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“For what trial, exactly.”

“The trial of public opinion, June. The court of the people.” Cash gestures grandly with his coffee mug. “Someone in this house is in love and nobody’s telling me who.”

I glance at Sloane, who is looking at her plate with an expression of profound, deliberate neutrality, and I understand — not for the first time, but more clearly than before — that Sloane already knows. Has known for a while, probably. And has been sitting on it, carefully, the way you sit on something that isn’t yours to say out loud.

“I think,” Sloane says, mild, still not looking up, “that people are allowed to have whatever laundry they want, Cash.”

“I never said they weren’t.”

“You strongly implied a conspiracy.”

“I’m a curious person. Curiosity isn’t a crime.”

The conversation moves on. Cash pivots to a story about his own laundry disasters, which somehow becomes a ten-minute monologue about a red sock and a ruined white jersey. I sit there with my coffee going cold. Thinking about lavender sweaters and green toothbrushes and Sloane’s careful neutrality and the fact that apparently my belongings have been living at Raven House long enough to become a topic of investigation.

I catch Beau’s eye across the table at one point. He gives me nothing. No smirk, no raised eyebrow, nothing that would tip Cash off. But there’s something steady in the look — something that says he’s known even longer than Sloane has, and has simply decided it’s not his business to make it anyone else’s.

We think we’re being careful. I’m starting to suspect careful and successful are not the same thing.

The sweater situation, for the record, started three weeks ago. It’s since expanded. A toothbrush — purple, apparently, per Wren’s testimony. A specific shampoo Theo now buys without being asked, because he noticed I liked the smell of his once and quietly switched. And, as of last Tuesday, my grandmother’s reading glasses, which I only wear at night and which now live permanently on his nightstand because I kept forgetting to take them home and he stopped mentioning it.

Neither of us has said anything about any of this. It just happened, the way a routine happens — one small unremarked thing at a time until you look up and realize you’ve built an entire second home inside someone else’s room.

I think about mentioning it to him. Making it official somehow. Naming the drawer that doesn’t technically exist yet but functionally does — one side of his dresser that’s become mine without either of us discussing it. Folded shirts. A spare pair of leggings. The emergency hair ties I keep meaning to consolidate. I decide not to, not yet. Some things are better left unnamed until they’re ready to be named on purpose. There’s a version of me that would have panicked about this a year ago — the specific horror of accumulating evidence, of things adding up into something that could be taken away if I looked at it too directly. That version of me is quieter now. Still there. Just quieter.

I fall asleep some nights running the tally in my head anyway — how many months, how many stolen hours, how much of my actual life has quietly relocated four minutes across town without a formal announcement — and I don’t reach any conclusion except that I don’t want to stop.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I notice my period’s late.

Not dramatically late. Four days, maybe five — hard to say exactly, because I've never been the type to track it with any real precision, just a loose sense of around now that's been reliable enough not to require more than that. I've never missed a pill. Not once, not even during Charleston, not even the week of the presentation when I barely slept. I set an alarm. I take it before I brush my teeth. It's the one piece of my life that runs on autopilot and has never once needed my attention.

I think about it for exactly as long as it takes to think of a reason, and the reason arrives fast and easy and completely plausible: stress. Nationals bearing down, conditioning ramping up, the specific physical toll of throwing myself into the air five days a week on top of everything else — the LSAT, the project, sneaking across town and back at midnight more nights than not. My body's allowed to be a few days off. Bodies do that. Cortisol does things to cycles; I read that somewhere, in some magazine in some waiting room, and it lodges in my head now with the specific convenience of a fact I want to be true.

I don't make an appointment. I don't buy a test. I add it to the list of things I'm handling by not looking at them too directly, right next to the corkboard I still haven't rearranged and the future I haven't let myself fully believe in yet, and I go back to my routine, because there's a semifinal tonight and a stunt sequence to land Sunday and a life that doesn't leave much room for anything else right now.

It'll sort itself out. It always has.

Saturday morning — game day, semifinal, one step closer to everything he’s been working toward — I text him before he’s even awake, because I know his routine now the way I know my own.

Foot position. Stick on the ice. You’ve got this.

His response comes twenty minutes later:

Theo

did you just quote my own advice back at me

I’m a quick study.

Theo

Extension. Full extension. You’ve got this too.

I smile at my phone for longer than the message probably warrants, sitting on the edge of my bed in the gray early light, Wren already up and moving around downstairs, June’s door still shut. This is ours now, apparently. A specific exchange of borrowed advice before every game, before every stunt sequence, the two of us handing each other’s own words back like small offerings.

I text one more thing before I put the phone down:

also I miss you and it’s been like fourteen hours