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Downstairs, the house is clean, which means Sloane. Twelve hours ago this was a hundred people and a keg and a candle somebody nearly took the den out with, and now the cups are gone and the floors are clear and the furniture’s back where it lives. Sloane Beckett doesn’t sleep so much as audit a building until it surrenders. Beau says she cleans when she’s happy. I wouldn’t know what that’s like firsthand, but I believe him, and lately the house has been very clean.

The smell hits before I’m through the door. Bacon, and a serious amount of it, the grease in the air thick enough that somebody’s hangover is being treated as a medical emergency.

Cash is at the stove in last night’s shirt, looking like a man supervising his own autopsy. Wyatt’s beside him on a second pan, ball cap backward, moving slow the way you move when your skull’s running over. Between them there’s a whole production line — bacon stacked high, patties going gray to brown in their own fat, eggs frying hard at the edges, a bag of rolls torn open on the counter. Breakfast burgers. Cash’s invention and Cash’s religion: fried patty, two fried eggs, more bacon than is wise, all of it crushed into a roll and eaten standing up over the sink like the animals we are.

Beau and Sloane are at the island, him with the bad arm in the sling he pretends he doesn’t need and the coffee he absolutely does, her tucked under his good side in one of his shirts with a mug in both hands.

“Mercer lives,” Cash says, not turning from the stove. “We were about to charge admission to view the body.”

“You look worse than I feel.” Which is true, and which is saying a lot.

“Not possible. I peaked at peak. I’m a cautionary tale now — very freeing, you should try it.” He flips a patty. It folds in half and lands wrong, and he stares down at it like it’s betrayed him personally. “I used to be good at things.”

“You used to think you were good at things. Different.”

Wyatt huffs a laugh into his burger and immediately regrets it, going still with his eyes shut. Then he reaches over without a word, builds a second one, and holds the plate out to me — because Wyatt feeds people the way other men shake hands. I take it. It’s obscene, grease running down the side, yolk going everywhere the second I pick it up, and I eat it over the sink because some traditions are worth the mess. It’s good. Best thing that’s happened to my morning that doesn’t have to stay behind the wall.

Beau watches me over the top of his coffee with the look he gets right before he becomes a problem.

“You disappeared early last night,” he says. “She have a name?”

There it is. I knew it was coming the second I smelled the bacon.

I catch Sloane watching me over the rim of her mug. Still. Careful. Not drinking, just holding it there like a shield she’s looking over the top of. Sloane watches everything — the one thing she and I have in common — so I don’t make anything of it. I clear my throat.

“No one you’d know.”

It’s a lie. Not the careful kind I usually deal in — the real kind. Beau knows exactly who Margo is. They all do. She’s Sloane’s best friend, in and out of this house three times a week, a fixture at every Sunday table and every party we’ve thrown since October. No one you’d know isn’t withholding. It’s a bald, clean lie, and it was out of my mouth before I’d decided to tell it.

That’s the part that stops me. I don’t lie. I’ll hand you the hard thing in four words and let you sit in it, but I don’t lie, because lying is the thing my father did for years while the rest of us ate the fallout. And I just did it. Easy. Over coffee. To keep the name of a girl I’ve spent three months swearing I can’t stand — which tells me something about how far past the wall she already is, and I don’t love what it tells me.

I set that down with everything else I’m not looking at this morning, and drink my coffee.

“Mysterious,” Beau says, delighted. “Look at that. Mercer’s got a whole life.”

“Everybody’s got a life. Some of us don’t narrate ours.”

“That’s a dig at me,” Beau tells Sloane.

“It was a dig at you,” she agrees into her coffee, and there’s the smallest curve at the corner of her mouth, and I let it sit — because pushing on it would mean wondering why it’s there, and I’ve got enough this morning.

The kitchen’s loud and warm and full of grease and people I’d take a hit for. The photo’s still face-down on my desk. There’s a scrap of black fabric in my drawer I’m pretending I didn’t see. And my skin keeps reporting in about a girl who’s four minutes across town by now and gone. I need the one place none of that follows me.

“I’m getting on the ice,” I say.

Cash makes a sound like I’ve reached across the kitchen and personally injured him. “It’s January first. The sun isn’t even committed yet. There’s a couch in there with my name carved into it.”

“Your name’s carved into a lot of things you’re not currently using.”

Wyatt laughs again, helpless, then grabs the counter. Cash levels the spatula at me, deeply wounded, grease dripping off the end onto the floor he is not going to clean.

“I’m hungover,” Wyatt says, mild and genuinely apologetic, like it pains him to turn me down. “Brother, I’d be a danger to myself and the general public on skates right now. I love you too much to die in a beer-league accident on a holiday.”

“Not asking you to play. Asking you to get out of my way.”

But I’m not really asking any of them, and they know it, and none of them moves to come, which is fine. Better than fine — going alone is most of the reason for going.

“I’ll come watch,” Beau says.