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I’m not doing anything about it. I lean on the doorframe and watch my mother fall for my girlfriend, and I let it run, because it’s the best thing I’ve seen in a while and I’m in no rush for it to stop.

Last night she said it back. I’m not going to think about that in my mother’s kitchen, because if I think about it I’ll do the face the twins make fun of, the one I don’t know I’m doing. But it’s sitting in my chest like a stone I swallowed warm. I love you too, to the dark, in my old bed, in a voice I’d never heard her use. I’ve been carrying it around all morning like it might spill.

“You’ll come for the spring weekend,” Mom says. Not a question. “Britta’s recital. We make a whole thing of it.”

“I’d like that,” Sloane says.

“She’d like that,” my mother repeats to me, like I’d argued.

My dad comes in from the garage wiping his hands on a rag. He’s been “looking at my tires,” which is what he does when he’s got a feeling and nowhere to put it. He decided about Sloane the first night. My father reads people the way I read the ice. He doesn’t narrate it. He doesn’t have to.

“Tires are good,” he says. “You’re due an oil change in maybe five hundred miles. Don’t run it to Haven and back twice pretending you forgot.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.” Almost a smile. He puts his hand out to Sloane, and she takes it, and he holds the shake a second past where a shake ends. “Drive safe, kid. Door’s open.” That’s the speech. From my father, that’s a whole sonnet, and I watch Sloane clock the size of it.

“Thank you,” she says. Two words. She means them. He hears it.

“Erik.” My mother’s gone misty. “Tell her about the lake place.”

“She doesn’t need the lake place yet, Anni. Let the girl get out the door.” But he turns to Sloane anyway. “Summers we go up to a lake in the Berkshires. Nothing fancy. There’s a dock, a bad canoe, a grill I won’t let anyone else touch.” A pause. “You’d be welcome. Whenever. That’s all.”

I watch something happen to Sloane that I don’t have a name for yet. She goes still. Not cold — still, the way a deer goes still, the way you go quiet when the thing in front of you isn’t a threat but your body hasn’t been told that. It lasts half a second. Then she’s back, easy, smiling, saying something gracious about canoes.

I file it. I don’t get it. But I file it.

Then the stairs come alive and the twins arrive at speed.

“You’re not allowed to leave.” Liv has Sloane by the sleeve. “We decided. Britta, tell her.”

“We decided,” Britta confirms. “Also, I made you a playlist. It’s on your phone now. Don’t ask how.”

“How?” Sloane asks, somewhat amused by my sister’s antics.

“Don’t ask.” Britta beams. “It’s a two-hour drive. Tracks one through nine are for the highway, ten through the end are for when Beau gets quiet, which he will, because he always does.”

“I don’t get quiet.”

“He gets so quiet,” Liv tells Sloane, confidentially, like I’m not standing right there with two bags on my shoulder. “Mom calls it the Captain Thing. You’ll see it. It’s like a fog rolls in.”

“I’ve seen it,” Sloane says, and she doesn’t look at me when she says it, and something in my chest does a small dumb thing it has no business doing in front of my whole family.

“Okay.” Liv claps her hands. “We follow each other now. On everything. And you have to actually post, not just lurk, because Beau lurks, it’s tragic, he liked a photo from 2019 last week like an uncle.”

“I will actually post,” Sloane lies, smooth as anything, and Britta points at her like she’s caught a teammate cheating.

“She’s lying. I respect it. Welcome to the family.”

Welcome to the family. Sloane laughs — the real one, short and surprised out of her — and I get to watch it land on all of them, my mother and my father and the twins, the whole loud kitchen leaning toward her like she’s the warm part of the room. Which she is. They just figured out what I already knew.

“Text me when you arrive,” my mother says, catching Sloane’s wrist one more time. “So I know you made it. Both of you. You especially.”

“I—” Sloane starts, and stops. Nobody’s asked her to text when she’s home in a long time, maybe ever, and I watch her not know where to put it. “Okay. Yes. I will.”

“She will,” I say, to give her somewhere to look that isn’t my mother’s face.

Getting her out the door takes actual effort. My mother has both of Sloane’s hands again, and Sloane’s got the Tupperware and the rolls and a tote bag Liv has decided she can’t live without, and I get an arm around her shoulders and sort of peel her out of the cluster. Like backing a guy off the puck. Gentle. Firm. No whistle.