uses when she’s lying to a whole party at once.

And I said right. Because that’s the deal I’d have asked for if she hadn’t gotten there first. One night. No name in the morning. The clean thing.

It was the wildest I’ve ever had. That’s what won’t sort — the most unexpected and the best, same girl, same night. The cheerleader I wrote off in thirty seconds the first time I saw her turned out to be the one who put the floor through.

And here’s the cold part, right on schedule, showing up behind the heat like it’s on the payroll.

I can’t afford her.

Not just the money, though there’s that too — Margo’s the quiet kind of expensive, the kind that’s never once stood in a kitchen at midnight doing the numbers on whether the lights stay on. But the money isn’t even the part I can’t afford. It’s the distraction. I’ve got exactly one door out of the life I started in, and it’s the draft, and the draft does not care how good last night was. It cares about June. About camp, about whether I’m the name a scout circles or the one he forgets by the next rink. My mom’s been on her feet thirty years so I’d get a shot at the thing that finally gets her off them, and I am not going to be the moron who coughs that up because a blonde with a smart mouth got under the wall during a countdown.

So that’s where she goes. In the box, under the one heading I’ve kept clean my whole life: things I want and don’t get to have yet. Lid down.

I just need the box to hold.

It held all night for every single thing in my life except her. I’m not looking at that directly. Not this morning.

I open my eyes. Ceiling. Thin gray January light coming in sideways. Enough.

I get up, find my plaid bottoms on the floor where they ended up, pull them on. Drag a hand down the beard on reflex — it rasps under my palm and just like that I’m back on the inside of her thigh, so I take my hand off my own face like it bit me. Get it together, Mercer.

I open the top drawer for a clean shirt.

Her underwear’s in it. Black. Small. Folded once, neat, which means she did it on purpose — or means she shoved it in there last night while I wasn’t paying attention to anything in the room but her. I stand there longer than a grown man should stand looking at a scrap of fabric in a drawer, and I feel my whole chest do something complicated and warm and extremely unhelpful about the fact that a piece of Margo is now living in my dresser. Then I shut the drawer. I don’t take it out. I don’t throw it out. Shutting the drawer on it is the most honest thing I manage all morning. I pull the shirt over my head and go down for coffee before I do something stupid, like open it again.

My phone buzzes on the desk on my way past.

I know before I turn it over, the way you know weather. Dad. A photo. Logan in full gear under arena lights somewhere in a state I don’t live in, stick up, grinning at whoever’s holding the camera — and the thing about the photo is always the angle. Low. Close. Stands-level. Lucas Mercer was never once in the stands for a single game I played, and he sends me a picture from the stands of my half-brother’s game like it’s a gift, like we do this, like there’s a version of us that does this.

The kid’s nine. None of it’s his fault. I know that the way I know all the facts I keep behind the wall.

I put the phone face-down and leave it on the desk. He can wait. He’s good at waiting — he had a whole second family doing it for years.

There. That’s all I’ve got for that this morning. The wall goes back up where he’s concerned, and it stays up, and I go find coffee.