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“Tess needs the second room for her work. The other one didn’t have a window.”

He looks at me for a second. Then he puts his glasses back on.

“Then that makes sense,” he says. “Did you read the lease?”

“Every page. Both of us.”

He nods, slowly. “When do you leave?”

“The twenty-third.”

He doesn’t tell me that’s too late. He doesn’t tell me it should be earlier, to get settled before rookie camp. He doesn’t tell me anything. He just nods and writes it down on the pad on his desk, like it’s something he wants to remember.

At the door, when I’m leaving with the box under my arm, he says, “Rafferty.”

I turn around.

He opens his mouth. Closes it. Something goes across his face that I’ve never seen there before, and I understand, with a feeling that he’s trying to say something and he doesn’t know how. That he’s never known how. I got that from him along with my jaw and my hands and my temper.

“I’m so proud of you, son,” he says, and stops.

I nod and leave.

Tessa packs a little every night over a week. She does it like every single thing is something.

I know about the duffel last December. Four minutes, she told me once, everything she owned. I know about the trash bags on her grandma’s porch when she was fourteen. I know there was a backpack with a strap she used to wind around her wrist so nobody could take it while she slept. She told me all of it in pieces at night in the dark when we’d lay by each other and talk for hours.

I watch her pack and I don’t help because she doesn’t want help with this. I’ve learned the difference.

She wraps the little ceramic frog in one of my T-shirts and puts it in the box marked DESK. She wraps the tape gun, the one I bought her birthday and told her cost twelve dollars. It cost forty. She still doesn’t know. She wraps my dad’s book, the one he gave her at Christmas, with her pencil marks all through his. The cream sweater, folded in tissue paper like it’s something precious. The green dress. The flannel pajamas with the stars on them. Her notebooks, three of them, September to now, in a rubber band. The watch stays on her wrist. It doesn’t come off. I’ve never seen her take it off once.

One night, she opens the cover of the first notebook and a yellow sticky note falls out into her lap. I can’t see what it says from the bed. She picks it up and looks at it for a long time. I watch her face, and that’s how I know it’s big.

Then she crumples it up and drops it in the trash can by the desk and keeps packing.

I don’t ask.

I want to. I lie there wanting to. But it’s hers, whatever it was. She’ll tell me or she won’t. I’ve had enough people in my life who thought they were owed every piece of me, and I’m not going to be that for her. I’m just going to be here if she wants to talk.

Everybody comes on the last Saturday.

Kylie first. She’s officially back from her parents’ a week early just for this. She runs up the stairs and into Tessa’s room and sees the boxes and bursts into tears before she says a word.

“You’re not allowed to be cool about this,” she says into Tessa’s shoulder. “I won’t allow it.”

“I’m not being cool.”

“You’re being so cool, Tessa.”

Nash and Barnes show up in somebody’s borrowed pickup with Koda in the bed of it, sitting on a cooler, for reasons I don’t know. Barnes picks up the box marked INVENTORY — HEAVY and immediately puts it back down.

“What’s in here? Rocks?”

“Boots,” Tessa says. “Forty pairs.”

“Why are there forty pairs of boots?”

“Because people want boots.”