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He glances at me briefly. “Why not?”

He isn’t pushing. It isn’t an interrogation. He just sounds confused, like he can’t imagine going home to somebody without warning them first. I guess in his house, you’d have to warn them. Somebody would have to make up a room and plan a menu.

“I wanted to surprise her,” I say. Then, quieter, because it’s true and he’s already heard worse from me, “And if I told her, she’d try to pay me back for the bus.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just nods once, like that makes perfect sense, and turns where I tell him to.

We come onto my grandma’s street. It looks exactly the same. The chain-link fences. The narrow driveways. The little houses with their porch lights on, yellow in the dark, every one of them a box with a roof. And there’s a car in front of my grandma’s house that I don’t know. It’s an old gray sedan with a dent in the back door and a garbage bag taped over one of the rear windows. It’s parked half on the curb, crooked.

My stomach drops. My hands close on the plastic grocery bag, and I lean forward in my seat without meaning to, toward the windshield, toward the car, like if I get close enough, I can read it.

“What?” Rafe says.

“Nothing.”

I say it too fast, and when I turn my head, he’s looking at me. Not at the car. At me. At my hands on the bag and my shoulders and my face, steady and quiet, the way you’d look at something to figure out what it was going to do. And I know that look. I know it because it’s mine. It’s the look I’ve been giving him across cafeterias and hallways and hockey rinks for four years, taking him apart into pieces so I’d know which piece to watch.

He’s reading me.

I’ve spent my whole life thinking reading people was the one thing I had that nobody else did. The one thing I could do that kept me safe. And Rafferty Waleska is sitting in a car on my grandma’s street, doing it to me.

I don’t know how long he’s been doing it. I don’t like not knowing.

“My cousin might be here,” I say.

He looks at the car. Then at me. “Is that bad?”

“No.”

Too fast again. Way too fast. I hear it. He hears it. It sits there in the warm air between us, and I wait for him to call it what it is.

He doesn’t. He looks at the gray car for a long second, and then he pulls into my grandma’s driveway behind it, and puts the car in park, and doesn’t say anything at all.

For a second, I don’t move. My heart stills as I look at my grandma’s front door, at the wreath she’s had since I was fourteen with the fake berries bleached pale by the sun, and I can’t make myself unbuckle.

This is so stupid. It’s my grandma’s house. I’ve been picturing this door for three months. I sat on a bed in Corvin and did math on it every night. I said yes to riding two hours in Rafe’s car to get here. And now I don’t want to get out.

For the first time in my life, the uncomfortable thing isn’t Rafe. It’s the gray sedan, and the porch light, and the fact that I’ve been gone three months and my body still remembers exactly how to brace for this house.

He doesn’t rush me. He doesn’t say anything. He just sits there with his hands on the wheel and waits.

I unbuckle and get my backpack from between my feet. I get out.

He pops the trunk, so I get my duffel myself. When I come back around to the passenger side to say whatever I’m about to say, he’s rolled the window down.

“Text me,” he says.

I stop. “What?”

He looks at the house. “When your grandma gets home.”

He sees that, too. That her car isn’t in the driveway.

“I’ll be fine.”

He looks back at me. “Call if you need something. I won’t be far.”

I blink. I think it’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to me. I try to make my voice do the thing it does with Kylie, dry and easy. “You’re fifteen minutes away.” And then because my nerves are high, I quickly add, “Thank you for the ride.”