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I put my laptop on the nightstand. I open the door.

She’s in the coat. The shoes that are wrong for everything, that she’s apparently been walking in all over campus anyway, because Margo Ashby will endure any amount of physical impracticality for the sake of an outfit. Her hair is down. Her eyes are doing the thing — the real version, the one that doesn’t get handed to rooms — and I take all of this in and I step back to let her in because she’s already decided, and I don’t make people explain their decisions when they’ve already made them.

She comes in. I close the door.

She stands in the middle of my room — which she knows well enough by now that she doesn’t do the first-time sweep — and she looks at me and she opens her mouth.

“Okay,” she starts. “I’ve been thinking about this. Since Charleston. I had all the evidence — I’m good at evidence, you know I’m good at evidence — and I laid it all out, and the conclusion was obvious, and I still couldn’t say it because every time I went to say it I thought, on paper this makes no sense.” A breath. “We make no sense on paper. You’re a hockey player who builds video games and barely talks to anyone and I’m a pre-law cheerleader who color-codes her entire life and we met through Sloane and Beau months before any of this, and then we slept together on New Year’s and I snuck out before you woke up because I was terrified, and then a professor paired us for an ethics project that you — that we — made about us. Which I saw on your screens in week four and didn’t say anything about because I was also —” She waves her hand. “That was us. We built a story about the two of us, and we called it homework.”

She takes a breath. She keeps going.

“And then you went to Charleston with me. You didn’t have to do that.” She shakes her head, something emphatic in it. “The arrangement did not require a plane ticket. It didn’t require you to stand in my parents’ house and talk to my father on a back porch and say what you said.” She stops. “Nobody has said that to them about me. Not once. My whole life. And you went in there — you, who barely knows them, who has never met them before Friday — and you told my father I deserved to be chosen. In the house where nobody ever chose me. Like it was just a thing that needed saying and you were the person who was going to say it.” She takes a breath. “That was the first moment. I can point to it. That’s when it changed.”

She keeps going. I knew she would.

“And then Michael.” She says his name like she’s putting it down on a table between us, neutral. “You went back inside and you didn’t say anything about it and then you told me later, in the pink room, exactly what you said to him.” Her voice goes quiet. “Your loss is my gain. She’s mine. She’s worth it. Said to him. On the porch. Plainly. Without asking me first — because you didn’t need my permission to know it was true.” She looks at me. “I’ve been replaying that over and over again. Not because you said it, but because of who you said it to. The exact right person. The one who most needed to hear it.” A beat. “That was the second moment.”

I don’t say anything. She’s not done.

“The beach.” Softer now. “We walked out on Saturday and I put my hand in yours. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t decide it. My hand just found yours because that’s what it does now, apparently, without asking me, which has never happened to me before in my life because I plan everything. Everything. And there we were on the beach in February and I was wearing completely wrong shoes and you didn’t mention it and I just —” She exhales. “That was the third moment. The one I keep going back to.”

She counts on her fingers. She’s actually counting.

“The Tab. You turned the phone toward me because I’d shown you what I carry. Because you showed me yours. Like it was an exchange. Like the things we carry are equal weight on a scale, which nobody has ever —” She stops. Takes a second. “I’m the easy one. I receive things. I hold things for people. I don’t get to have someone hold something back. And you just — you showed me you. Because I showed you me.” Her voice is careful now, precise the way she gets when the thing she’s saying costs something. “That was the fourth.”

Her breath goes out. Small. Slightly wrecked. Not crying. She doesn’t cry in front of people who haven’t earned it. She let me earn it in a shower on Sullivan’s Island and since then I’ve had the specific honor of being one of the only people she cries in front of, and right now she’s close but she’s holding it because she’s still talking and she’s not done yet.

“And I’ve been the secret-keeper. In our story. I saw it in week four on your screens — both of us, the two people who hold the true thing because saying it makes it real and real things can be lost. I built my whole defense of your project around the idea that the secret-keeper wasn’t wrong to be scared. And I meant it. I was defending me.” She meets my eyes. “I’ve been scared. Of saying it. Of naming it. Because what if it changes and what if I lose it and what if on paper we’re just —”

She stops herself.

“Okay,” she says. Different register now. Direct. “Here’s the thing. The actual thing.” Her breath goes in. “I think I love you. Not the arrangement version. Not the project-partner version. I’ve been in love with you since somewhere around the library study room in January when you said you wouldn’t call the sixth term meaningless because that would be lying and you don’t lie.” She says it like she’s been holding it for months and the holding is over. “I didn’t know what to do with a person who doesn’t lie. So I called it chemistry and I built six terms around it and here I am at eleven forty-seven in the wrong shoes at your door and I just — I love you. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And I know we don’t make sense on paper but I’m very good at defending things that don’t make sense on paper and I think we’d make —”

I pull her in.

Both arms. Cut off the sentence at the source, which is her mouth, which I cover with mine, and she stops talking, finally, the way she always stops when something more immediate replaces the words. I hold her face in both hands and I kiss her until the breath she’s been holding releases all at once into my chest, and she makes the sound she makes when something costs her something and she’s finally letting it be worth it.

I pull back. Just enough. Her eyes are open and wet at the edges and she’s looking at me like she’s waiting for the verdict.

“Margo.”

“Yeah?” she breathes.

“I think I’ve been gone for you since we met,” I tell her. “It was just easier to pretend you didn’t take up so much space in my world than to admit I wanted you in it to begin with.”

She makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh and not quite a cry. It’s the third thing. The Margo thing.

“Okay,” she manages.

“Yeah,” I agree.

I pull her back in, and she tucks her face against my neck, and I hold her in the middle of my room at midnight, and the coin that’s been in the air since October stops moving.

When we’ve been sitting on the bed for a while — her leaning against the headboard, me beside her, neither of us needing to fill the quiet — she turns to look at me with the expression she uses when she’s building a case.

“I need to ask you something,” she says.

“Ask.”