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“I’m not doing a face.”

“You’re doing the face people do when they’re reading into things.” She finally looks up at me, and her expression is dry and level and gives away exactly nothing, which is becoming the thing I’d most like to crack. “Friday, Sorensen. Now go home. You’re scaring the freshmen with your whole —” she waves a hand at me, the jacket, the general situation “— aura.”

“My aura?”

“It’s very loud. Goodbye.”

The bell rings its half-step-off note behind me, and the evening’s gone cool and blue out on Main Street, the streetlights just coming on, and I stand on the sidewalk for a second outside my grandmother’s shop with my hands in my jacket pockets and my shoulder aching its low ache.

She’ll have an answer by Friday.

She didn’t say no.

I head up Main toward campus, and I’m three blocks gone before I catch myself doing the thing — running the exhibition game in my head, where she’d sit, what she’d see, whether Mormor would come — and I stop, because that’s not — there’s no reason to be planning that far ahead. It’s a business arrangement she hasn’t even agreed to yet.

I run a hand through my hair.

I keep walking.

I don’t plan the game.

I do, a little. But I don’t mean to.

Chapter 8

Sloane

The walk home from the bookshop takes eleven minutes, and I spend nine of them thinking about Beau Sorensen, which is nine more than I’d budgeted.

It’s not a productive kind of thinking. It’s the circling kind — the kind where you handle a thing from a few different angles and put it down and pick it back up two minutes later having decided nothing. I’ve been doing it since I left the shop, since I untied my apron and hung it on its hook and said goodnight to Margaret, who watched me go with the satisfaction of a woman who believes a plan is unfolding and is too dignified to say so out loud.

The thing I keep landing on isn’t the proposal. The proposal I understand. The proposal is almost insultingly logical, which is its own kind of problem, because I’ve spent the better part of a day trying to find the hole in it and the hole keeps not being there.

The thing I keep landing on is the clipboard.

The way his face did something when Margaret held it out. The way he said I’ll do it later, let me finish my coffee in a voice that was almost his regular voice but not quite — a half-step off, the way the bell over the shop door is a half-step off, close enough that most people would never catch it. And the way Margaret took it back without a word, smooth, like the asking had never happened, which is not how Margaret does anything. Margaret nags. Margaret has nagged me about checking the order on nights when I was visibly drowning. She does not let people off hooks.

She let him off the hook.

There’s something there. I don’t know what it is, and it isn’t mine to know, and I’ve told myself three times in the last eleven minutes to leave it alone, which is exactly the number of times you tell yourself to leave a thing alone when you have no intention of leaving it alone.

And then — because apparently the clipboard was only ever the respectable half of what my brain has been doing — there’s the rest of it.

The rest of it is less defensible. The rest of it is his hands around the Roastery cup, too big for it, the same way they were too big for the box of books he carried into the back room like it weighed nothing. The way he matched his stride to mine on Main without making a thing of it, without slowing so obviously that I’d have to notice and resent it — he just shortened the gap and let me set the pace, and I noticed anyway, and I resented it anyway, but quietly, in the way you resent a thing you’re also keeping. The one-cornered almost-smile. The line of his jaw when Evan wouldn’t let go of my arm and something in him went flat and certain and handled it, and the entirely separate, entirely unwelcome fact of what that did to the back of my neck.

I think about the back of my neck for half a block before I catch myself, which is half a block longer than I have ever permitted any man real estate in my head, and I would like it on the record — the record being the inside of my own skull, where these proceedings are sealed and will never be entered into evidence — that I am furious about it. I built this head specifically so this wouldn’t happen in it. I have rules. The rules are good rules. They have kept me upright through worse than a hockey captain with careful hands and a thing he won’t say about a clipboard.

The rule, when a thought like this shows up uninvited, is that you look at it once, flatly, the way you’d look at a coat someone left on your sofa, and then you fold it and you set it by the door and you do not try it on.

I’m two blocks from Sailmaker Lane, the maples going dark gold overhead and the streetlights just coming on, when my phone goes off in my pocket.

I know who it is before I look. There’s a particular dread that has a shape, and this one has Evan’s shape.

I look anyway.

Evan

We need to talk, Sloane.