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She pulls up her bank app and looks at it. There’s nothing there yet. She knows there’s nothing there yet. She looks at it anyway, and puts the phone face down on her leg, and then picks it up and looks at it again.

She checks it three times between that exit and the next one.

And I sit there with my hands on the wheel, and there’s a weird pressure in my chest. It’s been there since she said okay. It’s not pity. I don’t feel sorry for her. She just beat a bus company at its own fine print on the shoulder of a highway, and she doesn’t need anybody feeling sorry for her for anything.

It’s just good. That’s all. She has her ninety-four dollars back. She isn’t getting on a bus on the twenty-second. She isn’t staying at her grandma’s. She’s sitting in my passenger seat with numbers written on the back of her hand, checking a bank app that won’t change for a week.

I’m relieved.

That’s all it is. Relief is simple. You stop bracing for something, and you feel it go.

She puts on her playlist without asking. I let it play.

The gates are open when we get there. They aren’t usually. Somebody opened them for us. I take the drive slow up through the trees, past the fountain, the gravel loud under the tires, and when we come around the last curve and the house is there at the top of the hill with every window lit, I don’t go around the side.

I pull up out front right in front of the steps. Right where Martin parks when my father has people over and wants them to see the car.

She looks at me, and then I watch her glance at the front door, and then at the side drive I didn’t take, and then at me.

She gets her own bags out of the trunk. I don’t even try. I get mine.

The front door opens before we’re up the steps, and it’s my mom in a cream sweater with her hair down, holding the door with both hands.

“You made it,” she says, and kisses my cheek, and then she turns to Tessa and doesn’t kiss her, doesn’t hug her, doesn’t reach for her at all. She just smiles. “Tessa. I’m so glad you came.”

“Thank you for having me, Mrs. Waleska.”

“Come in, come in. It’s freezing.”

And my father is in the front hall.

He’s standing by the foot of the big staircase with a glass of something in his hand in a sweater over a collared shirt, the way he dresses on Saturdays when he isn’t going anywhere. He’s not doing anything. He’s just there like he happened to be standing in the hall when the door opened. I know him well enough to know that’s not true.

He looks at me first. One look. The split lip is gone, and the bruise on my cheek faded a week ago, but he checks for both of them anyway. Then he looks at her.

And I watch his eyes. It’s the same look. I know it. I sat in a car next to it when I was fourteen, with rain running down the windshield. It isn’t rude. My father is never rude. It’s just thorough. He looks at her the way he looks at a menu, or a contract, or a car somebody’s trying to sell him. Her coat. Her bag. Her shoes, the canvas ones, gone gray at the toes. Her face.

And I know he knows who she is. I see it land.

“This is Tessa,” my mother says. “Tessa, this is Rafferty’s father.”

“Mr. Waleska,” Tessa says. “Thank you for having me.”

She holds his eyes when she says it. She doesn’t look at the floor. She doesn’t look at his shirt.

My father smiles. It’s a good smile. He has a lot of them.

“Of course,” he says. “Welcome.”

“Let me show you your room,” my mom says, already moving toward the stairs, already with her hand out for Tessa’s duffel. Tessa doesn’t give it to her. My mother doesn’t push. She just goes up, and Tessa follows her.

I let her go. Every part of me wants to go up those stairs, too. Right behind her. Stand in the doorway of that room while my mom shows her where the towels are. I don’t. I stand in the front hall with my bag on my shoulder and let her go up with my mother, by herself.

Halfway up, Tessa looks back.

I’m already watching her.

Then she turns around and keeps going, and she’s gone around the landing.