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My jaw’s tight. I let it be tight for a second. Then I let it go.

“Ignore her,” I say.

Theo raises an eyebrow.

“I mean it.” I reach for my undershirt. “Ignore her. That’s the whole play. She wants a reaction — she wants me to post something, or text her, or send Cash to talk to whoever filmed it, anything that says she got to me. She doesn’t get any of that.” I pull the shirt over my head, careful with the shoulder. “Ignore her. That’s my plan.”

Cash has drifted over by now, because Cash can smell a situation from across a room. “That’s a bad plan,” he says. “My plan involves finding out whose apartment that is.”

“Your plan always involves finding out whose apartment that is.”

“And it’s always a good plan.”

“It’s never a good plan.” I stand, grab my towel. “Ignore it. All of you. She’s loud, she’ll be loud for a few days, and then she’ll find a new thing to be loud about. Don’t feed it.”

Theo’s watching me with the flat, assessing look he gets, the one that means he’s adding something up. “You’re very calm about this,” he says.

“I’m a calm guy.”

“You’re a guy who’s been two strides late all morning and now you’re zen about your ex telling a lot of people you’re bad in bed.” He pockets the phone. “Those don’t go together.”

He’s not wrong. They don’t go together. But the reason they don’t go together is the one thing I’m not putting in this room, so I just shrug — one shoulder, the good one — and head for the showers, and let Theo think whatever Theo’s going to think, which he’ll do regardless of what I do.

The thing is, the video changes the math. Not a lot. But some.

Because Bella running her mouth in public is exactly the kind of thing that keeps her in the picture — keeps people talking about her and me in the same breath, keeps the will-they-won’t-they-again thing alive, which is the thing she wants alive. And the cleanest way to kill it isn’t to fight her. It’s to make the question irrelevant. You can’t run a will-they-get-back-together story about a guy who’s visibly, obviously with someone else.

Which is the plan.

Which is the plan I pitched to a girl on a sidewalk two days ago, who’s going to give me an answer tomorrow, and who I have spent all morning being two strides late over.

I stand under the hot water and let it hit the shoulder and I think about Sloane Beckett, which I’ve apparently decided to just let myself do now, since the not-doing-it isn’t working.

It follows me out of the building.

I’m walking the path back toward the house, bag over my good shoulder, the afternoon gone gray and cool, and I’ve got my phone out before I’ve fully decided to, and I’m doing a thing I have never once done, which is look someone up.

It takes a second to find her. I don’t know her last name spelled out the way you’d type it — Cash said Beckett, and I trust Cash, but typing is its own adventure for me and search bars are not forgiving — so I go at it sideways, through the bookshop’s account, which Mormor makes me follow, and there she is, tagged in a photo behind the counter. @sloane.in.the.margins. Of course. A book joke. I’d roll my eyes if I weren’t, against my will, a little charmed by it.

I open the profile.

It’s curated. That’s the first thing I notice — not in a fake way, in a deliberate way, the way a stage is deliberate. Books, mostly. Stacks of them shot in good light. A paperback open on a windowsill with a coffee. The new arrivals wall at the shop, the one Mormor cried about, and it’s genuinely beautiful, the spines arranged by color into something that looks less like a store display and more like a thing somebody made. Photos of her and the three roommates — Margo mid-laugh, the dark-haired one I now know is Wren looking unimpressed, the quiet one with the coffee, June. Sloane in the middle of them, or off to the side of them, never quite the center, always a little angled away from the lens even when she’s smiling.

There’s nothing about her family. Anywhere. I scroll back a long way and there’s not a parent, not a sibling, not a hometown tagged, not a throwback to anything before Whitmore. Two years of a life that apparently started at eighteen. I notice it the way you notice a held breath — not the thing itself, but the shape of the space where the thing would be.

And then there are the performance videos.

Last spring’s show. The department did Much Ado About Nothing, and Sloane played Beatrice, and somebody filmed clips, and I stand on a campus path in the cold and watch them with my thumb hovering, not scrolling.

She’s good.

I don’t know anything about theater. I can’t tell you what she’s doing in any language that would mean something to her. But I know what it looks like when somebody’s the best one on the ice, the one your eye goes to without being told, the one moving a half-beat ahead of everyone else like they already know where the play’s going — and that’s what she’s doing up there. There’s a clip where she’s sparring with whoever’s playing Benedick, fast, dry, the whole audience laughing, and she’s not playing it big, she’s playing it exact, every word landing like she set it down on purpose, and I think: that’s the same voice. That’s the voice she used on the sidewalk. If you want this to be believable, you cast for it. She wasn’t being modest. She was telling me she knows precisely how good she is, and she’s right.

I watch the clip twice.

Then I catch myself watching it a third time and stop, because that’s — no. There’s a line and I’m standing on it.

But I need her number. That’s the practical thing, the thing under all the not-scrolling. I can’t show up at the game tomorrow and hope to corner her. I can’t run a plan through carrier pigeon. And there are exactly two ways to get a junior theater major’s phone number when you don’t have it, and one of them is my grandmother.