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It comes out flat. Hard. An order.

She doesn’t flinch, but she doesn’t answer, either. She just looks at me with her chin up and waits.

I close my eyes.

That isn’t the question. That’s my father’s question. How much. What can you afford. Let me see the numbers. That’s a man deciding if somebody’s worth the trouble.

That isn’t what I want to know.

I open my eyes.

“Can you support yourself,” I say. Slower. “Somewhere else. If you were somewhere else. Not here. Could you do it on your own?”

Not can I support you. Not would you need me. I don’t want to know that. I want to know if she’s free.

She looks at me for a long time.

“I don’t know, Rafe,” she says.

I nod.

And she’s still looking at me, waiting for it to make sense, and it doesn’t, not to her. I can see it doesn’t. She’s sitting there in my T-shirt in the middle of her bed with her arms around her knees, trying to read me, the way she’s read me since she was fourteen, and for once, she can’t.

I get up.

“Where are you going?”

It comes out of her fast. Too fast.

“A walk,” I say. “I’ll be back. I just need to think.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just watches me pull on my shorts, my shoes, and the Sentinels shirt off the top of the pile, the first one I grab.

At the door, I stop.

I look back at her. Sitting on her bed with her knees up.

“I’m coming back, Tess,” I say.

She nods.

She doesn’t believe me. I can see that she doesn’t believe me, not all the way. Not the part of her from the sewing room.

I go anyway.

I go down the stairs and out onto the porch. Paige is out there on the swing with a book, and she looks up at me. At my face.

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me for a second, and then back at her book.

I walk.

Down Wren. Onto Main. Past the post office, closed. Past the diner, with the chocolate cake in the case. Past the vintage store. The streetlights coming on, one at a time, as it gets dark. It’s still hot. My shirt sticks to my back.

I walk all the way to campus across the quad. Past Corvin, which is dark, all of it, every window, the whole building empty for the summer. I stop in front of it and look up at the third floor. At the window that was mine. At the window three over, that was hers.

I take out my phone.

I don’t know why I call him. I just do.