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“Your sisters called me.” I make myself come in and take the chair, because standing in the doorway is only a slower way of running. “They’re scared. They said you’re not talking to anybody.”

“They shouldn’t have dragged you into⁠—”

“They were right to.”

He looks away, at the silent parade, and I keep going before I lose the nerve. “I knew you were hurt worse than you let on. Back in November. I watched you favor it and I let you tell me it was nothing, because letting you was easier than the fight.” The words come up tasting like rust. “I should’ve made you go in.”

“No.” He shifts, and the shift costs him, and I watch it cost him. “That one’s not yours to carry. I hid it from everybody — it’s the thing I’m best at, hiding the—” He doesn’t finish that, either. “I should’ve gone in September. I sat on it because I didn’t want it to be real, and now it’s about as real as it gets. That’s mine, Sloane. All mine. Don’t go taking it. You take everything.”

“Somebody has to.”

“You’d think.” The corner of his mouth moves, almost. Then his eyes do something I know too well, because I taught it to him over a counter in a bookshop — they go slow and careful over my face, taking the inventory. His jaw sets. “You’re not eating.”

“Beau.”

“You’ve lost—” He won’t put a number on me; he just stops, and the not-saying is louder. “When did you last actually eat something?”

“Things taste like nothing lately.” I hand it to him before I can dress it up, which is how I know I’ve already started to lose. “It’s not a thing. It’s just — appetite’s the first thing to leave and the last to come back. I know the order of it.”

“Don’t do the fine.” Still gentle, but there’s a floor under it now. “Not with me. You never had to do the fine with me. That was the whole — that was my favorite part.”

I don’t have anything to put on top of that, so I put nothing, which with Beau has always been allowed.

“Tell me about the surgery,” I say. “The real version. Not the one you give your mom.”

So he does, because I asked, and asking him is the only thing I’ve got to give that isn’t a lie. The repair. The infection that crept in after. The drip. The clean-out they might still have to do. The season’s been over since the boards, he says, like that part’s old news. The draft is the part he says flattest, and the flatness is how I know it’s the part that’s bleeding.

“First round’s gone.” He says it to the parade. “Maybe gone for the year, depending how the next month goes. Guys come back from this. Some guys. With a shoulder that does what it used to, if you get lucky twice — once on the table, once after.” A slow breath. “I had one thing in my whole life that was only ever mine. The wanting of it, I mean. Not my dad’s, not the scouts’. Mine. Turns out it’s the one thing nobody gets to hand back to me when it breaks.”

“Does it scare you? Not making it?”

“Yeah.” No hedge on it, which from Beau is its own kind of nakedness. “Not the way you’d think, though. I’m not scared of being bad at it. I’m scared I was only ever this one thing, and now I’m not sure I’m even that — and then who’s left in here.” He looks at the strapped arm like it belongs to somebody else. “Fifteen years of being the guy who’s good at the thing. I don’t know who’s in the room if he’s not.”

“I know who’s in there.” It’s out before I’ve decided whether I’ve earned the right to say it. “He got dealt a bad hand on the reading and taught himself to do it out loud anyway, in front of forty thousand people, and never once let them see what it cost. He warms up barbecue at midnight for a soldier he met one time. He knows what color my eyes go in October.” My voice catches on that and I make it keep going. “You were never only the thing you’re good at, Beau. You were just never quiet long enough to find out what else was standing in the room. You’ll make it.”

“Sloane.”

“You’ll make it.” I lean on it, because I mean it down to the floorboards. “I’ve watched you do the thing you do when a whole room’s already decided you’ve lost. You’ll make it, Beau. Maybe not on the schedule the chart wants. But I’d put Margaret’s car on you.”

That lands; his mouth tips. “You stole Mormor’s car?”

“Borrowed. There’s a heart on your door. Your sixteen-year-old sister thinks you’re going to be fine, and sixteen-year-olds are almost never wrong about the people they love.”

He huffs something that’s nearly a laugh, and it’s the first thing in the room that’s cost him nothing, and it nearly undoes me more than the rest of it.

“Your turn,” he says. “How are you? The real version. Not the one you give your brother.”

And here’s the thing I came to do without knowing I came to do it: I don’t deflect. I let him in, which is the only Christmas present I’ve got on me and the only one I’ve never once managed to give anybody.

“I lost Yale.” I say it and wait for it to hurt and it doesn’t, same as it didn’t the first time. “They moved the audition up — some scheduling thing with the panel — and I missed the email in the week I was busy carrying my life eleven blocks, and Vivienne got the slot instead. And the worst part wasn’t losing it. The worst part is I felt nothing. The thing I built my entire self around turned out to weigh about as much as a coat.”

“Sloane.” He says my name like it physically hurts him. “That’s — you wanted that since you were a kid.”

“I wanted out since I was a kid. Yale was just the train.” I turn the ring that isn’t on my finger. “Evan found me outside the library to explain it to me, in case I’d missed it. That men like you don’t keep girls like me.”

His face changes. Even strapped to a bed with a line in his hand, something in him goes very still and very cold, and for one second the captain’s all the way back in the room. “Evan put hands on you?”

“No. He stood close. He’s good at standing close.” I keep my voice level, because level is the only thing that keeps my hands off the rail. “I handled it. I’m good with him by now.”