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The words catch me strangely. I open my mouth, but she is already gathering her bag from the chair by the kitchen.

“Take the tickets. Bring someone.” She pulls her hair into a loose knot while she searches through her bag for her keys. “Call your brother, maybe he’ll take pity on you and join you.”

“I doubt a twenty-year-old frat boy in his college prime will want to give up a Saturday night to walk with his older sister through a garden, Ma.”

“Try him,” she says, heading into the kitchen to collect her water bottle. “Or maybe bring someone else, someone you like.”

There is no reason for a specific face to appear in my mind.

And yet there she is. Blonde hair caught in the sunlight. Big blue eyes fixed on me over an iced latte. A grin spreading across her face when she tells me her name is Merryweather, as if the entire situation is somehow my doing.

The thought is so immediate that I resent it. And it does not qualify as liking her. I spoke to her for maybe a couple of minutes.

Attraction, certainly.

Interest, unfortunately.

But not⁠—

My mother is looking at me.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Her eyes narrow slightly. Then her eyebrows lift. “Oh.”

“No.”

She smiles as she heads toward the hallway, which tells me everything I need to know, and everything I should immediately shut down.

“I love you! Wear sunscreen if you leave the house tomorrow,” she yells over her shoulder. “And please try to leave the house.”

The front door closes a few seconds later, leaving the space quiet again.

“I leave the house,” I say to no one.

I go to work four days a week. I grocery shop and run errands. I occasionally have drinks with Luis after a shift, although admittedly the last time was sometime in August. And I see my friend Maggie sometimes, too. We’re still figuring out how to be friends again after a few years of me not being particularly good at it, but we’re trying.

There are people in the world who would consider all of those things leaving the house.

I pick up the elastic again and slide another piece of citrine into place, but the rhythm I had before is gone. Instead, my mother’s question keeps circling back through my head.

Why don’t you give yourself permission to hope?

Because hope is easy when you are a woman like my mother. She can meet a man three times, buy tickets for something weeks away, and somehow believe the three good dates were worth having even when the fourth never materializes. She doesn’t seem to need any assurance that something will last before she allows herself to enjoy it while it’s happening.

I have never understood how she does that, and maybe I don’t want to.

My gaze drifts toward the black envelope on the table.

And, because my brain has apparently decided to betray me today, I think of Merryweather again.

Someone you like.

Absolutely not.

I don’t know her. I know her coffee order and her name, and that she has a cat named Aurora. I know she’s gorgeous in a way that apparently causes me to forget basic motor functions, and that she smiled at me enough yesterday that I spent an embarrassing amount of time wondering whether she was flirting or simply being friendly.

That is attraction. And attraction is easy, and I’m not interested in anything else because attraction doesn’t require me to do anything about it.