"I saw your screen," I say, keeping my voice low. Ivy's still on the couch.
The smile holds but something shifts behind it. "Oh, that." She waves a hand, easy and bright, the way she gets when she wants a conversation to bounce off her. "I was just browsing. Keeping an eye on the market. It's nothing."
"Bozeman."
"Beck—"
"You're looking at apartments in Bozeman," I say, and my voice comes out flat in the way it does when I'm trying to keep it level and failing, and I know it, and I can't stop it. "That's not nothing. That's not staying."
She closes the laptop the rest of the way and turns to face me. "It's just keeping options open," she says, like she's explaining something obvious to someone who is overreacting. "Everyone does that."
"I don't."
"That's because you bought a house."
"Gemma."
"I'm not—" She stops. Starts again, brighter, which is the tell. The brightness is always the tell. "It was just idle browsing. I wasn't seriously looking, I was just curious what the market looks like, it doesn't mean anything."
"Planning your exit," I say, and the words land harder than I mean them to, harder than I wanted them to, and I watch her face change.
"Excuse me?"
"That's what this is. You're already?—"
"Don't." Her voice goes quiet and sharp at the same time. "Don't tell me what I'm doing."
"Then explain it to me."
"I already did." She's very still, the way she gets when she's not being bright anymore, when the shield is up and functional."I said it was nothing. You decided it was an exit plan. That's you deciding I'm leaving, Beck, before I've given you any reason to think that."
"I saw the screen."
"You saw a browser tab." She stands, and the chair scrapes on the tile, and Ivy shifts on the couch without waking. We both glance at her and then back at each other, and the argument goes quieter. Harder for it. "You are doing the thing where you decide how the story ends before it gets there. And then you're surprised when it ends that way."
That lands. I feel it in my sternum.
"I'm not — " I stop. Start over. "After everything—" Another stop. The words won't line up. They're all too large and I'm standing in my own kitchen and I'm thirty-six years old and apparently I can't say a simple true thing without choking on it.
Gemma watches me. Waiting.
"You're right," I say finally.
She blinks.
"I saw the screen and I reacted. I didn't—" I press my fingers to my eyes and breathe out. "I wasn't trying to end the story. I was scared of what ending it was telling."
The room is quiet enough to hear the hum of the refrigerator, the faint mountain wind off the back of the house.
"What story?" she asks, and her voice has gone softer now, the edge gone out of it.
"That I made you want to go." The words come out rough. "Not that you'd leave. That I'd — that I'd do whatever I do, and you'd find yourself looking up apartments because staying stopped being worth it. Because that's—" I stop. Start again. "That's the version I know."
Gemma is quiet for a moment. A long one. Ivy breathes on the couch. Outside, a jay calls once, sharp and gone.
"Beck," she says.
"I know. It's not fair. I'm putting?—"
