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She looks at me for a long time. I look back. I don’t take it back. I don’t add anything to it.

She looks away first at the window and the dark coming down over the lawn.

“Is Koda coming?” she says after a while.

“Barnes? Yeah. He’s coming up for a couple days after Christmas. And Kennebeck.”

She smiles at the window.

“I like that,” she says.

“Like what?”

“That you have hockey.”

I don’t know what she means. I look at her.

“Not the games,” she says. “Not the scouts. Just—you have the guys. You have something that’s yours. It sounds nice.”

She says it like it’s nothing. I don’t know what to do with that. So I don’t do anything.

“We can go thrifting,” I say.

Her head comes around so fast her hair swings. “What?”

I stop my lips from curling. “Yeah, there are places better than the Goodwill around here.”

She sits all the way up. She takes her feet out from under her and puts them flat on the floor and looks at me.

“You know thrift stores?”

“There’s an estate place in the next town over. And a vintage store that my mom won’t go in because she says it smells like her grandmother’s attic. And a church sale every Saturday in December, at the Methodist church by the high school.”

She stares at me. “How do you know all of that?”

I don’t answer right away.

“I looked.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me, sitting up straight on my couch with her feet on the floor, in the half dark, and her face does a thing I don’t know how to read, and it goes on for long enough that I have to look somewhere else.

“If I’m bored enough,” I say, to the window.

And she smiles. A real one. Slow, and a little crooked, like she knows exactly what I just did.

“I would like that,” she says.

My phone buzzes on the coffee table.

Mom: Can you two come down and help with the tree? I waited for you.

I read it twice.

She waited. I didn’t know that. Every year, the tree’s up by the first of December, done by a woman my mother pays, in white lights and silver balls that match the curtains in the front room. But maybe she waited because it’s the first time I’ve been away at college.

“My mom waited to put up the tree,” I say.

Tessa looks over. “She didn’t put it up yet?”