When she was younger, Quinn had often gotten strange, shapeless aches up on her forehead, in her belly; she felt dizzy sometimes for no reason, and the school would call her mother. Her mom would yell the whole way home about how the money didn’t come by magic, that she had to work to make it, that she could not fucking believe that she could not ever, not since the day Quinn was born, get a fucking break.

She could be kind, too, Quinn’s mom. She could be fun, used to tell bad jokes to make Quinn laugh. Sometimes the memes she shares on her Facebook page still make Quinn laugh. Quinn thought often, after she had Maddie, that maybe there simply had not been space or time or energy left over for her mother to be good to her, to be nice, more often than she was.

Right now, in a drawer inside a drawer inside the closet in Quinn’s room—you have to reach up to know it’s there, a thin slat of flat wood with a green felt bottom—are three pills, tramadol, that Quinn’s boyfriend left. Quinn found them in the back pocket of his pants, sealed up in a small bag, very early in the morning, when he was still asleep. She’d known his dad’s new girlfriend had had surgery three weeks before and thought, perhaps. She had to not think while she reached her hand into each pocket. She had to not think about the weight and feel of them as she reached for and held them in her hand; she held them separate from her body as she carried them across the room and put them in the drawer.

When he asked her later: asking was admitting that he had them, would out him as not-clean if she didn’t have them; was risking, according to the promises she’d made him make when they first met, Quinn telling him that he could not come back. But he was more concerned, it turned out, with getting the pills back than pretending to have kept any of the promises he’d made to Quinn.

“Did you see anything in my pants?” he said to her, too loud. He didn’t have his shirt on, though she’d asked him lots of times to have his shirt on when Maddie was awake. He’d gotten up two hours after Maddie, come bounding into the kitchen, his hands deep in his pockets, hair mussed, shoulders leaning forward, body hard. Both she and Maddie had already eaten. Maddie was reading on the couch.

His face came too close to hers, and Quinn tried to angle her eyes past him to make sure Maddie was still far enough away that she couldn’t hear. She’d laughed at him. “In your pants?” she said, letting their eyes meet, smiling but no longer laughing. “What should I have found?”