He does not, and five minutes later, I’m zipping up my puffy jacket and shoving my feet inside my boots while Jack and Paul Hollywood wait for me by the back door. We step outside onto a dark patio and take stairs down to the snow. It’s not a long walk from the cabin to the Airstream, but in the silence between us, it feels as long as our hike from Powell’s to Southeast Portland. A few minutes ago we were singing together, and now everything feels too serious.

We reach the Airstream and she puts one foot on the metal step. There’s a slight pause before she hoists open the door, and I follow her inside the Airstream without fully realizing what it will be like to step inside this place again. It’s like stepping through a wormhole into the past. Into our past.

There are the kitchen cabinets she pushed me up against. There are the cookbooks I knocked over when she hoisted me onto those counters. There is the bed where Jack curled herself around me. The smell of peppermint tea and sourdough bread. Me, crying with my boots under my arm, fleeing the Airstream as quickly as I could.

Jack catches me looking at her unmade bed. “It… it hasn’t changed much since you were here last.”

“No,” I say quietly. “It hasn’t.”

Jack makes several false starts, like there’s something she wants to say and can’t, but when she finally gets a word out, it’s “Alexa!” to the tiny Echo on her counter. “Mix Jack’s playlist.”

It’s Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” that cuts the awkward silence between us.

“You do know people have continued to make music since the aughts, right?” I ask her.

Jack smiles, and some of the tension eases. “Gingerbread house supplies,” she says and grabs a tote from under the kitchen table. “Do me a favor and grab my extra piping bags. They’re in the bottom drawer there.”

I swivel toward the narrow drawers built into the wall between the kitchen table and the bathroom door.

“Wait, no, wrong drawer,” Jack barks as I slide open the bottom drawer, just like she said. There are no piping bags. It’s a drawer stuffed with winter clothes—beanies and scarves and gloves—and right on top is a hand-knitted cerulean blue scarf I recognize immediately. My drunk heart corkscrews in my chest.

“What—why? Why do you have this?”

“You… you left it here,” Jack starts, but I’m already lifting the scarf from the drawer. It’s heavier than it should be, and something falls out of the folds of the scarf Meredith knitted for me. It’s a copy of Fun Home, and it lands on the floor with an ominous thunk.