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“Shut up.”

That night, in the hotel, I’m lying on top of the comforter with the TV on mute when my phone buzzes on my chest.

It’s her.

My pulse jumps. I open it fast, and I hate that I do.

Tessa: The box sold.

I know which box. I don’t need to ask.

Me: For?

The dots come up. Go away. Come up. Go away. A long time. Long enough that I can feel how annoyed she is from two states away.

Tessa: Fifty.

I look at it.

I don’t smile. I don’t do that. But I feel...something.

Me: You’re welcome.

She leaves me on read.

I put the phone down and look at the ceiling of this hotel room and feel weirdly, stupidly satisfied, like I just scored.

I don’t really check the map while we’re gone. I mean, I do. But not the way I did. It’s not a thing I sit there and stare at anymore. I open my phone to check the score of something, and there she is. Library, Friday afternoon. Student center, Friday night. Corvin, mostly. And on Sunday morning, when I wake up in the hotel at seven-forty and roll over to check the time, her dot is on Route 9, sitting on top of the Goodwill, two minutes before it opens.

I lie there and look at it.

What’s she after? What gets her out of bed on a Sunday and onto a bus in the cold to stand outside a thrift store before the doors open? Jeans? Another box? Some scarf that looked like a tablecloth?

I’m never going to know.

I put the phone down on the nightstand and go take a shower.

The registration window opens at nine that morning, and I’m sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting for the bus with a bad coffee and my laptop open on my knees.

It’s supposed to be easy. Log in. Pick your classes. Confirm. My father’s assistant sent me a list in October, with the courses my father thought I should take for spring, all of them lined up neatly under my major, which is finance, which my father picked in the spring of my senior year without asking me, the same way he picks everything.

I look at the list.

And I think about standing over a table in a lounge at ten at night, looking at a spreadsheet on somebody else’s phone, and seeing what she was doing wrong in about four seconds. The pricing. The margin. The time she wasn’t counting. I didn’t even have to think about it. It was just there, like reading a defenseman’s body before he commits. And I liked it. I liked arguing with her about it. I liked being right. I liked the problem.

I’ve spent my whole life thinking I hated business. I hated the office. I hated the summer I spent in it, learning to shake hands with men who looked at me like an inheritance. I hated every dinner where my father talked about deals and margins and acquisitions like they were the only things in the world, and looked at me like I was one of them.

But I don’t hate the work. I just hate that it was always his.

Apparently those aren’t the same thing.

I click on the major. There’s a dropdown. Finance is highlighted. Under it, a whole list of other things.

Business Administration.

I pick my own classes. Accounting, because I need it. Business analytics, because it sounds like the jewelry box. Managerial economics, because my father thinks economists are useless, and something in me wants to find out if he’s right. A writing requirement. A stats class. Nothing he sent me. Not one thing off his list.

The system asks me if I’m sure.