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She looks at me for a long time.

And she lets me.

She doesn’t reach for it. She doesn’t say anything else. I understand that’s the biggest thing anybody’s ever handed me. Bigger than the contract. Bigger than the pen. She knows I know she can carry it. She lets me anyway.

I call that winning.

I go down the stairs with it.

I wait at the bottom. She stays up there by herself for a minute in the empty room. I don’t know what she does. Then the light in the window goes out, and she comes down the stairs and doesn’t look back.

“Thank you,” she says to me.

I lean over and kiss her.

Kylie’s on the porch crying into Nash’s shirt. Paige is standing next to them with her arms crossed, not crying, which says more. Barnes is sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck I think is either his or Kennebeck’s.

Tessa walks around the front of the car and opens the passenger door and gets in.

I get in and shut my door. The car’s hot, and it smells like cardboard and the rink and the pine tree on the mirror, and her. I put the key in. I don’t turn it.

I look at her.

She’s got her sunglasses pushed up in her hair and her knees pulled up against the dash, and her hands in her lap, and her watch on her wrist. Behind her, through the window, there’s Wren Street, the maple, her whole life here, the one she built in a year by herself out of nothing, the one she knows would work. I know it would work. I watched her build it.

“You can still say no,” I say.

She turns her head and looks at me. And something happens to her face that I’ll be thinking about for the rest of my life.

“I know I can,” she says.

Then she reaches over and turns the key herself.

“I’m coming with you, Rafe. I’m not changing my mind.”

It’s five hours. She sleeps for two of them, and I don’t turn the radio on. The other three she does math out loud and asks me questions about the rink I don’t know the answers to.

We get there at four.

The building’s uglier than the pictures. The dry cleaner downstairs smells like hot chemicals. The stairs are narrow and the carpet in the hallway is a color I don’t have a word for. Our door sticks like it’s cheap paint. It opens on an empty room that smells like new paint and somebody else’s life with afternoon light coming in across the floor in long strips.

Tessa walks straight past the living room. Past the kitchen. Past the bedroom where our mattress is going to go on the floor tonight because the frame doesn’t come till Wednesday.

She goes to the second room. I follow her down the little hall and stand in the doorway. It’s tiny. It really is basically a closet. But the window faces east, and the light’s coming through it. She walks to the middle of it and turns all the way around once, looking at everything. Then she goes back to the door where I am and puts her hand on the lock. She turns it. Locked. She turns it back. Unlocked. She does it twice.

“Good?” I say.

“Yeah.” She doesn’t look at me. She’s looking at the wall. “My shelves go there. I need measurements.”

“Jesus Christ, Tess, we’re not even unpacked.”

“Tomorrow.”

I stand there in the doorway of this shitty little room over a dry cleaner in a city neither of us has ever lived in and look at her standing in a square of sun with her arms crossed, arguing with me about shelving, and I’m so happy I could put my fist through the drywall.

She came.

Nobody made her. Nobody packed her in four minutes. Nobody’s car was running in the driveway. My father didn’t pick this. The Sentinels didn’t pick this. Hockey didn’t pick it. I asked, she thought about it, and she said yes, and then she reached over and turned the key in my car herself. She had somewhere else to be. She had a whole life back there that worked. And she’s standing in this room anyway because she chose this. She chose me.