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She doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then she leans over and puts her forehead against my shoulder and leaves it there. Her coffee tips a little and spills on the sheet, and neither of us does anything about it.

Sato sends three apartments.

She sends them in an email with no greeting and no signature, just three links and one line that says Team covers first month and deposit. After that it’s yours.

The first one is perfect. Downtown, ten minutes from the affiliate’s rink, a gym in the building, a rooftop with a grill, floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room. I scroll through the pictures on my phone lying on Tessa’s floor with ice on both knees, and I’m already in it. I can see it. Me walking to the rink. Her on the roof in the summer. I turn the phone around and hold it up so she can see it from the desk.

“This one,” I say. “Look at this one. Two bedrooms.”

She gets up, comes over, takes the phone from my hand, and scrolls.

“The second bedroom doesn’t have a window,” she says.

“So?”

She just looks down at me lying there on her floor with bags of ice on my knees with her eyebrows a little bit up.

“Right,” I say. “Fuck that one.”

She hands me back my phone. She goes back to her desk. And I lie there on the floor of her room in the heat and think about how my whole life, nobody ever looked at me like that. Like I’d said something stupid, and they were waiting for me to hear it. My dad would’ve just picked. My dad would have picked the first one, signed the lease, and handed it to me with a sticky note on the line. And I’d have been fine with it. I’d have been fine with that my whole life.

The second one’s in a part of town Sato’s note says she wouldn’t park in. Tessa doesn’t even let me open it.

The third one is twenty-five minutes from the rink on the second floor of an old brick building with carpet that looks like it’s been through things. The second bedroom is basically a closet. But it has a window. And there’s a post office four blocks away, which she found in about nine seconds, and a Goodwill eleven minutes away, which she found in six.

She sits there at the desk with the listing open and doesn’t say anything, and I can see her wanting it. I can see her not wanting to be the one to say it.

“You want that one?” I say.

“It’s farther from the rink.”

“I didn’t ask that. You want it?”

She turns around in her chair. “Yes.”

“Okay.”

I pick up my phone and send Sato a thumbs-up on it. Sato sends nothing back, which means she’s already on it. And Tessa sits there in her chair looking at me like I did something, and I didn’t do anything. I said okay. That’s all I did. But I watch her face when I say it, and I think nobody’s ever said okay to her about anything that mattered, either. Not once. Not without it costing her something after.

The lease comes a week later. Fourteen pages. We read it on her bed, both of us, every page, out loud, because that’s how Sato taught me.

We sign it on her blue desk. Her name and then mine. Her handwriting is small and neat. Mine looks like a kid’s. They look stupid next to each other. I take a picture of it before she can stop me.

The shelves are a whole thing.

“I’m buying the shelves,” I tell her.

“No.”

“Tess.”

She says, “I can buy shelves.”

“I know you can buy fucking shelves.”

“Then why are you buying them?”

I open my mouth, and nothing comes out. I’m standing in the hardware section of a store forty minutes from Woodbury with a cart, and she’s standing on the other side of it with her arms crossed and a tape measure clipped to her shorts.