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“That’s what makes it worse,” he says.

Yes. Exactly that. The knife that knows.

I tip my head back against his shoulder. The water is starting to cool. The steam is thinning. Neither of us moves.

“Thank you for coming in,” I say. Quiet. Meaning it.

His arms tighten around me, once. That’s his answer.

He steps out first.

I hear the shower door, the drip of him, the soft sounds of towel on skin. A minute later the door opens — a crack, no further — and his arm comes through with my pajamas folded clean, the ones I’d left on top of my bag. He found them. Of course he found them.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Take your time,” he says. The door closes.

I stand under the cooling water for another minute. Just breathing. Then I turn it off and I stand in the quiet of the steamed-up bathroom in my parents’ house and I look at myself in the mirror, which has fogged over entirely, which means I don’t have to.

When I come out he’s already in bed.

Changed into his plaid pajama bottoms and nothing else, the way he always sleeps, and he’s sitting up against the headboard with his phone in his hand and the lamp on the nightstand throwing a low warm light across the room. He looks up when I come out. He doesn’t say anything about my face, which I know is a disaster. He just looks at me the way he always looks at me when the performance is off — the open, warm, taking-stock look — and then he puts his phone face-down and opens his arm.

I cross the room and slide in beside him and curl myself into his side, and his arm comes down around me, and I fit against him the way I always fit, which is completely, the specific geometry of a body that’s learned another body over months of being close to it. His chest under my cheek. His heartbeat. The room quiet around us.

We’ve done this. The after-part. Hotel rooms, his room, a dozen instances of the specific warmth of him after the other thing. But this is different from all of them. There’s no performance to take down, no terms to check, no morning we’re not acknowledging. There’s just the pink room and the dunes and the Atlantic three hundred yards away and the lamp and him.

“Tell me something,” he says. Low. Not pushing. Leaving it open.

I look at the ceiling of the room I grew up in. The crown molding. The particular white of it. The ghost of a glow-in-the-dark star I put up at age nine and could never fully scrape off.

“Being the good one is exhausting,” I say. “I’ve never said that out loud.”

He doesn’t react. He just listens, the way he listens to things that matter.

“Maddison has always been — she’s always been the one who doesn’t think before she does things. She breaks rules. She says what she thinks. She takes up the space she wants and nobody tells her not to.” I pause. “When we were young, my parents were always managing her. Worrying about her. Redirecting her. She took so much of their attention. And I figured out — I don’t even know when I figured it out — that if I was easy, if I never gave them a reason to worry, if I did everything exactly right, then I got to be the one they didn’t have to think about. And that felt like —” I stop. Try to find the word. “Safe. It felt safe. Like if I could just keep being perfect, I’d never have to worry about whether they still wanted me around.”

The ceiling. The ghost star.

“The specifics of it are embarrassing.” I keep my voice level. “I was the one who never missed curfew. Never failed a test. Never brought home a boy they’d have to ask about. I started planning my meals at fourteen because I liked the feeling of controlling something. I color-coded my school planner in eighth grade. I was homecoming queen and I cried the night before because I was worried I’d lose and someone would see that I wanted it.” A breath. “Meanwhile Maddison told a teacher to his face that he was being unfair, and my parents had a meeting with the principal, and my mother was mortified but also — she also kind of laughed about it. Later. With her friends. Oh, that Maddison.” I feel the old tightness in my chest. “Nobody ever laughed like that about me. Because I never gave them a story. I was just — fine. Always fine. Exactly as expected.”

Theo’s arm tightens slightly around me. He’s listening with all of him. I can feel it.

“There’s something else.” A pause. I say it the way I say everything I’ve worked on — directly, with the steadiness of someone who has said this in a therapist’s office enough times that the words no longer ambush her. “I had an eating disorder. In high school. I’ve been in recovery for a few years. I’m okay. I want you to know that first.” I stop. “But it happened, and it’s part of the same thing I’ve been describing.”

Theo is very still.

“It started around fourteen. The logic was so neat, looking back — that’s the part that still makes me sad. Maddison was always smaller than me. Not by much. We’re identical, so it was never dramatic. But she has a different build. And I was the cheerleader. I’ve always been strong — my body is a tool I’ve spent years training, and I’m proud of what it can do — but strong didn’t look the same to me at fourteen as it does now.” I pause. “Which sounds so small, when I say it out loud.”

“It doesn’t sound small,” he says.

“The real thing was the control. The food was the one thing I could manage when everything else in my family was about managing Maddison and hoping she didn’t need too much that week.” I breathe. “I needed things. I had needs like any person has needs. I just couldn’t afford to show them. So I found something I could control and I controlled it, and it felt like having power in a house where I’d given all mine away trying to be easy.” A beat. “My parents don’t know. They noticed I was thin. They asked if I was eating enough. I said yes, I’m fine, and they believed me. Because I was the one who was always fine.”

I stop. The ceiling. The ghost star on it.

“I’m okay now,” I say again. “I’ve done the work. I just thought you should know — since you know the other things.”

Theo doesn’t say anything for a moment. He doesn’t move, doesn’t offer comfort too fast. He holds me, steady and unhurried, and I feel him absorb it the way he absorbs everything that matters.