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“Five,” Mr. Waleska says and writes it down in the folder.

I look down at my plate so nobody sees my face.

I’m proud of him. Of both of them, maybe. I don’t know if anybody else at the table noticed. I don’t think Mrs. Waleska did. But I did. I’ve been watching Rafe Waleska since I was fourteen years old, and I have never once seen anybody ask him what time he wanted to do anything.

And he answered. Like a person. Like somebody whose life is his.

He’s going somewhere. I know that. I’ve known it for a long time. But sitting on his parents’ patio under the string lights, I watch him go somewhere I can see. Not a city. Not a team. Just forward. Just into his own life, finally, with his own hands on it. And I’m so glad. I’m so glad I can feel it in my chest. And underneath that, very quietly, I realize he’ll be somewhere I won’t be.

That night, in his room with his door locked and his parents asleep on the far side of the house, I can’t stop looking at him.

I don’t mean to. I don’t notice I’m doing it at first. It’s just that everything is very clear. The crooked bridge of his nose. The way his shoulder looks in the lamplight, the line of it. The way his breath catches when I put my mouth on his neck. His hand at my waist. The way it spreads out, the whole width of me. The way his fingers press.

His face, when he comes. The way he says my name.

I watch all of it. I see all of it. I take all of it in, like I’m not going to have it again.

Afterward, he’s lying on his side, facing me, with his hand on my hip. And he’s looking at me with his eyebrows down a little.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

He opens his mouth. Closes it.

He doesn’t know. I can see him not know. He just knows it’s different.

I don’t know, either.

I put my face in his chest so he can’t look at it anymore.

After a while, he says, into my hair, “After the draft, it goes fast.”

“How fast?”

“Development camp if somebody takes me. Couple weeks after, maybe. A week of it. In whatever city.” He’s quiet. “And if they want me to sign, it could move faster. Sato says sometimes they want you in right away. To start in their minor-league team in the fall. Or the summer.”

I lie there, and my heart stops beating.

“Would you?” I say. “Sign?”

He doesn’t hesitate.

“If it’s right,” he says. “Yeah.”

No pause. None. It’s just true, and he says it.

I lift my head off his chest to look at him.

“You should,” I say.

And I mean it. I mean it all the way down. I’m not testing him. I’m not waiting for him to say he won’t leave me. I don’t want him to stay at Woodbury for me, or for anybody. I want him living his dream because he’s good. They’ll be lucky to have him. I want it more than I’ve wanted anything for myself in a long time.

He looks at me for a long time in the dark.

Then he pulls me back down against him, puts his chin on the top of my head, and doesn’t say anything else.

In the morning, I wake up first. He’s asleep on his stomach, taking up the whole bed, the way he does. I slide out from under his arm and sit on the couch in his T-shirt with my phone and my knees pulled up. The sun coming up over the lawn, and the old part of the house yellow at the far end.