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“Adequate.”

“Don’t let it go to your head, Sorensen. There’s a UMass defenseman who’d give you a much lower review.”

And I laugh, the shoulder be damned, because she watched the whole thing and clocked twenty-two and is needling me about it in a parking lot, and there is no part of my body or my well-managed life that is behaving correctly around this woman, and I’ve stopped pretending to myself that it is.

Here’s what the week does.

The week does the thing weeks do when you stop noticing you’re in them — it fills up with small stuff, and the small stuff is the part that gets you.

I start bringing her coffee. This is not on the schedule. There is no rule that requires me to know Sloane Beckett gets out of Advanced Scene Study at three-forty on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and there is definitely no rule that requires me to be standing outside Hartwell when she does with a chai from the Roastery — the good one, cinnamon, the order I now know cold because Mormor told me once and I never forgot it. But on the days I don’t have class fourth period I find myself walking to the arts building anyway, and I find myself with a chai in my hand, and I find myself leaning on the brick by the door like a guy with a reason to be there, and when she comes out and sees me her face does a thing she tries to shut down and can’t quite, and that thing is worth the walk.

“This is rule seven,” she says the first time, taking the cup. “There’s nobody here. This is textbook rule seven.”

“There’s a guy by the bike rack. He counts as an audience.”

“He’s on the phone. He’s not watching us.”

“He might look over.”

“You’re a menace,” she says, and drinks the chai, and doesn’t give it back, and we walk. I do it Wednesday too. And the Thursday. By the end of the week she’s stopped citing rule seven and just takes the cup, and I’ve stopped pretending the guy by the bike rack is why I’m there, and neither of us mentions that the rule’s become a thing we both walk past on the way to something we’re not naming.

The girls start coming to the Raven House. That’s the other thing the week does. It starts with Wren — she and Cash have whatever they have, the thing that runs on mutual insult and would absolutely take a bullet for the other person — and Wren brings June, and June brings a book and reads it on our couch like she’s done it her whole life, and Margo arrives like weather and reorganizes the kitchen and tells Theo his cooking would be better if he “committed to a flavor,” and Theo, who has not taken culinary feedback from a living soul in three years, adjusts the dish. I watch him do it. I don’t say anything. You don’t point at it when Theo does something human; you just let it happen.

And Sloane’s there in the middle of it, on my couch, in my house, in the warm chaos of the place I love most in the world, and it stops being strange to see her there sometime around the third night, which is its own kind of alarming. She fits. She fits the way a thing fits when it was always going to. Sunday she ends up in the kitchen with Wyatt arguing about a book they’ve both read, and Wyatt’s got that warm steady attention turned all the way up, and she’s giving it back, dry and fast, and I stand in my own doorway watching my fake girlfriend get folded into my real family and I think, this is going to be a problem when it ends.

When it ends. I keep saying that to myself like it’s scheduled.

And then there’s the Evan thing.

I hear about it secondhand, which is the only reason Evan’s still walking around with all his teeth. Tuesday, apparently — Sloane coming out of Hartwell, me not there because I had class, and Evan was waiting. Not aggressive, by the account I get. The reasonable version, the one that’s worse. Can we talk, just five minutes, I think you owe me that. And before Sloane had to spend a single unit of the composure she spends too much of, Margo — who has apparently appointed herself a one-woman security detail and was walking out two steps behind — got between them and, in the version I hear, said something so precise and so quietly devastating that Evan left without finishing his sentence.

I get the story from Cash, who got it from Wren, who got it from Margo, who I’d bet money edited her own dialogue to sound cooler, though knowing Margo it doesn’t need editing.

“What’d she say?” I ask Cash.

“Margo? To Evan?” Cash grins like it’s Christmas. “Okay, so — and Wren swears this is verbatim — she gets right up in his face, this tiny terrifying woman, and goes, ‘She has a boyfriend, she has a restraining-order-shaped future if you keep this up, and she has better things to do than relitigate the worst decision of her sophomore year. Walk away, Evan. You’re embarrassing the whole offensive line.’ And then he just — left, man. Didn’t finish his sentence. Folded like a fucking lawn chair.” He shakes his head, reverent. “I’m a little in love with her. Don’t tell Wren.”

I laugh. And then I don’t, because under the laugh is the part I don’t like — that he keeps coming, that the door I’m supposed to be hasn’t fully shut him out, that boyfriend did some of the work and Margo did the rest and Sloane shouldn’t have needed either of us standing between her and a guy who can’t take an answer. My jaw’s tight about it before I’ve decided to be angry. I notice the anger a beat after it arrives, the way I notice everything, and I notice it’s bigger than the strategy would explain.

I don’t say any of that to Cash.

I just file it with the rest of her, on the list that has no system, and I think about Tuesday, and Margo two steps back, and a chai going cold in my hand outside the building because I wasn’t there, and I decide — quietly, the way I decide the things that matter — that I’m going to be there more.

Which is, I’m aware, not in the plan either.

The football team wins a game.

I want to mark the strangeness of that sentence, because it’s a strange sentence — Whitmore football has been a rumor of a program for two years, three-and-eight last season, the kind of team you forget the school has. But they beat someone they weren’t supposed to beat, some Saturday upset, and a winning football team throws a party the way a man who’s never had money spends his first paycheck, which is to say loudly and all at once.

It’s the same week — the Saturday that closes it. The shoulder’s better — not good, but better, manageable, iced and hidden and holding. And it’s a public appearance, flagged on the schedule Sloane keeps, because a football party is exactly the kind of room where being seen matters: the whole athletic ecosystem under one roof, which means Bella’s circle and Evan’s circle and everyone whose belief in the thing is the thing’s entire point.

I get to the Sailmaker to pick her up — we decided to arrive together, hand in hand, maximum visibility, which was in the plan and which I am not pretending I didn’t also just want — and Margo answers the door and looks me up and down once, fast, like a quality inspection, and says, “She’s almost ready. Don’t make that face when you see her, you’ll embarrass yourself,” and walks off before I can ask what face.

Then Sloane comes down the stairs, and I understand what face.

She’s — okay. I notice it the way you notice a hit you didn’t see coming. Off-the-shoulder sweater, the soft expensive kind, one bare shoulder and the line of her collarbone, jeans that do not leave a lot to the imagination and brown boots up to the knee, and her hair’s down and done, and there’s something on her eyes that makes them more than they already are, and the whole effect lands somewhere in my chest and a couple other places I’m not going to itemize in her roommate’s front hall.

I don’t make the face. I think I don’t make the face. Margo, on the stairs behind her, mouths the face at me, so I made the face.