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She tilts her head. It’s a gesture I recognize — she does it when she’s deciding whether to be reasonable. I can’t tell yet which direction this is going. The hallway is narrow and warm and there are people on both sides of us and I’m aware of all of it. This is my house. That’s the part I keep coming back to. She came to my house and walked into my kitchen and is standing in my hallway. She planned this, which means the four texts were a prelude, which means I have been, for the past three days, underestimating the situation.

“I just thought,” she says, “that we could talk.”

“We’re talking.”

“I mean really talk. Not —” she gestures at the party around us — “here.”

My thumb presses harder. “Bella.”

“I’m not asking for a relationship.” She says it quickly, which means she rehearsed it. “I know that’s not what you want. I’m just saying things were good last semester, and I don’t understand why we can’t⁠—”

“Because I told you in May.”

“You said you needed space.”

“I said we were done.”

“You said⁠—”

“I was clear.” I keep my voice even. I know what my voice sounds like when I’m managing something — Cash calls it the Captain voice, which he means as a dig and which I take as a compliment, because at least it means I’m not shouting. “I wasn’t trying to be unkind. I meant it.”

She looks at me for a long moment.

Something shifts behind her eyes. I see it happen.

“You know,” she says, and her voice has changed now — the rehearsed version gone and what’s underneath coming through sharp and aimed, “I talked to three girls who said the same thing. That you do this. You’re great, and then you check out, and you act like it’s because of hockey, but it’s not really hockey, is it?”

“Bella—”

“You’re just scared.” She says it like she’s handing me information I don’t have. “You’ve got the whole captain thing, and the family thing, and the⁠—”

“I’m not doing this.”

“Doing what? Listening?”

“Having this conversation.”

Her chin comes up. She’s getting louder and I know it and she knows it and the three people nearest us in the hallway have gone carefully still in the way people go still when they don’t want to be involved and absolutely don’t want to leave either. My jaw has been tight for forty-five seconds. I’m aware of it.

She is in my house. She came here. She walked through my front door at a party she knew I was throwing and she has been waiting in my kitchen and she is doing this in my hallway, and I have been polite about it twice already. The polite is running out. I can feel it going, the way you feel a stick about to crack, and the part of me that’s still holding the line thinks, very clearly: don’t. Not here. Not in front of the team.

“You don’t get to just—” she starts.

“I was clear.” I say it again, and something in my voice finally gives — not a shout, not cold, but past managed. Past the Captain voice. Past the fourth time I’ve said the same true thing to the same person who keeps deciding not to hear it. “I was honest with you from the start. I was honest in May. I was honest in that text. And I am being honest right now, in my own house, at a party you were not invited to, in a hallway where half my team can see us, and the fact that you’re here doing this means you know exactly what you’re doing and you’re doing it on purpose.” I stop. I breathe. “I’m not going to say it a fifth time.”

The silence in the hallway has weight.

I don’t look at who’s in it.

Bella stares at me. Her eyes are bright in the way that means she’s deciding between two responses and one of them would require crying in front of an audience, which Bella Hastings does not do. I know this about her. I know more about her than I probably should, for something that was never supposed to be serious, and the knowing makes the whole thing worse in a way I’m not going to examine right now.

She says, very quietly, with a precision that means she means it: “I hope she’s worth it.”

Then she turns around.

She moves through the hallway and the living room and out the front door, and I can smell her perfume in the space she left — something floral, something that’s been in every room she’s been in since September of last year, too sweet, too much, the smell of a decision I made over and over and rationalized because nothing was ever technically official.

I stand in the hallway for a second.