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My throat goes tight.

“I’m not telling you to come,” he says. “I’m offering.”

I look at him for a long time.

He’s standing in my dorm room in a T-shirt, and his hands at his sides where I can see them. His eyes are on mine, and I feel like I don’t know who he is. I knew the other one. I knew him so well I could find him in the dark. I knew which door he’d come through and what color his eyes would be when he did.

I don’t know this one at all.

“What happened to you?” I ask.

He frowns a little. “What?”

“You.” I wave my hand at him. All of him. “Where did the old Rafe go?”

He thinks about it. Then he puts his hands up beside his face, flat, at his temples, like the blinders on a horse. And he pulls them away from his head slowly out to the sides like he’s taking something off.

He doesn’t smile. His face doesn’t do anything at all.

“Turns out I was missing some shit,” he says.

I stare at him.

I don’t laugh this time. I can’t. I just stand there with my arms crossed and my mouth open a little, looking at him.

The Rafferty Waleska I knew would have died before he did something stupid in front of me. He would have died before he let me see him look ridiculous. Nobody ever got to see him look like anything he didn’t choose. And he just did something ridiculous in front of me with a completely straight face.

I sit down on the edge of my bed and look at the ground.

“Your parents,” I say.

“I asked my mom.”

My head comes up. “What?”

“Ten minutes ago.”

Now I’m nervous. He asked her already? Before he knocked. Before he asked me. He didn’t walk in here with an idea. He walked in here with a plan.

“What did she say?”

“She said of course.”

I think about her at the breakfast table in her gray cardigan with her coffee in both hands. She’s her own person. I think about her holding out the cashmere sweater and not pushing when I didn’t take it.

“And your dad?”

“My dad doesn’t have to like it.”

I think about a black car at the curb and a man holding the door. A boy in a suit somebody else picked, getting into the back without a word. A front door he didn’t walk through, at Thanksgiving, because his father was on the other side of it.

My father doesn’t have to like it.

“Where would I sleep?”

“The guest room. Across the hall from mine. It has its own bathroom.” He stops. “It has a lock.”

I look down at my hands.