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She looks at him. I look at him.

Through the window in the back door, I can see his car in the courtyard. There’s a long dent in the back passenger door, deep and silver at the bottom where the paint came off, right behind where my head was.

“That,” his mother says, “is demonstrably untrue.”

We walk out. He opens my door for me. I catch his mom watching from the steps, and I smile at her.

I plug my phone into his car to charge it, and the screen lights up. The first thing my hand wants to do is open FindMy, which is a funny instinct with him getting into the driver’s seat right next to me. We don’t need it anymore. I could say it right now. We can turn it off. I put my phone down and don’t mention it.

The gates open slowly, the way they did last night. I watch them this time. I watch the whole drive go by, the trees and the fountain and the gray stone house getting smaller in the side mirror, and then we’re out on the road, and it’s just a road.

“Pick something,” he says, at the first light.

I look at him.

He doesn’t look back. He just nods at my phone that is plugged into his dash.

I think about it. I could put the musical back on. It would be funny. He’d hate it and let it play anyway, and I’d get to watch him hate it.

I don’t. I put on my own playlist instead. The one I listen to on the bus. It’s nothing special. Some of it’s old. Some of it’s stuff Elsie sent me that I pretended not to like and then listened to forty times.

He doesn’t say anything for two songs.

“This is better.”

“You’re welcome.”

That’s all either of us says for a while.

It’s different from the drive down. We’re both tired. I can feel it in him, the way he holds the wheel, the way he blinks slow at the long stretches. I can feel it in me, in my throat and my ribs and somewhere farther in that. Nobody’s trying to fill the quiet.

That’s new, too. I’ve never sat in a quiet room with him and not been waiting for something.

“Who do you play?” I ask, somewhere past the bridge.

“Providence.”

“Are they good?”

“They think they are.”

“Are you good?”

He glances at me. “I’m fine.”

“Your hand.”

He looks at his right hand on the wheel. The gauze is gone. The knuckles are split and dark and swollen, two of them, the skin pulled tight.

“It’s fine,” he says. “I’ll tape it.”

I don’t say anything else. He doesn’t either.

We get on the highway. The trees go by. The sky is gray. A truck passes us with a Christmas tree strapped to the roof, already, the day after Thanksgiving, and I watch it go and think about my grandma’s tree, the one with the ornaments I made, and then I make myself stop thinking about it.

I think about what happens after this. We’ll get back to Woodbury soon. He has a game at seven. I have mailers to send and a spreadsheet that’s wrong now, and a sticky note on my closet door that doesn’t mean what it meant on Wednesday. Kylie will come back. Nash will come back. He’ll be three doors down, and whatever this has been, I don’t know if it survives the walk up the stairs.

I don’t know why that bothers me, but it does. I watch the road for a long time before I say anything.