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“Clean.”

“You haven’t even heard the —”

“Didn’t have to. If there’s a right answer, it’s not a dilemma. It’s a quiz.” I lean back. “You keep pitching me stories where the reader gets to feel good about his choice. Nobody replays the one that let him feel good. You want both doors to cost something real — so he can’t wash his hands of either one. Otherwise, it’s not a branch. It’s a lecture with buttons.”

She stops. Looks at me. And there it is behind her eyes, the recalculation — the same one I keep having about her. Oh. There’s more here than the box said.

“Say that again,” she says.

“Which part?”

“The part where you sounded like you’d done this before.”

And I could deflect. I’ve got the deflection loaded, same as always. Instead I hold her eyes a second too long and feel the wall crack about a half inch, and I don’t hate it as much as I should. I open the laptop.

I don’t show people this. That’s the rule, unwritten, and I keep it. The scowl does the work so nobody looks past it, and I let them not look, because the version of me that builds things is soft in a way the ice can’t be and the draft can’t afford.

The laptop wakes on something that’s mine — a build I’ve had open for three days, a working title nobody’s ever read — and I close the window before she can catch it, fast, the way you shut a door on a room you don’t show anyone. She notices me close it. She doesn’t ask what it was. And that lands somewhere warm and unfamiliar, because most people would’ve asked, would’ve reached for the handle just because they saw the door — and she just lets it be shut. Lets the not-asking sit there like a favor. And I add it to the short, growing list of things I owe her and won’t say out loud.

Then, because she’s the defender and I’m the builder and the assignment is the assignment, I turn the screen halfway toward her and pull up the tool we’re allowed to use, and I start laying it out. Nodes. Branches. How a choice has to change what comes after or the reader stops believing you. I show her how you seed a decision three scenes before the reader knows it’s a decision, how you make both doors look like the right one from the hallway. I’m talking with my hands, which I don’t do, and I’m two branches deep before I catch her not looking at the screen.

She’s looking at me.

And I like it. That’s the part I don’t have a plan for. She’s looking at me the way you look at a thing you’re revising your whole opinion of in real time. And instead of putting the wall up, I want to keep going. Want to show her the next branch and the one after it. Want her to see the part of me nobody at that house has ever once bothered to look for.

“What?” I say. It comes out rougher than I mean it.

“Nothing.” But she’s got the small, private look of someone who just found a room in a house she thought she’d mapped. “You just — you like this. The intimidating one. You go home and build worlds.”

“It’s a major. It’s not a personality.”

“Theo.” Quiet. She almost never uses my first name; it does something to the air. “That’s the least full-of-crap I’ve ever seen you.”

I shut the laptop halfway. Not all the way. Halfway — which is more than I’ve given anyone, and I don’t let myself examine why I stop there. “Pick a dilemma.”

She holds my eyes one more second. Then she lets me have the wall back, because she’s the only person I’ve met who seems to know exactly when to.

“Okay,” she says. “Here’s one. A person keeps a secret. Not to hurt anybody — the opposite. They keep it because the truth would blow up someone they love, and they’d rather carry it alone than watch it land on somebody who can’t hold it.” She taps the pen. “The dilemma isn’t should they tell. It’s what we call them for not telling. Coward, or caretaker.”

The room gets very quiet.

Because I know which one I am. And I know which one I just was, downstairs in a kitchen eight days ago, telling Beau no one you’d know over a plate of eggs.

“Coward,” I say.

It comes out faster and harder than I mean it to.

She blinks. “You didn’t even —”

“Don’t have to think about it. The secret-keeper’s a coward. Every time.” I lean back. “You dress it up however you want — protecting someone, sparing them, carrying it so they don’t have to. It’s a story you tell so you don’t have to say the true thing out loud. That’s not care. That’s protecting yourself and putting a bow on it.”

“That’s bleak.”

“It’s honest. There’s a difference, and the difference is the whole class.”

“So everyone who’s ever kept a hard thing from someone they love is a coward. Your mom, when she doesn’t tell you how bad the money gets so you’ll keep your head in the season. Coward.” She lets that sit, and it lands exactly where she aimed it, because she aims. “You don’t get to make it that clean. Sometimes the truth is just handing someone your weight so you don’t have to hold it. Sometimes keeping the secret is the kindest, hardest, most adult thing a person can do, and calling that cowardice is a nineteen-year-old’s take.”

“I’m twenty.”