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“January,” she says. “January, Tessa.”

My insides clam up. “I know.”

“You’ve known since January, and you didn’t fucking tell me?”

“I’m sorry.”

She looks at me for a long time. And I watch it go across her face. Not anger. Kylie doesn’t really do anger. Something softer, and worse. Her eyes go shiny at the rims and she presses her lips together, hard.

“Where are you going?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you transferring?”

“No.”

“Are you going to your grandma’s?”

That makes me cringe. “No.”

That one I know. I’ll make sure I never end up back there.

“Then what are you doing?”

“I don’t know yet,” I say.

And I wait for it to scare me. Saying it out loud to somebody who isn’t Rafe. In September, I don’t know was the worst sentence in the world. It meant a couch. It meant a bus to nowhere. It meant my backpack strap around my wrist.

It doesn’t now. I say it to her, and it’s just true. I don’t know yet. I have two thousand two hundred and eighty dollars and four hundred people following my hands and a notebook full of random things I like to write because Kylie told me to write. I don’t know where I’m going. But I’m not falling back down the well to the bottom.

Kylie wipes her nose on the back of her wrist.

“Really,” she says like she can’t believe it.

She sniffs. She picks the candle back up. She puts it in the shoe.

“You’re still coming to see me,” she says. “Wherever you go. You’re coming back here and sleeping on my floor in Hargrove with the bay window and eating my bread.”

“Okay.”

“Good.” She points the shoe at me. “Because I know where your grandma lives.”

“You actually don’t.”

“I’ll find out. I’ll ask Rafe.”

I laugh. And she laughs.

Paige comes over at four to help because Kylie texted her SOS, and what she means by help is that she and I end up doing all of it while Kylie lies on the bed narrating.

We’re on the floor labeling boxes in Sharpie, Paige writing KYLIE — SHOES (WHY SO MANY), when there’s a knock on the open door.

Koda.

He’s standing in the doorway in his practice hoodie with a roll of packing tape in one hand. He says Rafe sent him. He says Rafe said we’d run out. We haven’t. We have four rolls. He holds the tape out anyway into the room like an offering.

“Thanks,” I say.