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I should like it. I’ve spent my whole life liking it — the alone, the quiet, the room with no one in it to read. And I do, a little. But I also lie in his bed in his shirt with the house creaking around me and his side of the mattress cold, and I notice I’m listening for the truck, for the door, for the noise of him coming home, and the noticing is its own alarm, because listening for someone is a thing I swore I’d never do again after I learned, at nine, what it does to you to listen for footsteps that don’t come.

He texts me before the game. In Burlington. Cash already got us kicked out of one diner. Wish you were here. And then, a minute later, the thing that undoes me, the thing he had to work to type because typing costs him: Watch the stream if you want. I’ll find the camera after I score. That one’s yours.

I watch the stream. Of course I watch the stream.

He scores in the second period — a hard wrist shot, top corner, the Vermont crowd groaning — and he doesn’t do the big celebration, he never does, but he wheels out of the slot and looks, for half a second, straight up into the nearest camera, and I’m sitting alone in his bed four hours away with my hand pressed over my mouth like an idiot, because he found the camera, because that one was mine, because he told me he would and he did.

I don’t text him back right away. I don’t know what to say that isn’t I think I’m in trouble.

I text:

Adequate goal.

He texts back, after the game:

Coming home tomorrow night. Don’t get used to the whole bed.

I have, though. That’s the problem. I’ve gotten used to the whole everything.

That night I go through the house in the dark, alone, the way I used to go through the Sailmaker when the others were out — except this isn’t my house, and the going-through isn’t the old habit of cataloging exits and checking locks. It’s something worse. It’s me touching the evidence of a life I’ve been let into. Wyatt’s ancient cap on the hook. Cash’s ridiculous protein tubs lined up like trophies. The egg situation, ongoing, Theo’s territory clearly marked. The framed jersey in the hall, Beau’s number from some junior tournament, his father’s shadow hanging behind it the way Margaret says it always has. And on the fridge, held with a magnet shaped like a puck, a grocery list in Beau’s handwriting — careful, deliberate, the letters formed slow and a little wrong in places, the handwriting of a man for whom writing is work — and at the bottom, after the milk and the eggs and the protein, in the same careful hand: the chai she likes. cinnamon. ask Mormor which.

I stand in the dark kitchen and look at that line for a long time.

He wrote it on a list he didn’t know I’d see. The chai she likes. Not for an audience. Not for the plan. Just a man remembering to buy the thing that makes a hard morning easier for the girl who’s moved into his life, written in the handwriting that costs him to produce, and I think — standing alone in his kitchen at midnight in his shirt — that I have spent my whole life being someone people forgot to keep, and I have somehow ended up on a grocery list in a hockey house in western Massachusetts, remembered, in pen.

I take a picture of it. I don’t know why. I just want it to exist somewhere besides the fridge.

Then I go up to his bed and lie in his cold sheets and listen for a truck that isn’t coming until tomorrow, and I let myself miss him, which is a thing I haven’t let myself do about another human being since I was nine years old waiting on footsteps in a different kitchen, and the missing doesn’t feel like the danger I always thought it would.

It feels like being a person.

The truth is the campus had started catching on before the fire, before the drawer, before any of it — at Halloween.

That was weeks ago now, the end of October, the last big party before the season swallowed the team whole. Margo made me go. Margo made me into something, actually — poured me into a costume that was technically Sandy from Grease but mostly an excuse for the leather pants, did my eyes in a way that made me look like a person who wasn’t afraid of anything, and sent me out the door of the still-standing Sailmaker with a you can thank me later. Beau went as — and I will treasure this until I die — a hockey player. Just himself. A jersey and a black eye drawn on with Cash’s eyeliner and the words it’s a costume, I’m a guy who plays hockey delivered with total sincerity to anyone who asked, which was the funniest commitment to a bit I’d ever seen and which made me laugh, the real one, in front of two hundred people.

We weren’t living together yet. We weren’t even — I hadn’t let myself call it anything yet. But we walked in together and we didn’t leave each other’s orbit all night, and at some point he had his hand at the small of my back in the leather pants and I had a hand fisted in his jersey and we were dancing in a crush of vampires and sexy nurses and one guy dressed inexplicably as a traffic cone, and I caught Vivienne watching us from across the room with an expression like she’d bitten down on foil, and I caught the rest of the room watching too, and I understood, somewhere under the noise and the eyeliner, that this had stopped being a performance I could see the edges of.

That’s the night people decided. I know it now, looking back. Halloween was when Sorensen and the theater girl stopped being a rumor people were testing and became a thing people just knew. So when the fire happened weeks later and the news went around that I’d moved into the Raven House, nobody was surprised. They’d watched the whole thing coming since a girl in leather pants laughed at a man whose costume was himself.

The campus figures it out, the rest of the way, the way campuses do.

It travels — Sorensen’s living with the theater girl, the fire, the moving in, the walking-home, the way we’re never not within reach of each other now — and by the second week it’s just a known fact, the kind of thing people have stopped finding interesting because it’s stopped looking like a story and started looking like a couple.

I see the girls between classes, the three of us crammed into a corner of the campus center, June with a hot chocolate and Margo with the gleam she gets.

“So,” Margo says. “You’re living there.”

“My house caught fire, Margo. I’m aware you were present.”

“You’re living there, in his room, in his bed, and don’t insult me by pretending there’s a cot involved, because Cash tells Wren everything and Wren tells me everything and there is no cot.” She points a fry at me. “I’m not even going to ask if it’s still fake. I watched him kiss your knuckles in a truck on the worst morning of your life when he thought no one was looking. I have my answer.”

“It’s—” I start, the old reflex, the deflection.

“It’s real,” June says quietly, into her hot chocolate, with the soft certainty she gets about things she’s sure of. “It’s okay that it’s real, Sloane. You’re allowed.”

And I look at the two of them, my friends, the people I’d die for, and I think about lying — I’m good at lying, I could deflect this into next week — and then I think about Beau finding the camera in Burlington, and the cleared drawer, and I’d rather be cold with you than warm without you, and I’m so tired of pretending the thing I’m doing isn’t the thing I’m doing.

“It’s real,” I say. Out loud. To witnesses. The first time I’ve said it to anyone, including myself. “I don’t — I don’t know what to do with it. It terrifies me. But it’s real. We both know it’s real. We stopped pretending weeks ago and just didn’t tell the paperwork.”