“And two—” I raise my voice as loud as I dare over the silence of the cabin. Everyone else is still sleeping, but I’ve been awake for hours, hiding in the laundry room on the ground floor, working on the panels for episode two of The Arrangement—current working title: “Revenge of the Snow Day.” As soon as I came downstairs, I sent Meredith a frantic, all-caps CALL ME text with twenty exclamation points at four in the morning my time, and then anxiously waited for her to call me back.

“You should not make light of my struggles,” I scold her now, even though I’m just grateful to see her face.

“You’re not fucking with me, then? Andrew is Jack’s brother? Jack is there? With you? Jack?”

“No, I’m not ‘fucking with you.’ She’s here.”

“Well.” Meredith shrugs on the screen. “You definitely have a type.”

“I hate you.”

“I mean, statistically, you don’t develop crushes on dudes very often, so it would make sense that you were crushing on Andrew because he looks like a girl you already slept with.”

“So much. I hate you so, so much.”

Meredith shakes her head. “And she told you not to tell Andrew about your history?”

“Yes, she did. Because she’s clearly a garbage liar person.”

“A sexy garbage liar person.”

“That detail is immaterial to this argument.”

“Feels material.”

I flop back on my washing machine perch. “I can’t stay here! Andrew has a weird thing with his sister’s best friend, and I slept with his sister, and it’s a whole love trapezoid situation that’s going to end disastrously for everyone involved. So, I’m going to find a way back to Portland.”

“What do you mean? You can’t leave. The money!”

“I can’t stay, Mere! She’s his sister!”

“You quit your job! You can’t just go back to Portland! Where will you live?”

“Wherever it is, it has to be better than staying here!”

Meredith sets down her torts flash cards and gives me her full, undivided attention. “It’s eight days until Christmas, Ellie. You’re telling me you can’t suffer eight days in that house for two hundred thousand dollars? That’s twenty-five thousand dollars per day.”

“I know, but—”

“You survived with your shit family for eighteen years, and you didn’t get a cent for it,” Meredith points out. “Think about how you grew up. Think about what money like that could mean.”

The problem is, I know exactly what it would mean. Money like this… it wouldn’t solve all of my problems, but hell if it wouldn’t solve a lot of them.

Our FaceTime lapses into awkward silence, and for a moment I think she’s frozen, her curly red hair framing her sleepy face, a pencil shoved into her half bun. Then she speaks: “How was it? Seeing her again?”