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She walks me to the door when it’s done. The cold comes in when she opens it, and she’s standing in the warm gold of the shop and I’m half into the blue of the street, and there’s a beat where neither of us says the thing that would end it.

“Text me your schedule,” she says.

“Text me the rules. Whenever.” Whenever.

“I will.” A pause. “Goodnight, Sorensen.”

“Night, Beckett.”

She doesn’t veto Beckett.

I noticed, three days ago at the parking lot, that she doesn’t veto Beckett — she vetoed everything else, babe got a look that could curdle milk, sweetheart got a full sentence of contempt earlier tonight when I floated it as a joke, but Beckett she just lets stand, lets land, and I don’t know what it means and I want to know what it means.

I walk home in the cold with the rules in my head — six of them, with sub-clauses, because I do remember, I told her I would and I did — and somewhere around the second block I realize I never found out what she wrote next to rule seven. The checkmark. The note I couldn’t see. There was a thing she added there at the end, in pen, and I didn’t see it, and I want to have seen it, and I’m aware that wanting to have seen it is its own piece of information about me that I’m choosing not to process.

A beat late. The way I process everything.

My phone buzzes against my hip.

Sloane

The rules. As promised. Now you can’t claim you misremembered tier three.

There’s a photo attached. The list. She’s photographed the whole thing rather than typing it out, the actual page in her actual handwriting, small and even, and I stop under the lamppost at the corner of Mill and Main because reading a photo of handwriting is its own particular fight and I’d rather lose it standing still than walking.

I work down the page. Slow. The way it always is — the lines wanting to slide, the letters not holding still, the effort of it that I’ve spent thirteen years making sure nobody watches me spend. But I’ve got time and I’m alone and there’s no one waiting on the reply, which is the only condition under which the page and I make peace, so I take it rule by rule.

Duration. Visibility. The tiered system, capital letters and all. Rule four, Mormor underlined twice. Five, six. Seven — and there, next to seven, the checkmark I couldn’t see across the counter. Just a checkmark. Nothing else. I sit with the small disappointment of that longer than a checkmark warrants.

And then under seven, under the line where the list was supposed to end, where the arrangement officially stops — there’s another one. Lower on the page. Smaller. Like it got added at a different time, in a different mood, pressed harder into the paper.

8.

It takes me a second. It always takes me a second, and then the words come, and then I wish they’d taken longer.

Do not, under any circumstances, forget that this is fake.

I read it twice. Once for the words. Once for the meaning, which is the part that lands.

She didn’t mean to send me that one. I know it the way I know where the puck’s going before it gets there — she photographed the whole page, the six rules and the secret seventh thing under seven, and didn’t think to crop, or did think to crop and decided it didn’t matter because rule eight isn’t a rule for me. It’s a rule for her. A note she left herself in pen on a morning I don’t know anything about, and now I’m standing under a lamppost on Mill Street holding the one piece of her she’d never have handed over on purpose.

Do not, under any circumstances, forget that this is fake.

You only write that down, I think — you only need that rule, in pen, underlined harder than the others — if some part of you is already worried you might.

I don’t text back about rule eight. I’m not going to embarrass her, and I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t see it. So I do the third thing, which is the coward’s thing, which is to answer the part she meant to send.

Got them. Tier three noted. I’ll behave.

The dots appear. Disappear. Appear.

Sloane

You won’t, but I appreciate the effort.

I put the phone in my pocket. I stand under the lamppost a second longer than the cold makes reasonable, because there’s a thing happening in my chest that I’d have to be a lot more honest than I currently am to name, and I’m not going to name it — the same way she’s not going to admit she wrote rule eight, because she’s scared of the exact thing I’m not naming.

We’re going to be a problem for each other.