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“Yeah,” he says. “That’s good.”

And he smiles.

Not the corner of his mouth. Not the almost. He actually smiles with his whole face, the way I’ve maybe seen him do three times since November. Once at Palinski’s. Once on Christmas morning. Once against my mouth.

He’s happy. He’s so happy he doesn’t know what to do with his face.

I want this for him so much it makes my chest hurt. I love seeing him happy.

“Draft’s in three weeks,” he says.

And something changes in me.

It’s just that until now, June has been a word in his mouth. June will answer a lot. Nothing matters until June.

Now it’s three weeks. It has a date. Twenty-one days. I could count them on a calendar. I could put a sticky note on the inside of a closet door.

It’s real.

He puts a hand on my knee, and I place mine on his.

May was a really good month. Two thousand and counting. June is on pace to be better. I’ve started buying smaller and selling faster, and I’ve stopped feeling guilty when I walk out of the Goodwill with one bag instead of three. The post office lady knows my name and my coffee order now, because sometimes I bring her one.

And my social media is going off. The loafers video, the one I told Rafe about on FaceTime, didn’t stop at sixty thousand. It’s at a hundred and twelve thousand now. I don’t understand how. Some mornings, I look at the number and feel a little sick. A hundred and twelve thousand people have watched my hands hold up a pair of shoes and put them back on a shelf. And they keep asking. The same things. Over and over.

I start making a checklist. I call it Before You Buy It. It’s every question I ask in my head in an aisle, every single time, written out in order. What are the sold comps, not the asking prices? What will the fees take? What will it cost to ship, and what does it weigh? What’s the condition, honestly? How fast do these actually sell? What happens if it doesn’t? Is this worth an hour of your life?

That last one, I write and cross out and write again.

I don’t know if I’ll charge for it. Probably not. Not yet. Mr. Waleska’s book has a whole chapter in the margins about giving away the first thing so people trust you with the second. He wrote TRUST FIRST at the top of the page in his upright pencil, and underlined it, and I underlined it again.

I’ll give it away. And then I’ll see.

Paige is across the hall. We didn’t plan to live together. She saw the same flyer. She took the room on the other side of the landing, the one with the bigger window and no lock, and she’s here until August, working at a lab on campus she doesn’t talk about very much.

She comes over in the mornings, mostly. Not to talk. She just comes in with her cereal and sits on my floor with her back against the bed and eats it while I tape mailers. Sometimes she watches a video before I post it and says cut the first four seconds or the lighting’s weird or, once, that one’s good, don’t touch it. She borrows my tape gun and brings it back every single time, which nobody has ever done in my life. She sits on the front porch at night with her feet up on the railing and a book she doesn’t read, and sometimes I sit out there with her, and we don’t say much of anything.

I like her. I like that she doesn’t need anything from me. I like that she’s quiet the way I used to be quiet, except I think she chose it.

Once on the porch with the streetlight coming on, I ask, “Is Koda still being weird?”

She doesn’t look up from her book.

“Koda is always weird,” she says.

She turns a page. I don’t ask again.

Kylie calls every other day from her parents’ house, usually from her bedroom floor. She misses Nash. She misses us. She’s coming back in July and she’s already planning what we’re going to do, and most of it involves a lake and Rafe’s car and none of it involves asking Rafe.

On a Thursday, I’m on the porch with Paige and Kylie’s on speaker on the railing between us, and Kylie says, out of nowhere, “Tess, where are you going in August when the sublet’s up?”

I open my mouth.

“You could stay here,” Paige says. “If the grad student extends. Or find another one.”

“Or come to Hargrove!” Kylie says. “I know you’re not enrolled. I don’t care. You can sleep on the floor. I’ll get you a bed and put it in my room.”

I laugh. “Kylie.”