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It’s the twenty-seventh. The day after the lake. My face still hurts from the cold, and there’s a bruise on Barnes’s arm the size of a puck from somebody’s stick, and Mr. Waleska said at dinner that he wasn’t playing any card games, absolutely not, he had calls. He’s sitting in the armchair by the dining-room door right now, watching.

We play again.

And again Rafe has a spoon before anybody sees him move. And again. Four rounds in a row. By the fourth, Kylie is standing up behind her chair, playing on her feet because she says it’s faster. Nash has stopped pretending he doesn’t care. He said he wasn’t playing at all at the start, said it was a kid’s game, and now he’s leaning over the cards like this is serious.

When he loses the fifth round, by half a second to Rafe’s mom, he puts both hands flat on the table and says, “That’s bullshit.”

“Language,” Mrs. Waleska says very pleased, putting her spoon down in front of him like a trophy.

And then Kylie points at me. “She’s helping him.”

I look up. “What?”

“You’re helping him. You’re passing him signals. You touch your ear when you have three.”

I scoff. “I do not touch my ear.”

“You touched your ear twice last round.”

“Because it’s itchy, Kylie—”

“Tessa Canten, I have known you since August, and your ear has never itched in your life—”

“She isn’t helping me,” Rafe says.

“Then how are you doing it?” Koda says, still on the floor.

Rafe looks at him. “I watch everybody’s hands.”

“You’re not looking at anybody’s hands. You’re looking at your cards.”

“I’m looking at your cards. You hold them where you’re going to grab. Everybody does. You lean before you know you’re leaning.” He shuffles. “You’ve been leaning at the spoons for two rounds, Barnes.”

The table goes quiet.

I sit there with my one spoon and look at him. He’s shuffling with his sleeves pushed up, not looking at anybody, watching what everybody does before they do it. The same thing he does on the ice. The same thing he showed me on the couch at Christmas, backing up the same thirty seconds of somebody else’s game. Of course he’s good at Spoons.

“I hate this,” Koda says to the ceiling.

“Deal,” Nash says. “I’m watching your hands this time, Waleska.”

We play until eleven. Rafe wins nine rounds. I win one, the last one, and I don’t know how that happened, either, except that halfway through I looked up and Rafe was looking at me instead of the cards, and I grabbed.

His eyes do tell me everything after all.

Kylie’s never going to believe I wasn’t helping him.

The next morning, Kylie and I are the only ones up. It’s early. The house is making all its morning sounds. We’re sitting on the counter by the coffee maker in our socks, which Mrs. Waleska would definitely not like, eating cold cinnamon rolls out of the pan with our fingers.

Kylie has her knees pulled up inside a hoodie that I’m pretty sure is Nash’s. She’s quiet for a while. She licks icing off her thumb.

“So does this mean my little hermit crab is going to come out of her shell when we get back to Woodbury?” she asks, smacking her lips and taking another bite of the cinnamon roll. “No more hiding, right?”

I take a good look at my cinnamon roll for my next bite. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on,” Kylie teases as I take a small nibble of the edge. “I don’t need to hear the full story to know that there was something there.”

I shake my head and cover my mouth. “There was nothing ever there. Trust me.”